You sling code every day. So do I. You sit down at your box, throw on those noise canceling headphones, fire up some mp3s, and get jiggy wit’ it. That’s hot. But could it be hotter?
After doing this day in, day out, for many years I’ve picked up some apps and tools that let me get a lot done in a way that may seem effortless and a bit cheeky to my peers. This Paris Hilton style of coding is mostly seen as flashy, decadent, or sophisticated, all of which are true. Some few curmudgeons on the other hand may find it criminal in its use of short cuts, helpers, and preferential treatment I give it. Those people are just jealous.
Here they are, the “hot” apps I use every day to be the Paris Hilton of developers. These apps are hot, fast, easy and a little bit dangerous. Oh yeah….
Note: I don’t pretend that these apps are super-secrets noone has listed before. Some of them can be found on Scott Hanselman’s awesome tools list or elsewhere on the interweb, but the list that follow, (broken down into general applicability) are things I use every day and have made me the defacto go-to guy in my shop for apps and tools. Now you can be too.
Universal, non-development specific apps
#1 Launchy. Price = Free
Launchy, as its name would imply, is an application launcher. Any time not spent clicking desktop icons or start bars is time well spent, and this app is fast, slick, and looks damn cool doing it. As their propaganda aptly reads, “Launchy indexes and launches your applications, documents, project files, folders, and bookmarks with just a few keystrokes.” I use this all day every day.
Launchy on sourceforge.
Launchy Plug-Ins
Lifehacker Tips on extending launch
#2 Texter -Price = Free
Texter is a “Text substitution app Texter saves you countless keystrokes by replacing abbreviations with commonly used phrases you define.” It’s also totally awesome. Built on top of AutoHotKey, Texter lets you setup keystrokes that automatically expand themselves into whatever words, phrases, signatures, ascii art, snippets of code, or full blown pages of text your desire. Texter works in any and all windows apps making it a very attractive alternative to setting up app-specific code snippets in your text editor, Visual Studio, etc. Texter can also be used to script logins to websites or fill out forms, what more could you want?
I got to give the latest version a full workout as a LifeHacker beta tester and can tell you that the author Adam Pash (a LifeHacker employee) is very committed to having it kick ass. So far it succeeds in spades.
Read about and download Texter HERE
#3 JRuler -Price = Free
JRuler is a super small and simple screen ruler you can pop up in a moments notice. I do a significant amount of asp.net coding and this small, simple app is great for getting a quick low down on images, tables, coordinating with creative folks, whatever. I’ve been known to use this as a bookmark I drag around to read the web. But that’s probably just me.
http://www.spadixbd.com/freetools/jruler.htm
#4 ColorMania -Price = Free
ColorMania is a great, slick, freeware color picker. I use it as my go-to eyedropper utility to get colors for the web. Zoom around for just the right pixel, eyedropper that pig, and bam! you have the hex you need to drop in a stylesheet.
http://www.blacksunsoftware.com/colormania.html
#5 Cropper Price = Free
Cropper is a fast, free screen / window / arbitrary area capture tool that really doesn’t warrant a screen shot of its own. Saves in lots of formats, has great options. Can’t beat it for free. I use this all the time even though I have Snaggit on my box.
http://blogs.geekdojo.net/brian/articles/Cropper.aspx
#6 WinGrep Price = Free
I’ve already written extensively about this bad boy here http://www.mikeduncan.com/wingrep-code-tool . (screenshots, download links, etc are there too). I use this every single day at work. No joke.
#7 Unlocker Price = Free
Ever try to delete or rename a file only to have windows spit in your face, insult your ancestors and then make some off-hand comment about it being used by another person or program? Don’t even answer that because I know the answer. Unlocker hangs out in the background and when it sees you trying to delete what is rightfully yours, pops up and gives you the option to free all the locks on the file and get rid of that bad boy once and for all. Awesome.
http://ccollomb.free.fr/unlocker/
#8 Sizer Price = Free
Sizer is a cool little tasktray app that will give you the dimensions of any window as you resize it around which is pretty handy.
THE SECRET AWESOME HOTNESS NO ONE KNOWS ABOUT:
If you RDP your box and have apps open on your 2nd or 3rd monitor that you can’t get to, you can resize them from the task bar and they will pop onto your main monitor. You heard it here first kids, get it now.
http://www.brianapps.net/sizer.html
IT / System administration type apps
#9 Terminals -Free
If you have to RDP to a number of machines with any frequency, you know how it can be a pain trying to keep track of which window is which server, and the tedium of firing up all those connections all the time. Terminals is a free, tabbed interface to RDP sessions that lets you save groups of machines as single click shortcuts among a raft of other noble features. If you RDP with any frequency, you really want this.
http://www.codeplex.com/Terminals
#10 Baretail -Free
How could a entry about coding like Paris Hilton not include an app called baretail. Seriously folks. Baretail is a great, free, color coded windows version of the tail command in unix.
- I use this constantly to watch the output of my log4net logging.
- I use it to look at IIS logs.
- I use it to impress non-technical co-workers when they walk by my desk as it looks like reading magical code out of the frigging Matrix.
It works well in all of these circumstances.
http://www.baremetalsoft.com/baretail/
Developer Specific apps
#11 Resharper Visual Studio Add-On 49-$349 depending on license
If you are a .Net guy / gal, I’m sure you have at the very least heard of ReSharper by now. All the A-lister’s can’t stop talking about it and it’s with good reason. Everything you at one time wished was already in Visual Studio, ReSharper adds in. It’s the single biggest productivity booster you can have if you live in Visual Studio for a living.
A point about ReSharper I don’t often see made is that the automation of ReSharper is a great enabler for doing things the “right way”. Following design patterns, refactoring, frequent renaming of methods or classes, programming to interfaces are all hallmarks of good programming, but can have barriers to adoption if your GUI makes doing these things tedious. ReSharper’s quick shortcuts allow you to do all of the above with no penalty in time or effort, so you have no excuse not to build that project they way you know you ought to.
http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/
http://www.excastle.com/blog/archive/2007/01/31/13141.aspx
#12 RegexBuddy $39.95
I write a lot of regular expressions for all sorts of uses. UrlRewriting, updating 100s of semi-templated files at once, cleaning up datafiles, you name it. Even with my expertise in regex syntax, it’s great to have an app that will show you exactly what your regex will match against a test case, color coded in real time. RegexBuddy highlights your matches and capturing groups on the fly, has a great library of canned regexes, and will even generate instant language specific code for you if can’t recall offhand the differences in syntax between say C# and JavaScript. Easily worth the $40 if you do regex stuff with any regularity.
http://www.regexbuddy.com/download.html
#13 EditPad Pro - Free or $49.95 Paid versions.
Everyone has a favorite text editor for non-visual-studio tasks. I hopped from one to another with the frequency of a cheap ham radio until I settled upon edit pad pro. It’s by JGsoft, the same people as the aforementioned RegexBuddy and has all the usual stuff you’d expect from an all purpose, multi-language text editor, but has one key killer feature I’ve not seen elsewhere:
EditPad Pro will let you easily search and replace (plain text, wildcards, regex) across multiple lines. If you are search and replacing in 10 files at once, and your search phrase is at the start of some of the files line, but breaks across two lines on others, the replace will still happen. This is a total deal-maker for me. My editor search is over.
http://www.editpadpro.com/download.html -Free Trial
#14 Reflector -Free
Reflector is the class browser, explorer, analyzer and documentation viewer for .NET. When you want to see just how a framework class does it’s magic, it’s great to be able to view the nitty gritty of how things run under the hood. This is a great learning tool that any .Net coder needs to take it to the next level.
http://www.aisto.com/roeder/dotnet/
#15 GhostDoc -Free
GhostDoc is a free add-in for Visual Studio that automatically generates XML documentation comments for C#. Either by using existing documentation inherited from base classes or implemented interfaces, or by deducing comments from name and type of e.g. methods, properties or parameters.
Basically if you name your methods and parameters with nice descriptive names, you get full XML documentation for free.
http://www.roland-weigelt.de/ghostdoc/
Closing thoughts …
Leverage apps to give yourself slack while still getting things done and get yourself noticed for being a coding celebrity, a Paris Hilton developer. Conversely, repeat yourself over and over, write boated code by hand, or just erratically cobble together what seems right at the time, and fate will not be so kind …
Britney Spears: Looking bad while doing things the hard way
56 comments ↓
That picture of Britney is enough to scare me into using whatever tools you tell me to use.
I have to agree.. That picture is disturbing.. I swear she’s not usually THAT bad.
Awesome tools! Launchy is a must have, unlocker is a time saver, and other tools are very useful too. Thanks!!!
I can suggest you add Clipdiary to your work environment. It’s very useful to have power clipboard when coding. (Yeh, I know copy-paste is bad style:))
A couple others worth checking out:
- WinMerge
- ArsClip
- SQLDBDiff
- Microsoft Virtual CD Control Panel (free .iso mounter made by MS)
- TaskbarShuffle
Terminals is great, but sooo buggy. Its at least usable if I stick to RDP connections.
Seriously, for the sake of humanity, you could have at least censored the neck chub.
#1: SlickRun. Also Free. Not as slick looking, but very-very good.
#3: Mezer tools. Free. http://www.bayden.com/mezer/. By the same guy who did SlickRun…and Fiddler
#5: Snipping tool. Free with Vista. Just install the Note Pad extensions. Very slick.
#13: Notepad++. Free. Favorite text editor is almost a religious decision these days. But I do like this one. The add-ins are also amazing.
#16: Fiddler. Can’t…live…without
#17: FireFox with Firebug is love for the web developer
You forgot ‘resizer’ (http://zestant.googlepages.com/resizer). Really handy when you work with multiple screens! Also handy for the problem you described in sizer.
Instead of launcher I’m addicted to ’slickrun’ (http://www.bayden.com/SlickRun/).
The two only tools I really need are :
- Firebug. I just cant think of coding js or CSS without this again.
- Notepad++ (beats all other text editor, see this review)
When I read the headline, I was expecting power tools for real coders. What I see here instead is power tools for HTML / Graphics / Web Design weenies using Windows :p
Not very “universal” if they’re all for windows :p
Could it even hurt to mention linux and mac versions too? i.e. Quicksilver for macosx, which is definitely more powerful than Launchy is.
Launchy is so Paris: all style no substance.
Slickrun is what you really need.
- Notepad++ (beats all other text editor, see this review)
Doesn’t beat Vim. Not even close.
@Dave, I still disagree. Neither Slickrun nor Launchy..or for that matter, any similar apps for Windows come close to Quicksilver. Unfortunate, because I find myself using my Mac more for that app. Used to do that too for Exposé when it was new in macosx, but nowadays with compiz fusion and all it’s a moot point.
@Jane
Ok. But Slickrun > Launchy if we’re limiting this discussion to Windows.
But what I really want to know is, is there an equivalent for Linux?
[…] read more here […]
@Dave, I haven’t really tried many for Linux, but here’s two:
http://katapult.kde.org
http://developer.imendio.com/projects/gnome-launch-box
Eh.. most important Paris-superstar-coder-like tool: Mac OS X …
Nice… just nice..
the tools are the same that i use… one more… one less…
but…
I agree… that photo of Britney really scary!! ahh!!!
Great round up man…these will save me tons of time
[…] 15 -hot- tools that made me a coding Paris Hilton. - […]
He doesn’t need to mention this is Windows only, because he includes screen shots. Neither Linux nor Mac OS looks that pathetic these days.
It is funny when a site isn’t labeled Windows, though. A throwback to when some assumed everyone was white, male, protestant.
Then too, others could tell right away from the lack of taste.
Uhh… I understand with Mono, he could well be a C# developer on Linux (and possibly Macintosh too), however, its blatantly obvious he’s an ASP.NET developer.
What’s with the race remark? Pfft.
@Yeats & @Jane - Sorry if it was unclear this was for windows. I only submitted my story to a windows forum, but when these things catch on they take on a life of their own.
If anyone would like to post good links for similar lists for Mac or Linux, I’d be happy to aggregate them here and make a post.
@Shannon - Everything you said is right on.
@Other folks with suggestions - I’m going to try ‘em all!
Dave–in addition to Katapult there’s Deskbar for GNOME (and XFCE, really) which is more like a combo Launchy and Spotlight thingy. I have mine mapped to Win-Space.
Back before I switched, my fave regex tester for Win32 was regex coach. RegexBuddy looks a bit more versatile, but I have a hard time imagining its additional features could merit $40.
Now that I’m on OS X, I’m happy to report that TextMate is a very, very nice editor, nicer than anything I remember from my windows days (ultraedit, e.g.). And long live Quicksilver! Who knows what it will become with Google’s care and feeding…
@Toby errrr…Google’s care and feeding? Wha? Last I checked there’s only a Google code page..
But..TextMate++. It’s replaced EVERYTHING as my general purpose text editor on top of being a worthy programmers’ editor type app. I can’t wait for the Leopard only version.
[…] 15 -hot- tools that made me a coding Paris Hilton. (tags: developer webdev windows Development Programming) digg_url=’http://blog.shawnlmorrissey.com/?p=399′; digg_skin = ‘compact’; digg_bgcolor = ‘#FFFFFF’; digg_title = ‘links for 2007-11-16′; digg_bodytext = ”; digg_topic = ”; Powered by Gregarious (39) […]
[…] 15 -hot- tools that made me a coding Paris Hilton. (tags: developer webdev windows Development Programming) […]
i prefer find and run robot over launchy, uses less system resouces and is overall better
also have you tried notepad+ ?
[…] 15 -Hot- Tools That Made Me a Coding Paris Hilton (via DotNetKicks) […]
Significant part of these tools could be replaced by EMACS.
I user Mezer Tools, which takes the place of #3, #4, and #5 on your list, in just one app.
[…] love reading blogger’s posts about their favorite software tools. I recently read one where the author was gushing with praise for […]
[…] 15 -hot- tools that made me a coding Paris Hilton. (tags: List Tools Web_Design) […]
Great list
I wasn’t aware of most of the tools, and this Launchy thing is gold, pure gold.
Thanks!!
[…] Link: Mike Duncan […]
Launchy, must have on windows OR in linux standard (ALT-F3)
Unlocker, must have on windows aswell OR in linux no such problems
PSPad, texteditor on windows OR eclipse on Linux
And sizer, not sure how, but it is possible in linux without installing any package (/program)
Sorry… but windows is so limited
I’m sure these are useful, but the headline made me laugh. In my circle the words “Paris Hilton” always translate as “C*ck S*cker” thus I laughed and laughed.
StrokeIt + ClipX or ArsClip
You scare me…
Seriously a bunch of those tools can be replaced with Zoom+.
http://www.gipsysoft.com/zoomplus/
That Britney picture is nasty!
After using TextMate (http://macromates.com/) on my Mac, I have been searching for a decent editor on my PCs. I found e-texteditor (http://www.e-texteditor.com/). This has replaced all other text editors I use.
I tend to use google desktop to index my files, but nothing gets close to QuickSilver on the Mac.
Thanks for the list… I’ll definitely be trying some of these out. I couldve done without the last picture of Britney at the end.
I’m sure anyone programming in Java is aware of the Eclipse IDE. What non-java developers might not know is that there are a wide variety of plugins available for eclipse that arent java-specific. A few of my favorite plugins are quantumDB (database tool), aptana (javascript/css/html), and the phpEclipse plugin.
Use a mac and you wouldn’t need half that shit.
“Use a mac and you wouldn’t need half that shit.”
Pfft. Maturity much?
[…] 15 -hot- tools that made me a coding Paris Hilton. […]
[…] ok, not me but that’s what this list of wonders did for Mike Duncan. So why am I mentioning it here? Because a lot of the stuff he lists here isn’t developer […]
[…] 15 -hot- tools that made me a coding Paris Hilton. (tags: tools programming development utilities software freeware tips windows **) […]
[…] Windows only: Measure photos, graphics and other digital media directly on your monitor with freeware app JR Screen Ruler. JR Screen Ruler comes as a stand-alone executable that can be used to measure inches, centimeters, pixels or picas (a unit of measurement corresponding to 1/6 of an inch). You certainly won’t need to use the ruler everyday, but it’s nice to have in your pocket when the occasional screen measurement is called for. I would recommend dropping a shortcut to JR Screen Ruler in the same folder that houses GIMP and/or Photoshop so you don’t forget about it. JR Screen Ruler is a free download for Windows XP and Vista. JR Screen Ruler [via mikeduncan.com] […]
[…] Windows only: Measure photos, graphics and other digital media directly on your monitor with freeware app JR Screen Ruler. JR Screen Ruler comes as a stand-alone executable that can be used to measure inches, centimeters, pixels or picas (a unit of measurement corresponding to 1/6 of an inch). You certainly won’t need to use the ruler everyday, but it’s nice to have in your pocket when the occasional screen measurement is called for. I would recommend dropping a shortcut to JR Screen Ruler in the same folder that houses GIMP and/or Photoshop so you don’t forget about it. JR Screen Ruler is a free download for Windows XP and Vista. JR Screen Ruler [via mikeduncan.com] […]
[…] http://www.mikeduncan.com/15-hot-tools-that-made-me-a-coding-paris-hilton/ […]
Hi,
nice collection of tools. But you can save yourself the 40 bucks for RegexBuddy and use the Regex Coach (http://www.weitz.de/regex-coach/) which is free (but donations are encouraged). I am using it all the time. Granted, it may have a bit less bells and whistles but for me it always did what I wanted. And it never crashed (something I can not say of the other regex tools I tried).
Actually RegexBuddy is worth it for the tree breakdown of the regex that it gives you. Regex coach is still better at some things, but if you are doing some advanced regex work then the breakdown is an amazing tool will really help you understand every part of your expression. Especially in regard to greed of certain operators and lookarounds.
If you every spend more than 10 minutes on a regex then Buddy can probably help you out a lot better than Coach, although I really hope the breakdown tool is someday added to Coach too.
I like Launchy but it won’t work on my Win 2003 Server box
Any idea of an alternative that works on this version?
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