I’ve been using Windows as my choice of office OS for a long time. I have a Mac at home, but for office work, Windows seems like the best choice. But not Windows itself. It is the apps that make it my go-to OS and often I find myself looking at OS X and thinking, “well I’m glad I have Windows too!”
Here’s a small list of Windows apps which I use on a daily basis –
- Sublime Text 2 – the less said about this, the better. This is the King of code.
- WinSCP – you know how you want to find a simple tool to send files to your servers and just can never get the workflow right? Or you want to quickly edit your linux VPS’ .bashrc and hate ssh-ing, then opening the file in vim/nano/emacs/pico/whatevs? This is it. Easy to use and manage. Right-click-Edit to open any editable file in the right editor (mostly Sublime Text for me). Or move files in and out of servers with ease. When I want to look at large log files and can’t be bothered with the CLI, I open them in Sublime Text through WinSCP.
- mRemoteNG – I have yet to discover all the awesome features this tool has. Manage your SSH/Telnet/RDP/VNC connections in the same app, organize everything into folders and export the connections as a file in Dropbox for ultimate portability. I recently discovered that if you punch in google.com and connect using HTTP/HTTPS, mRemoteNG fires off its in-built browser for your convenience. Woah!
- Rebex Tiny SFTP Server – recently, I got a Windows VM that I needed to send some files to. It was hooked up to the network, but not really setup. I looked for a solution and found rebex through this site. This thing works like a charm! I fired it off and started the default session (username: tester, password: password). The next moment, I had connected to it using WinSCP and was throwing files at it like a pro.
- CLink – I’ve only recently added this to my workflow. It makes the Windows command line so much better. The most important thing I needed in there is a persistent history, which Microsoft has till now ignored. CLink does the job and then some!
Notice that I’m talking about a very specific environment here. I’m in the networking-software testing world. But if you’re ever in a fix about what tool to use to edit code on Windows, or fling files between two networked but not truly connected machines, or are looking for a way to SSH into your servers across the world, these are the best tools out there.
I may add tools to this list as I go about discovering what else is out there. But that’s all for now.