Five utilities that make my life easier

I’ve installed a lot of applications on my PC over the years, but several have earned the distinct honour of being allowed to stay:

1. Freemind – An excellent mind-mapping tool that makes it easy to grab lots of ideas. I use this to note down all my rough ideas, and although it’s not quite as flexible as a pen and paper, it’s extremely useful.
2. Keynote – I’ve tried several tools like this, and although it doesn’t have the power of Microsoft’s OneNote, it’s much smaller and sits quite happily in the tray.
3. CommandBar – If you use the command line for any amount of time, this is an invaluable asset. It allows you to open an explorer bar, similar to “History” and “Favourites”, that contains a working command prompt. I use this quite regularly, usually when building resource files for software, and it has made my life so much easier.
4. Foldersize - Another explorer extension, this time allowing you to view the size of a folder in a column in explorer. Quite handy when trying to find junk hiding on your hard drive.
5. Vim – There’s not a lot for me to say about Vim that hasn’t already been said. I use it mostly for editing batch files and .htaccess files, but also if I just need to edit a file quickly.

I hope you find them as useful as I do.

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