Over the years I have used a variety of tools to make my dev life a little easier from essentials like editors and text compare tools to SaaS products like Pocket and Feedly. Here is a list of tools I use everyday

Editors

  • Atom: Developed by GitHub, it’s constantly being improved.
  • Sublime Text
  • Visual Studio Code
  • Beyond Compare: One of my favorite pieces of software to use. I use this tool often to compare files and merge changes. You can also set it up to replace your default git mergetool, see the instructions here for various platforms.

 

CLI Tools (Command Line Interface Tools)

  • Azure Xplat CLI: A cross platform command line tool used to administer azure resources such as VM, apps.
  • Git: The best distributed version control system you can find.
  • Cmder: A portable command console for windows. Looks great as well.

 

Remote Tools

 

Online Services

  • LastPass: Great tool for storing login credentials for all the sites you use.
  • Pocket: As a developer information is constantly changing, use pocket to store blogs and articles to read offline when you have time.
  • Feedly: An online RSS reader, I was an avid Google Reader for years until they decided to kill the platform, I haven’t missed a beat using Feedly.
  • Spotify: An essential tool for any developer is good music, spotify has the biggest library to feed your soul.

Productivity

  • Evernote: Store all of your meeting notes, comps for your projects.
  • Todoist: One of the best task management services.

Backup

  • Crashplan: Set it and forget online backup service for all your files.
  • SyncBack Pro: I use this to backup my nightly sql backups to other servers and Dropbox.