Must have free productivity tools for Windows 10 (& Linux/Mac/etc)
By: Kaspar L. Palgi
Tags: Tools, Windows, Windows 10, Productivity

Use the right tool for the job

Here are some tools that are small &lightweight so they won’t slow down your PC, easy to learn, free and after first testing, you won’t understand how could you leave without that before. OK, let’s get straight to it!

Ditto text clipboard manager

Have you ever had Notepad open to copy/paste stuff in it that you want to use later? Because every time you CTRL+C something new last text/image in your clipboard gets overwritten. Ditto will solve this problem forever. Just install with default settings (NEX->NEXT->NEXT) and done. It’ss start automatically wherbever you start your Windows.

Now you can click wherever you are just click CTRL + ~ and use arrow down to select one of your past 500 things you have copied from somewhere and click ENTER on the right one to paste it. Simple as that — install it, copy few things from somewhere and CTRL + ~.

Download Ditto for free>>

CopyQ for Linux>> & Alternatives for Mac>>

GreenShot to take professional screenshots

Do you take screenshots so that you pess “Print Screen” key on the keyboard, open Paint, paste it there, save it somewhere, find it from hard drive where it was saved and then send it?

Better download Greenshot for Windows/Mac, install with default settings and press now “Print Screen”.

You see zoomed in the starting point to start taking the screenshot so you can make nicely cropped screenshot exactly from the area you need to capture. Click with the mouse at the starting point and select the area you want to capture. The menu opens where you have the following options:

a) Top one: “Save as” to save the image

b) Bottom one and most used: “Upload to imgur” so after that, you don’t need to do anything more than just go wherever you want and paste the Imgur link where that was automatically copied to your clipboard.

c) “Open in image editor” where you can select from the left toolbar useful tools:

- Mos useful — the arrow. The one you can see in the image in the top of this post. Very useful to point out what about exactly you are talking about.

- Text icon to add text on the top of the image to explain something or just add a, b, c, d — so you can add text explaining different areas of the image.

- Square to mark a bigger area in the screenshot that needs to be pointed out.

Download GreenShot Win for free (Mac $1.99)>>

Watch 1 minute YouTube video I have made>>

AnyDesk - access remote computers

Connect to any computer remotely from any operating system (Windows/Mac/Linux or your Android/iOS phone/tablet). Unlike very well known TeamViewer this one’s free version really works without any problems on all platforms.

Download Portable for free here (Win/Linux/Mac/Android/iPhone)>>

Finally, 2 must use keyboard shortcuts

Just one funny example of ugly text formatting:)

You know probably that CTRL + V will paste what’s in keyboard but now try to copy some formatted text (for example title of this section and some content) then go wherever you have the option to enter formatted text (for example start new email at Gmail) and press CTRL +V and then also press CTRL + SHIFT + V and see the difference! CTRL + SHIFT + V will paste the text without formatting so your emails, for example, don’t look amateur and ugly with maybe many many different fonts, text sizes, colors, background colors etc.

Select any text wherever you are where it’s possible to insert links (for example document, email, cms, etc) and Ctrl + K and popup window will open to enter the link URL and click ENTER and your text will be a link.