What are your favorite small handy utility programs (tools) helping you programming ?

Question

And how they help you improve your programming ? Could they be integrated in IDE and if yes how ?

Edit: Thanks to altCognito There has been almost duplicate question before named: What's in Your Utility Tookit**. "Allmost" since the listings there do not provide short explanations of what exactly each tool does Edit: If this question stays and you want to add a new tool please please according tool's popularity

A simple tool listing

• grep for powerful text searching
• ArsClip - it remembers the last n amount of entries in the ClipBoard. The shortcut combination Ctrl + Shift + Z , 2 gives you the second last copied text ( or object ) from the Windows Clipboard. Never heard of it being somehow used within VS , neither have I missed such an integration ...
• Process Explorer - for killing unwanted processes ( VS Online Help for example ) + vast grip of overall system info on Windows
• Paint.NET - use this often for writing or tweaking graphics (Visual Studio provides little in the way of decent graphics editing). Paint.NET is great for making transparent PNGs or GIFs - click the "Magic wand" tool to select the area you want to make transparent, and then hit Delete

You could find a broader list on my blog ...

Answer 1

• VisualSVN plugin for Visual Studio - SVN integration within VS.Net
• myGeneration - for code generation
• CCTray - for getting real-time updates on CruiseControl builds
• SQL 2005 query analyzer, ofcourse for queries
• jquery add-in for Visual Studio for jquery methods intellisense
• Resharper - for error highlight on the fly & several other features
• watIn test recorder - for recording test scripts
• nUnit - for executing unit test cases
• InBuilt code snippets
• XML to Schema - specifically for VB.net in VS 2008

Answer 2

Refactoring Plugin for Eclipse that I am working on. Hopefully it will allow you to easily break up large classes suffering from too many methods/fields into smaller ones. Theory is that methods using similar fields belong together according to the Single Responsibility Principle.

Answer 3

I come back to XMLStarlet time and time again. It's a command line XML utility for searching/validating/modifying XML. I've lost track of the number of times I've recommended it on SO for people having difficulties with XML issues.

Answer 4

Paint.NET and Notepad++.

Paint.NET - use this often for writing or tweaking graphics (Visual Studio provides little in the way of decent graphics editing). Paint.NET is great for making transparent PNGs or GIFs - click the "Magic wand" tool to select the area you want to make transparent, and then hit Delete.

NotePad++ for the ability to right-click any file of any size and view its raw contents - bypassing the default viewer for the file.

Answer 5

The fact that Transmit will let me edit live on the server is an absolute godsend.

Answer 6

One of my favourites is a teensy perl script I wrote that drops formatting from text so I can cut (from email or word doc) and paste the plain text sans foppery.

And here it is;

# Ridiculously simple, but very useful.
use Win32::Clipboard;
my $text = Win32::Clipboard::GetText() or exit;
Win32::Clipboard($text) if $text;

Answer 7

Evernote. Mainly because it's automatic syncorisation allows me to easily view and alter all my notes in the office, at home or anywhere else that I have a web connection.

Answer 8

• Expresso: excellent free and stable tool for regular expressions

Answer 9

Windows Sidebar for those sticky notes. good for quick copy and pasting code.

Answer 10

• debugview : for catching debug messages.
• notepad2 : excellent notepad replacement.
• regulator : regular expressions editor and tester.

Answer 11

• Visual Assit X - This has a lot of small things that make editing source in Visual Studio better. The install intergrates it seemlessly with the IDE.
• IncrediBuild - This will split your C/C++ compile over several machines and or processors. It's a great way to utilize those old machines laying around, and multiple processors. The install intergrates it seemlessly with the IDE.
• Includes - Shows all the header files a given file includes. I intergrate it by adding it to the external tools list in the IDE.
• Unlocker - When you fail to delete or rename a file or directory because it is locked this program automagically pops up a window showing what programs have it locked. I don't intergrate this with the IDE.
• Beyond Compare - Compare files or folders. I've replaced Visual Source Safe's default compare program with Beyond Compare.

Answer 12

Firebug and Web Development Toolbar (both for Firefox)-- no web developer should be without them.

Firebug lets you examine the structure of a document and edit the HTML/CSS on the fly. It also lets you see the JavaScript involved.

Web Development Toolbar lets you disable CSS and the cache. It lets you reset cookies.

Answer 13

Ack: As its domain name implies, Ack is better than grep. Mind-numbingly better than grep. So much better than grep that makes the original grep look brain-damaged.

I couldn't live without Ack.

Answer 14

• Mylyn -- task focused interface for Eclipse
• Foglyn -- for accessing FogBugz cases from Eclipse/Mylyn (shameless plug)
• Fiddler2 -- HTTP debugger, essential tool
• CLCL -- Clipboard history
• Faststone Screen Capture -- for making great screenshots
• Paint.NET -- for editing screenshots or icons

Answer 15

2nd for BeyondCompare. Inexpensive, powerful and available for Linux.