My productivity stack

My productivity stack for workflow transcendence. Ordered by blend of personal usage/general usefulness.

Have suggestions or alternatives? Submit an issue, especially for the following: Comic viewer (zips), image viewer, general file explorer, SFTP client, Adobe Fireworks.

My AutoHotKey Scripts

• Display Blanker - smooth display blanking via custom hotkey toggle for OLED monitors. When you want to leave your computer whilst not using the display. Disables on mouse movement and any keyboard press.
• Launch Calculator - allows only a single instance of a calculator to be launched. Bound to calc key.

Software

• ClipX - Clipboard manager. Add sticky & color picker (grab hex code colors from under mouse) plugins. Development discontinued many years ago but still works extremely well and beats Window 11's built-in clipboard manager.
• Everything - locate files and folders by name instantly. Totally replaced my use of built-in search.
• TrayWeather - Taskbar weather reporting, no fuss with some customization.
• Greenshot - screenshot power tool, can edit/blur and upload directly to image sharing sites.
• Notepad++ - General text/script editor, check ##Development for my current IDE.
• KeePass 2 - Password/private data manager (when not using Chrome)
• Process Explorer - Task manager for power users, drop-in replacement.
• IrfanView - Image viewer, initally released in 1996 and still in active development.
• Negative Screen - invert or dim your screen for those late night code sessions.
• CDisplayEx - Image viewer for zip and comics *WARNING* Official installer at cdisplayex.com is full of crapware, you must locate a clean copy elsewhere.
• SoundSwitch - Multiple audio outputs? Quickly switch default audio devices.
• Bulk Rename Utility - advanced file renamer

Media / Creation

• MPV - Media/video player, extremely customizable. Integrated with YT-DLP for streaming content.
• XMPlay - Tiny audio player. Grab this skin as the default design is ugly. It also plays old school tracker music and has plugins for old game console audio files!
• Adobe Fireworks - Discontinued bitmap/vector editing tool. The ultimate compromise between Photoshop and Illustrator. RIP Macromedia :(
• Audacity - Free & open source multi-track audio editing/recording.
• Adobe Audition - Defacto audio editing/recording suite. Spectral editing is quite impressive.
• LiceCAP - Customizable screen recording... to animated GIFs! It's output is quite optimal and has beaten all competitors so far!
• OBS Studio - Streaming and screen/video recording software, open source and ridiculously customizable.

Support/Diagnostic

• WizTree - Disk space visualizer, stupid fast.
• HWiNFO - Comprehensive hardware analysis/monitoring
• Driver Identifier - find newer system drivers if absolutely necessary.
• CPU-Z - Hardware identification
• Process Monitor - shows real-time file system, registry and process/thread activity. Not for the faint of heart. I recommend the checking out the entire Sysinternals utilities index for the various tools.
• Device Cleanup Tool - Remove non-present devices from Windows Device management

Development

• Visual Studio Code - IDE
• WinSCP - SFTP client
• Laravel Valet (Windows port) - PHP/Laravel development environment.

Personal taste

• OneDrive - Paid business cloud storage, consumes less resources than Dropbox. Wish there was an official way to have ignored folders.
• qBittorrent - Extremely customizable torrenting application.
• Rainmeter - Custom desktop widgets. I use it for my World Clock and edited version of Do I need a Jacket 2.0

Online services

• Spotify Premium - Music/podcast service. Premium because I hate ads and want to support artists.
• YouTube Premium - I feel legally adblocking and supporting a service is critical to its long term sustainablity... with the drama that is happening on the platform maybe there will be a different option.
• SignNow - E-signing service, Still with them due to grandfathered pricing, might build my own if forced to pay full price.

Android apps

• Blackberry Hub / Calendar / Contacts
• Today Weather - passive weather status in status bar, notifications, etc.
• Sync for Reddit - Reddit client, plenty of customization options and a major daily distraction! :)
• Textra - SMS/Texting
• Transit - public transit/on-foot directions
• True Phone Dialer - phone
• Keepass2Android
• Solid Explorer - file/cloud manager
• Accubattery
• WifiAnalyzer
• Twilight - active/passive screen hue control

Physical gear

• Headphones - Beyerdynamic DT770 Pro 80ohm headphones - closed reference headphones with soft pads & readily available replacement pads/parts (Beyerdynamic rarely discontinues models unlike brands... like Audio Technica).
• Mouse - SteelSeries Rival 500. Oodles of physical buttons and doesn't compromise ergonomics. See my detailed review here. This mouse retired my Logitech G502 in May 2018.
• Ballpoint pen - Zebra F-701 ballpoint Pen
• Measuring tape - Used way more often than one would think!
• Label printer - Ancient Dymo LabelWriter, any model is fine.
• Monitors - one in landscape (1920x1080), another in in portrait (1200x1920). Can't go wrong with Dell.
• Keyboard - Wireless Logitech K520 (comes as combo with mouse which I never use). Practically placed media keys and pretty cheap.
• Bluetooth earbuds - Anker SoundBuds Slim with custom eartips. Cheap, good frequency response and isolation.

Windows 7 only

• WizMouse - Allows mouse wheel to work on window under the cursor, even if it's out of focus.
• VirtualCloneDrive - Load ISO files directly, newer versions of Windows have this built-in.

Retired

• AquaSnap Pro - (Windows 10) Tiling window manager. Snap, dock & tile windows. Windows 11 built-in management is sufficient.
• Dropbox - Cloud storage, transitioned away because the free version has become limiting (3 device maximum, constant annoying notifications) and it consumes more resources than OneDrive.
• Cmder - replaced by Windows Terminal. Command prompt manager. Setup in quasi-Quake console mode.
• Sandboxie - Isolate potentially pesky/untrusted applications, to be retired once Windows 10 built-in sandboxing UX has improved.
• sWeather - replaced by TrayWeather. Data source no longer exists. Weather reporting, no fuss with plenty of customization options. Pre-dates Win 10's broken mess by at least 8 years :P
• Audio Switcher - replaced by SoundSwitch. File available for reference.
• KatMouse - Scroll unfocused windows. Replaced by WizMouse.
• SpeedFan - Monitors voltages, fan speeds and temperatures and check drive SMART status. Not updated actively so it has been mostly replaced by HWInfo
• ScreenToGif - replaced by LiceCAP. Editor UI is nice but the exported gifs are large.
• DisplayFusion - Advanced wallpaper manager and misc. tweaks. No longer change my wallpaper frequently enough to care, although I do rarely use it to generate multi-monitor wallpaper.
• iRotate - Screen rotation hotkeys. I now have two monitors in both portrait & landscape, so I have no need for it anymore.
• WebMon - discontinued web page monitoring program, used it for checking web comics for updates. Likely to be replaced by a Chrome extension.
• MediaMonkey - Absolutely incredible media library software. Highly customizable. When my media disks and backup failed catastrophically years ago I never had the time to get things back in order. Maybe I will someday, I enjoyed rating music I listened to on a 0-5 scale which online services can't do.
• FullContact Address Book - Android contact manager, now crapware. Avoid.