Some of the most efficient engineers, developers and IT professionals I know usually carry around a common "toolkit" of useful programs, add-ins or utilities which help them for day-to-day debugging, developing or designing.
The question is:
What is in your utility toolkit.. What tools couldn't you live without?
There are two tools I simply can't work without
These tools are so heavily ingrained into my daily routine and greatly increase my productivity.
Currently on my thumbdrive (not ALL software):
My Utility toolkit would have: 1.) Hex Editor - XVI32, or any other 2.) Beyond Compare - Comparison of files 3.) Cygwin shell installable complete with perl, gcc,gprof,gcov,gdb and related tools,bash,vim, development/debugging tools 4.) A model makefile for *nix platform 5.) Winzip utility 6.) Source insight or any other good code browsing tool 7.) Ghostscript and GSView 8.) PDF reader 9.) Good quick antivirus tool/exe
-AD
Since I'm often working on different workstations, I've got into the habit of tagging the stuff that I install on delicious:
grep gives you the biggest bang for the buck. You can use it to search on any type code and many forms of data. It is fast, and very powerful. In code it can locate what you're looking for in variables and function names, but also in comments. You can also pipe results into it, and can thus enhance the utility of many tools available on site.
With some clever hints you can easily make grep search for a specific type of an identifier. For instance, "^function_name" will often find in C code a function's definition, because these start with the name of the function at the beginning of the line. If a search pattern gives you too many false matches, you can filter those out, by piping the result through grep -v.
Many years ago I was stranded debugging COBOL programs on a 1970s-era Perkin Elmer machine running OS/32. The machine lacked programming tools, but had an ancient C compiler (so old, it would accept =+ as the original form of the += operator). I ended up writing a rudimentary grep program, which immensely improved my productivity.
Currently in Thumbdrive\Tools.
"Edit Plus 3" - lightweight editor that I've been using for ages.
"F# - 1.9.6.2" - great for when I need to throw something togheter since it's usable without an IDE, also a great language for many tasks.
"ildasm"
"Sysinternal Procmon" - great for debugging and getting a feel for what the machine is really doing.
Python. Seriously. I use it for a lot of small stuff. I also like to use the command line module for creating easy little project specific "shells" that I drop in frequently used queries etc. (show all tables in the projects db, search for stored procedures etc. - yeah, doing a lot of t-sql lately...)
I tend to accompany big c#/t-sql projects with a little python script that extends the cmd.Cmd class to give me a small collection of helpful queries etc. that I can use to poke around in the database.
Also, I often use python to modify input data (often csv files, but any junk will do) into insert statements etc. Or do plausibility tests on that data.
WinRAR and puTTY. That is all I need (i'm assuming internet doesn't count).
Total Commander (GREP, FTP, ZIP, it's all here...I'm not even starting on this one)
Notepad++
WinMerge
Its like grep, but better, faster, and does more what you want to generally do with large source collections. Written in Perl, and does complete PCRE because of this. Recursive traversal is default, and it intelligently skips files that are unlikely to match using file-type identification to short cut.
( This means it automatically avoids traversing .svn/.hg/.git directories and thus gives massive speedups )
ack "function\s+foo\s*\(" --php
# find the definition of "foo" in all php files
# decendant of the current directory
I have the following tools on my USB thumd drive:
I like to program in Python so I have created a portable Python programming environment on a thumbdrive.
Here's list of tools, utils and progs I use for my .NET software development projects.
I always seem to have a bootable Linux Distro on me in SOME form or other. Whether it be the bootable Pen Drive I keep attached to my Keys, or the multitude of LiveCDs I have for various "diagnostics" - I find that if I am in a situation, generally, where I'd need some sort of tools... a reboot into a Live environment provides me with near enough everything I need, and more
Emacs. It's my "does list of things" tool, helpful with quick calculations, with mangling configuration files (I work as a network engineer, there is an awful lot of configuration to be done, lots of it bordering on trivial to generate with either small snippets of code or careful use of keyboard macros).
Here's the tools I use to make Sharepoint solutions:
Tools I use because you do not have to install, just drop on system and use:
I use Espresso (I got it with the MacHeist bundle!), and Firebug for coding. I use Photoshop if I need any images.
I manage my projects with The Hit List.
I use/carry with me:
Just to name a few
Development Tools
Useful tools/utils
FireFox Add Ons
Visual Studio Add Ins
Fast image viewer that has been around for a long time and proven to work.
I do a full install of cygwin. It gives me 95% of the stuff I need and hard drive space is cheep. It's a lot easier to install everything then get emacs, gcc, gdb, perl, utilitys such as grep and awk, not to mention the servers it comes with like Apache and MySQL if you want to try something out quick.
I think the utility toolkit or the Tools List that every developer SHOULD have described in the following link from Scott Hanselman.
Scott Hanselman's Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows
ide: visual studio / netbeans (zip file!, almost portable)
editor: notepad++ (portable) with monaco font
file comparison: winmerge (portable)
source control: subversion, tortoise
ticket control: redmine
file manager: free commander (portable)
explorer: IE, FF (portable), chrome (portable), iron (chrom without google crap, also portable), qtweb, arora,
FF plugins: firebug, web developer, xmarks
imclient: pidgin
mail client: gmail
download manager: free download manager (portable)
sites: STACKOVERFLOW!!!, gotapi... and google, all the time...
miscelaneous: launchy (can't live without it!)
virtualization: virtual box (I have a machine image for every environment)
office: openoffice (portable)
lamp stack: xammp (portable!)
disk usage: windirstat (portable), scanner (portable)
pdf viewer: foxit (portable), sumatrapdf (portable)
uncompressor: 7-zip portable
M$ sql comparison tool: sql delta
M$ sql management: visual studio sql manager
mysql
mysql management: phpmyadmin, manager provided with mysql
uninstaller utility: revo unistaller (portable)
registry cleaner: ccleaner (portable)
ftp: filezilla (portable)
as you may have noticed, I have a special predilection for portable applications...
Architag XRay XML Editor - I test XSLT snippets with this nice lightweight tool.