Small tools/scripts that help you so much?

Question

On top of my head, especially for C/Linux developer:

• ack
• git-bz
• colorgcc
• colordiff
• moap and prepare-ChangeLog

Is there some tool/script you couldn't work without, but that you feel others don't know so much?

For instance, I just found:

• cppcheck

Answer 1

On Windows or Linux:

1. grep, without a doubt
2. tail
3. vim

On Windows (and Linux, Solaris), XMLStarlet

I realize that grep and tail are well-known, but it amazes me how many people think it's magic when you use either one of them. Same thing with Vim. I'm hardly a power user, but I can open it up and have a small document complete before MS Word would even open.

Answer 2

• StackOverflow
• Google

And my other two favourites are too large to be considered small :P

• Visual Studio
• The Internet

Answer 3

I don't use it that often, but the tool with the highest ratio of awesomeness to being little known has to be dot, which is the tool for drawing directed graphs that is part of the AT&T Graph Visualization suite. A nice example output is their Unix family tree.

Answer 4

It's a language not a tool, but it is small and not yet well known: the programming language Lua. I can't live without it and it is gradually displacing my sh, ksh, awk, and perl scripts... One mark of genius: the escape character for string-search patterns is different from the escape character for quoted strings. No more trying to make sense of legions of backslashes!

Answer 5

- ANT
- Mylyn
- TortoiseSVN
- firebug (think console too!)
- TextMate

Answer 6

• git has had such a profound impact on my workflow that I do not want to code without it
• firebug is a must for web development
• standard command-line utilities/functions: grep, find, locate, tail, sed, awk, pushd, popd
• custom TextMate bundle snippets, TextMate's bundle editor is superb even though TextMate lacks some important vi and emacs capabilities (like split buffers)
• regular expressions - people need to learn how-to use regexps, period

Answer 7

My faves are Notepad++, which I use for EVERYTHING that's not wrapped in a visual studio project, and a small macro in Visual studio that turns a c# variable declaration into a basic property. Both are simple, but oh so very useful!

Answer 8

The python interactive interpreter and its pumped up variant iPython are the tools that have enhanced my programming productivity like no other.

Being able to experiment with new code on the fly and inspect objects, classes, and modules in any way you want interactively is simply awesome.

Answer 9

Does know one depend on Putty ?, i really dunno what i would do with out it

Answer 10

I need the most tools when coding for web, anything else usually just a text editor.

for web:

• Web Developer Add-On for Firefox
• Notepad++
• Pixie
• MeasureIt Add-On for Firefox

Answer 11

Vim and PrintFile. All PrintFile does is print text and PostScript files, any which way I want them (including cut-and-paste).

Answer 12

I'm quite fond of:

1. .Net Reflector
2. Sysinternals (a bunch of cool tools here)

Answer 13

Most have been listed here already so I won't repeat. Here are a couple new ones.

LINQ Pad

Reflector

Sticky Notes VS Add-In

psValidation (My own Validation Class Library, Mostly RegEx)

Answer 14

Already listed but I must mention TextMate. I use Mercurial or Hg on a daily basis.

Answer 15

Firebug. More than anything else.