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
