My Tools for Windows

This post is a list of great software that I—an engineer and researcher—use on Windows and can personally recommend. I don’t include ubiquitous programs such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint; they are already essential for engineers and researchers.

Authoring and writing

• Obsidian is more than a note-taking application; it can work as a full personal knowledge manager. You can create notes in rich Markdown format and link them to build a knowledge network. This is especially useful for me as a researcher because it let me create a Wikipedia-like notepad with linked concepts and information.
  • Some people may prefer Notion that is fully online and has collaboration features. In Obsidian, your notes are local Markdown files. I sync my Obsidian notes to OneDrive, and when I need to share a note with someone, I export it to PDF.
• LaTeX is a document authoring system for technical and scientific documents. I recommend the TeX Live distribution for Windows. LaTeX is useful for high complexity documents, especially if they have lots of math, tables, figures, or references (e.g., theses and dissertations). For low and medium complexity documents, Word is perfectly fine.
  • LaTeX is efficient if you already have a defined document class (template). Most universities and journals provide one. If you want to heavily personalize the document class or create your own, you will spend precious time and lose the efficiency. In that case, you better use Word.
• JabRef is the best reference manager that I’ve used. In JabRef, LaTeX is first-class citizen, but it also supports Word via Office XML bibliography format.
  • Zotero is a fine alternative with dedicated Word citation plugin in case you don’t like to use Word’s integrated citation system. I use both JabRef and Zotero.

Imaging and media

• Paint.NET has a lot of features that you can find in Photoshop, and yet it’s a free and lightweight program. If you need an image and photo editor that is more powerful than Windows’s built-in Paint, give Paint.NET a try.
• ShareX is a feature-rich screenshot toolbox. It allows you to freely annotate on your screenshots, and it also comes with screen recorder, color picker, ruler, QR reader, and optical character recognition (OCR).
  • Windows Snipping Tool (Win + Shift + S) is a good alternative if you don’t want the extra features.
• Inkscape is a free vector graphics software. You can use it to make professional looking illustrations and designs. Since Inkscape deals with vector graphics, you can later modify your drawings and rescale them without loss of image resolution. If you use LaTeX, you can export your Inkscape drawings in the “PDF+LaTeX” format to get a consistent appearance (take a look at Gilles Castel’s workflow).

Productivity

• Bitwarden password manager helps you with the large number of online accounts we have today. Memorize a single master passphrase and let Bitwarden generate, store, and autocomplete all your passwords. Bitwarden generate strong random passwords; no need to use the same password for everything (which is unsafe). It has phone apps, so you have access to your passwords in all platforms.
• AutoHotkey allows you to create key shortcuts, remap keys, setup text expansion, and perform other automation tasks. For example, you can remap some of the F1–F12 keys to do something useful like select all (Ctrl + A), copy (Ctrl + C), and paste (Ctrl + V).
• OneCommander is a file explorer on steroids. If you deal with many files and folders on a regular basis, OneCommander dual-panel layout and additional tools can help you manage your files with ease.

Engineering

• Notepad++ is a lightweight code editor. It is more powerful than Windows’ Notepad in editing features, and it supports many programming languages. Notepad++ can open larger files than Notepad without freezing. It is useful to preview, search, and replace content in large text files. It complements VS Code for simpler tasks.
• SMath Studio is a mathematical notebook software similar to MathCAD. It is free and provides many features such as formula evaluation, plotting, and units of measurement.
• QGIS is a fantastic free GIS software. I use it to create all kind of maps and do complex geoprocessing. It provides a Python API, so you can extend its functionalities and automate tasks.

Programming and development

• Miniforge is a minimal installer for Conda, a popular package and environment manager for Python. A lot of people install the bloated Anaconda that comes with a large amount of packages that they will never use. Miniforge installs a minimal Python environment that uses the community-led Conda Forge channel by default.
  • After installing Miniforge, I manually install the packages that I actually need: conda install numpy scipy matplotlib pandas. That’s it; no need for the thousand packages that Anaconda installs by default.
  • An alternative to Miniforge that is still minimal but uses the Anaconda channel by default is Miniconda.
• Visual Studio Code is the best modern code editor. Period. You can use extensions to add features and support for virtually any programming language. Recently, it introduced AI assistance for coding via GitHub Copilot. I can recommend a couple of VS Code extensions:
  • LTeX+ provides grammar and spell checking for LaTeX, Markdown, and HTML using LanguageTool. I use this one for my thesis and this blog.
  • LaTeX Workshop turns VS Code into a powerful LaTeX editor.
• Windows Subsystem for Linux let you run a GNU-Linux distribution on Windows. I found that it is more performant than a virtual machine. If for some reason you need to run Linux software without installing a distribution or doing dual boot with Windows, it is the best choice. And, it is compatible with VS Code.

Utilities

• 7-Zip is the best free file archiver. Forget about WinRAR begging you to buy their software.
• ZoomIt is a minimal screen annotation tool. It is useful for technical presentations.
• WinMerge helps you find the differences between two or more files. It is also a file merging tool.
• TeraCopy does one thing: it copies files faster and more securely than Windows built-in copy-and-paste. It is especially useful for copying very large files or large numbers of files.
• WizTree is a disk space analyzer. It computes the size of all files and folders in your disk. WizTree helps you find the files that are using the most space and remove them. I used to use WinDirStat, but WizTree is much faster.
• Everything is a fast file and folder search program. It is much faster than Windows search.