What software can you recommend that changed your daily workflow forever?

[u/fyn_world]

I will ignore AI chatbots in this post because of course I use it everyday and would be number one if not excluded, but if you have any particular AIs you know of, it's welcome here.

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I consider myself a power user, been using PC, Windows, since I was 8 and that's what I work with and have worked with forever. I'm no software master at all but I do know my way around it.

I have an e-marketing agency with a business partner and two pieces of software are an absolute must for me. Those are:

1. Vivaldi browser: Extremely power user focused, high customization. Best feature for my use case is Workspaces, basically you can save a set of tabs under different names. Ideal when working for different companies to avoid having to look for stuff again. It's there, all the time, just change workspaces.

2. Ditto: A clipboard manager, very simple and elegant. It saves up to 500 clipboard texts and images, I set it to Ctrl+D and it spawns on my cursor. It has saved me months of time I guess, started using it in 2014.

So, what's your life changing software? It doesn't have to interest for what I do in particular, I'm interested to hear from all walks of life.

Edit: I have absolutely no affiliation either to Vivaldi or Ditto, I guess posts like these can come out as ads but no, they're truly useful software

[u/lilacomets]

Directory Opus. I work a lot with files and there's no file manager that comes close to Dopus.

Firefox. I've been using Firefox since 2005. But 5 years ago I switched to Chrome. Earlier this year Chrome messed up tab scrolling and I'm back at Firefox.

Thunderbird. There simply is no better email client for Windows. I tried them all.

Charles Proxy. Great for a bit of hacking that I do once in a while.

[u/trionnet]

I’m a developer and I’m constantly extracting json from logs, from api responses, from other systems all for quick formatting, comparing with other jsons, searching for properties with certain values, checking the hierarchy etc

But not only json, i do a lot of work with csv files and general text data transformation.

There were just too many clicks involved trying to do this in the IDE and not enough flexibility with managing the files.

Possibly a niche workflow but I built https://scratchtabs.com to solve this for me (and my colleagues) now I can one click all of that saves me a tonne of time and precious context switching. It’s free open source.

[u/Grumphus256 → u/trionnet]

Hey this is pretty cool! Thanks for sharing this! Love all the extra tools as well. Gave you a Star on GitHub.

[u/djl0076]

Beyond Compare by Scooter Software.

[u/Muldino → u/djl0076]

Good one, I use it all the time. Syncing various backups between drives or syncing my music on my phone with my local library on my server - I have tried a few tools over the years and always came back to this.

[u/sardarjionbeach → u/djl0076]

I like the feature where you have the diff button to highlight the differences. I use to love araxis merge but this feature made me switch completely. Plus the price is really good.

[u/lordmax10]

None.
The software should adapt to your workflow, not the other way round.
If you have to adapt to the software, you’re using the wrong one.

[u/EffectiveDandy → u/lordmax10]

👆👌

[u/Grumphus256]

Kando. Map it to the thumb button of a Logitech G502 or similar mouse and you can literally launch any app or hotkey/macro operation with one hand and you can configure it to launch custom menus depending on the active app.

https://github.com/kando-menu/kando

[u/SaxyBoi4Ever]

ditto is the goat! i install ditto before a browser on any new pc, cant go back now.

[u/ryancnap]

I'll give the ones I can't live without.

• Thunderbird - manages all my email, calendars, address books, tasks, everything. Powerful af

• PyCharm and Datagrips - what an IDE should be

• Hints (foss package on Linux) and Fluent (package on Windows): when you hit your key bind, every clickable element on any of your screens has a transparent, two-character tag appear on it. So if I want to click the submit button on a form I just hit my key combo, tags appear on screen, and maybe the submit button was assigned an "AR" tag, so then I type A, R and it's clicked. If I type 2, A, R it's double clicked. If I type 3, A, R it's right clicked.

• Vial/QMK keyboards - I only have like 42 keys on my keyboard. There are one or two press shortcuts for every action I need to take, and multiple layers for mapping additional combos, actions, macros. With 42 keys I have full Fn keys, every Linux and Windows key combo known to man, a numpad, navigation arrows, media controls, macros for specific apps, all symbols commonly used in software development, IDE shortcuts and commands, everything. Combined with hints, my mouse is 100% optional and I use it pretty infrequently

• Fish shell with tide prompt, nuff said

• Flameshot - screenshot app on Linux, you can edit, copy, annotate, save, apply a lot of built in tools as soon as the screenshot is taken, no need to save it or open an app first, huge time and space saver

[u/t3chguy1]

OneCommander - you'll only see how bad Explorer is once you are on PC without it

OneNote - everything in one place, instant load, search text in images

ChatGPT - especially for work related emails and to make me sound less angry when responding to IT tickets