Finally got around to collecting together the list of other bits of software I use (mainly at home). But first off, I should be given a thorough thrashing for not including XEmacs in the first list.
I first encountered XEmacs on HP-UX in Philips Eindhoven in 1995. Up until then I had used the VAX editor and a few crappy freeware PC ones. This thing was a revelation - syntax highlighting, tons of extensions, call-out to make, gcc, whatever. Built-in games for the love of god. It instantly became my favourite tool of all time.
When I got back to S3 I found it installed on SunOS, except it looked shit - very few menu items, awful scroll-bars etc. Then I found out about the schism between Emacs and XEmacs and discovered that the one in S3 was Emacs. In Integral Design, after getting gcc, popper and Samba installed on the Solaris boxes, XEmacs was my very next install.
Then the beauties hacked it to compile on Cygwin, then (heart palpitations), they got it to natively compile on Windows. It was my main development platform (and platform is not an exaggeration) until about 2001 when the amount of programming I did reduced to almost nothing.
But recently I re-discovered my old friend, still clunky on Windows, still unbelievably powerful. I must fish out my highly optimised .emacs file from a few years back and start using it again. In the past few weeks I have used it to edit Perl, Java and C++. Not great as an IDE anymore in comparison to Eclipse or Netbeans but for straight-up coding, you can’t beat it.
Back to the list:
XEmacs 21.5 B17 - See above DivX Player - handy MPEG4 player Hello - Odd but interesting tool. Handy for sending pictures to Blogger Picasa - Fantastic picture management tool Nokia PC Suite - My 6230 would be useless without it Quickpay - Run my payroll on this. Pretty rubbish but functional Sage Instant Accounts - Run my accounts on this. Hate it but it works (barely) Skype - Looks good. Don’t know anyone else who has it, so kinda like the first guy with a fax. Unison - Great for syncing directories VLC Media Player - Good for playing lots of formats. Won’t work with my PVR-350 yet tho! xplorer2 - Good dual-pane Windows explorer replacement ZXSpin - Excellent Spectrum Emulator EmuZWin - Ditto AutoIT v3 - Extremely powerful scripting tool for Windows Admin. Fresh Download - Free Download accelerator Fresh UI - Free Windows UI modifier (e.g. DOS Prompt here in the context menu) DVD Shrink - Every DVD I buy gets processed by this. The kids are given the copies to destroy with their greasy fingers and the originals are kept pristine. A must-have tool.
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