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Discussion on: The Programmer's Workbench

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darkain profile image
Vincent Milum Jr

I use Windows as a development environment.

Calculator? Windows has always come with a Rock solid one that does most of what you describe. For graphing? The Wolfram Alpha web site or app on my phone.

Media players? Foobar2000 it's by far the highest audio quality reproduction player available. It is also one of the most lightweight while remaining feature rich. I put in playlists of 16k+ songs (mix of Mp3, OGG, FLAC, WAV) and it just works. Real time searching of playlists that size on each key press. It's just FAST!

Secondary media player. MPC-HC. by far and away the best video player I've ever seen. It's the most stable, compact, and compatible player around. It'll take every format I throw at it, and just work. ISO of a DVD? sure, plays just fine. 5.1 audio dvd? Perfect! (Yes, some artists release their music in 5.1 rather than stereo CD and it's freaggin AMAZING!!)

Note taking? Trello is great for this, even as a solo dev. Something I have with my webapps is the ability to generate Trello notes for me. So if a big is detected using an on going dynamic analyzer while the web page is live, said bug will email the custom Trello board with a ton of details attached so I can investigate when I'm available.

Text editor? Simple. It's Sublime. IDE? The same, with a few extra plugins. This thing loads pretty much instantly, so becoming the default text editor, again, just works!

PuTTy is still probably the best terminal around for Windows. For me, I need both classic and modern support. By this, I mean that I connect to devices through serial port and telnet, where as all the severs are SSH. PuTTy properly supports smart card authentication, so my Yubikey aks as my SSH key. Plus with pagent always running, it's a quick simple menu from the system tray of all of my most frequently accessed severs. Just right-click, select the one I want, and I'm connected. Thanks to the Yubikey handling authentication, it just connects and just works!

Additionally to the above note, git for Windows also uses pagent, so the Yubikey acts as my git SSH key as well!

As far as merge goes, TortoiseGIT has that covered, along with countless other git related utilities.

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codemouse92 profile image
Jason C. McDonald • Edited

Sounds like a nice setup. Tortoise is SOLID as a VCS tool on Windows!

Actually, little surprised that the Windows Calculator is capable of half of what Speedcrunch is...back on Windows 7, it certainly wasn't; no history, no CAS, no custom functions. Maybe they've improved it?

I'd be curious how Speedcrunch stacks up to it, in your opinion. (It's cross-platform.)