When developing software, in addition to the environment-specific tools, it’s useful to have a set of general applications installed. I currently use the following:
- Visual Studio Code (An Editor for developing JavaScript, Smallworld and other applications. It can be transformed into a full-blown IDE via extensions. It also has basic Git functionality built-in).
- 7Zip (an archive/unarchive utility that’s also good for accessing .iso files).
- Agent Ransack (a powerful and fast file search tool).
- Notepad++ (a flexible text editor).
- Postman (an application that allows you to easily develop and test APIs — such as HTTP/REST).
- WinMerge (a diff/merge tool).
- SOAPUI (a client to test web services).
- TortoiseHg (a GUI for the Mercurial source code control system).
These industrial-strength applications are all available at no charge and can be downloaded from the Web.
Bonus: JSONView for Chrome (a Chrome browser extension that formats and validates JSON so you don’t have to read through ugly text representations of JSON data).
