software that just works

general
22

### Windows:

[winget](https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli)

This is built into Windows 11 and is built into Windows 10 if you update it and the store apps.

It's a package manager for Windows, made by Microsoft, it's still kinda new so it doesn't have as many features as third party options like Chocolately or Ninite. However it wins in two key ways, it's built-in and it doesn't have a database of installed/not installed. It directly queries the Windows installer and registry to tell what is installed and what needs updating. Basically you don't have to have installed the software with the package manager initially, if the software is available in the repository it will update it no matter how you first installed it.

It's nice being able to run a single command to update all the junk installed on your PC (winget upgrade --all). You can even run it remotely through SSH.

You can find packages here: https://winget.run

[Windows Terminal](https://apps.microsoft.com/store/detail/windows-terminal/9N0DX20HK701)

Think Gnome Terminal for Windows basically, a terminal with tabs for Windows. It can open tabs with WSL2, cmd, or PowerShell as the shell. You can set your default shell when it starts up to be one of those too. It's built into Windows 11 and available for download in the Microsoft Store on Windows 10.

### tvOS/iOS/macOS:

[Infuse](https://firecore.com/infuse)

This is a media player for iOS, macOS and tvOS. It costs about $10 a year and it's worth every cent. If you are a sometimes pirate or someone who rips their physical media, this program will play anything.

I'm too lazy and cheap to setup a proper PLEX server, so what sets this software apart is that it can simply load videos from an SMB share. So I can just have a tiny little Raspberry Pi with a hard disk in my cupboard instead of a hulking trans-coding monster.

It has a built in scrubber and will organise all your media and download pretty art and descriptions. It keeps track of your watch history and syncs it with iCloud. Even if you are an Android/Windows user, an Apple TV is such a great way of watching stuff if you use a simple SMB server and Infuse.

[APOD](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/apod-astronomy-pics-and-widget/id1532969874)

Cool little app that shows the Astronomy Picture of the Day from NASA (https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html). It's free without any ads and has a number of cool widgets you can add to your homescreen. Don't be scared off by the in-app purchases, they're just for donations to the developer :)

[ShellFish](https://secureshellfish.app/)

A simply lovely SSH client for iOS. Can integrate into the Apple Files app, so you can just transfer anything over SFTP using any application. The SSH client is also good, can do tunneling and keep persistent connections using background location calls (pretends it is a navigation app to keep alive I think) or using tmux sessions if you don't want to spam your location all the time. Costs a meagre amount of money for such a nice app.

### Linux

[TestDisk](https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk)

This app is very handy, can recover deleted files from anything. Even disks with deleted partitions or formatted partitions. So long as you haven't overwritten anything. It runs on Windows and macOS as well, but I mostly run it in Linux because of its vast file system support.

23

@“tanuki”#p106867 I haven't used it but it looks like they do have a git client or some kind of integration. Not sure if that means the entire organisation needs to use it or not though.

24

This thread is incredible. Folks like tanuki reminding me that I used to use yt-dlp and do neat stuff with it.

I use adobe products but got Inkscape and immediately made something cool I wouldn't normally do which was a breath of fresh air.

I reinstalled notepad++ and my unsaved documents were sitting there :D
For some reason notepad++ stopped working for me a while back and I thought it was dead. What a pleasant surprise. I used to write stuff in there all the time. What sorta happened was I also use VSCode and its too good not to use for coding. But I hate it for just writing text.

Also intrigued by the PDF printer products. I made a mini web app once with a print feature and it was a pain in the butt to get everything to translate correctly so I'd like to see how these work.

At work someone just showed me [Disk Inventory X](https://www.derlien.com/) which allowed us to see that Outlook was using 100 gb on someone's computer. That was handy.

25

>

@“DavidNoo”#p106911 Also intrigued by the PDF printer products. I made a mini web app once with a print feature and it was a pain in the butt to get everything to translate correctly so I’d like to see how these work.

They honour the thread title, is how I'll say they work.

You install one and it basically slides right into your existing printer devices. Choose it while using a program's existing Print functionality, as you'd choose which printer to output a document to normally. Of course, instead of outputting to a connected printer, it just pops up with a Save As window where you choose where to output the document to, and there it is.

There might be more to it in general if you have exacting needs for page size or resolution or whatever, I am not sure if a pdf printer will make up for lack in the program's print features or the system print dialogue, but if your needs are basic it's the most straightforward way to get any program with an existing print functionality to spit out a pdf of the document in question.

26

If you are still on PPC Mac OS X, you gotta get Stimpsoft's Cat-in-the-Dock.

1 Like
27

I've held off on replying in here because I can tend to have strong opinions on software, and they are mostly boring outside of the professional contexts I apply them in.

_However_, a food related post I made just now has reminded me of a piece of software I use daily that I think is appropriate to mention in here: [Paprika Recipe Manager](https://www.paprikaapp.com). It can parse and import pretty much any written recipe on the web automatically, and the grocery list function is fantastic. I like this thing so much that I bought the version for iOS to use on my phone and iPad, the mac version for my laptop, and the windows version for if I'm on my PC. They all sync together and share the one account/database. I'm not suggesting anyone else should do that -- one copy somewhere (probably ios or android so you can use it while in the kitchen) is likely fine -- but if you _do_, it is supported well.

[Divvy](https://mizage.com/divvy/) makes dealing with anything other than purely maximised windows nicer and easier. Using this is _so much_ nicer than grabbing a window corner handle and trying to drag it to just the right spot. It's available for both mac and windows.

On the mac specific front, there there is one piece of software that I find essential.
[Alfred](https://www.alfredapp.com) is my main interface with my mac. I don't ever use Spotlight, launch control, or navigate to the applications folder in Finder. It does so much more than being a Spotlight replacement however, check out the site to see what features it offers.

28

@“rejj”#p107187 Paprika is great!

29

@“Mnemogenic”#p106627 notepad2 is an amazing sequel to notepad! https://notepad2.com/ I install it on every PC I use.

@"Gaagaagiins"#429 I love using Ninite!
@"tomjonjon"#p107203 I’ve used Paprika for years. I have 359 recipes saved.

30

https://en.bandisoft.com/honeycam/

**Honeycam** is terribly named but fantastic.
It sounds weird to spend $26 on a GIF capture and editing tool, but it works amazingly well and I’ve used it almost daily for the last five years.

1 Like
31

@“docky”#p107239 i have been needing something just like this, thanks!!

1 Like
32

@“Mnemogenic”#p106627 I still write all my rough drafts on Notepad before moving them to fancier editing programs. I love that it just boots right up, there's no squiggly lines, and you can shuffle everything around super easily without screwing up the formatting. I wrote a whole novel in a single .txt in Notepad before realizing that was probably going a bit too far.

33

Apologies if this has been covered, but does anyone have a recommendation for windows audio control? I have to listen to bandcamp with my headphones on my temple because I can‘t control the volume independently, and my system volume is at minimum. So I’d like something that lets you independently control volume with greater resolution. thanks!!!

34

If you want to continue using legacy Apple programs, including iTunes, on versions of macOS as recent as 13.0 Ventura, check out Retroactive. I still enjoy using iTunes for organizing my offline music and for streaming to my 2012 AirPort Express—by far the best device Apple has ever created, and that‘s including the Newton without which we wouldn’t have that joke they made about it on the Simpsons.

35

@“exodus”#p107259

I have a hardware solution instead of software. The issue is your PC‘s amplifier, which is hardware. The windows software is controlling the amplifier.

I recommend routing your PC through a nice cheap entry level desktop d-class amp with headphone output. I’ve used one for every audio setup I‘ve had.

Here's the one I use, just as an example, but the quarter-inch jack is kind of inconvenient, plus it’s not available right now so I don‘t recommend it. It was like $60ish and worth every penny though.

Here’s one that appears to have 8th-inch (headphone) input ant output, so will work with whatever you already have. It's also only $15 dollars. you can mount it under your desk and/or add a nice knob to that potentiometer and make your own enclosure.

36

crap I guess I missed adding the link to the $15 one. @exodus

https://www.parts-express.com/YDA138-E-Digital-Audio-Amplifier-Board-10W10W-Dual-Channel-Amplifier-Board-DC-9-13.5V-320-605?quantity=1

37

thank you to whoever suggested Everything, i‘ve been annoyed by Windows’ terrible search system for the longest time. some suggestions of my own:

[**improvedtube**](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/improvedtube/bnomihfieiccainjcjblhegjgglakjdd) is a browser extension that lets you customise the look/functionality of youtube, which is refreshing given how much i use the darn website. this is how mine looks at the moment :P -note the button for taking a screenshot of the current frame of the video, and the button for looping the video.
![](https://i.imgur.com/LJ4qoPb.png)

similarly, [**winaero tweaker**](https://winaero.com/winaero-tweaker/) lets you customize how dozens of things look and feel on Windows, all in one handy program. it's also easy to reverse if you accidentally break something, which is possible lol

for video editing, a few months back i switched from Premiere Pro to **Davinci Resolve** and it has been a huge upgrade, it has innumerable quality of life improvements for efficiency and speed, a smooth and understandable interface, and a really powerful color correction tool. learning about it is a continuous process of being like 'ugh! that makes so much sense! why would anyone design this any other way?'. it's been such a great discovery. [this guy](https://www.youtube.com/@DarrenMostyn/)'s videos were a good aid in the transition.

ps: reminder to whoever needs to hear this that **computer viruses are still a thing**. i had gotten lazy about updating/installing antivirus software recently, until one day I noticed my PC was using tons of RAM while idle, with nothing open. turns out i had a hidden bitcoin virus using my resources to mine crypto!! a simple scan with one of the popular free antivirus programs fixed it.

38

Anything that replaces subscription crap gets big big thumbs up!!

Request: What's simple video file mux/demux/remuxer for windows these days?

39

@“exodus”#p107259 https://eartrumpet.app/ pin this on taskbar

40

I‘ve been upset with Adobe Acrobat as a PDF reader for a long time, but it wasn’t until today when I needed to use it a little more intensively that I realized just how many features are locked behind a paywall. Merging documents is a premium feature. Deleting pages is a premium feature. They want me to pay $20 per month to delete a page from a PDF? Come on! So I started looking around, and PDF24 is everything a PDF reader/editor should be, all for free. Merging and deleting pages is seamless, it doesn‘t require additional packages to read non-English languages (???), and it’s incredibly lightweight to the point that I didn‘t even realize just how slow Acrobat was until switching over. It’s got more feature sets than I even know what to do with, and they‘re all incredibly intuitive and optimized to do the job exactly as it’s supposed to without any fuss.

1 Like
41

@“KennyL”#p108123 Depends on what you mean by simple, but this is something that FFMPEG can do.

Example: Take the audio from input 0 and the video from input 1 and combine them:
`ffmpeg -i input_0.mp4 -i input_1.mp4 -c copy -map 0:0 -map 1:1 -shortest out.mp4`