fart

I know, I know. Laugh at the name all you want. It stands for “Find and Replace Text.” It is a 32-bit Windows command line tool that clones the functionality of the *nix grep command. It does not support search and replace with regular expressions.

I use fart to refactor class names and namespaces. For example: changing com.ui to com.views.ui would take a while depending on how many class files are in that namespace. But with fart it’s easy: fart -r *.as com.ui. com.views.ui.

http://fart-it.sourceforge.net/

baregrep

Allows you to search text files with regular expressions. The way it displays file matches is very intuitive. Baregrep can also be used as a command-line tool.

I use baregrep when I want to find all the classes that execute a particular function, dispatch a particular event type, and so on. The regular expression support is very helpful.

http://www.baremetalsoft.com/baregrep/

IrfanView

IrfanView is a light-weight feature packed image viewer. Images can be scaled very quickly and easily, flipped horizontally/vertically, and any changes can be saved.

I use IrfanView to cycle through a directory with lots of images. It has some very crude editing functionality but is really meant to be a viewer.

http://www.irfanview.com/

FileZilla

An open source FTP client that supports FTP, sFTP, and FTPS. It has a simple site manager and doesn’t try to be anything other than a good FTP client. Sites in the site manager can be backed up and restored quite easily.

http://filezilla-project.org/

WinSCP

WinSCP is a Windows app that allows you to browse files on a remote server via SSH.

http://winscp.net/eng/index.php

Open Office

An open source alternative to the Microsoft Office suite. It allows files to be exported as Microsoft equivalents but formatting differences do pop up from time to time. The best method for ensuring a document looks the same as what you see in Open Office is to export the document as a PDF.

http://www.openoffice.org/

Putty

The one, the only, the Putty!

http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/

7-Zip

A free Windows-based tool used to extract and create archives. Check their homepage for supported formats.

http://www.7-zip.org/

Tortoise SVN

A tool that allows you to interact with Subversion repositories in Windows with an intuitive GUI and Windows Explorer extensions.

http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/

I found this tool while troubleshooting a Windows XP install. It proved useful for troubleshooting because it catches network requests and asks for approval. Beyond troubleshooting, the Comodo Firewall requires confirmation for application requests such as:

• Writing to the screen
• Modifying executables
• Connecting to network resources
• Launching programs

Your response is saved per application after you confirm or deny requests. This is very similar to the McAfee security center firewall but the Comodo Firewall is free, it contains no adware or spyware, and is easy to configure. Better still, Comodo has no nag screens.