💻 My favorite Windows apps
Tags: windows
Published: 2021-07-02 19:11:15

---
title: 💻 My favorite Windows apps
published: true
date: 2021-07-02 16:16:00 UTC
tags: 
- windows
canonical_url: https://www.gozgeek.com/posts/2021/my-favorite-windows-apps/
cover_image: https://cdn.collinsoft.com/file/cdn-collinsoft/gozgeek.com/img/2021/surface/surface-1024x.jpg
---

This past week I bought a new laptop, a Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon Nano (say that five times fast). It’s been awhile since I have set up a new machine, so I started to document setting this one up. I’m surprised how quickly I had it set up, no wonder I haven’t automated it.

In no particular order, here are the apps I use regularly.

## Browsers

Windows comes with Edge installed, but I also install [Google Chrome](https://google.com/chrome), [Brave](https://brave.com), and [Firefox](https://mozilla.org). Each browser has synced turned on, so I don’t have to install my favorite extensions. I jump between browsers pretty regularly, and barely have a favorite for any length of time.

## Apps

For graphics I use Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo. They’re pretty awesome and very affordable.

I use [Telegram Messenger](https://telegram.org/) for more than just messaging. It is how I transfer files between my devices and phone, along with backups.

These are the only three applications I use outside of games and browsers.

On my desktop I use Davinci Resolv for video editing. I haven’t installed it yet on my laptop because I don’t know if I will be doing much video editing on the go, but I probably will.

## Windows Subsystem for Linux

I need my command line, so up comes WSL along with Ubuntu and Alpine. Ubuntu is used as my shell on the computer, while I use Alpine to connect over ssh/mosh to my virtual private servers. That task could be done under Ubuntu, but Alpine is really lightweight and I want experience with other distributions.

Along with WSL I install the [Windows Terminal](https://github.com/microsoft/terminal). It has come a long way in a short time. To set it up I copy the settings.json file from a machine where Windows Terminal is already set up how I like it.

Since I like playing around with Linux at the command line, I already have a [bootstrap script and keep my dotfiles in a Git repo](https://github.com/mrrcollins/dotfiles) making it really easy to set up any Linux machine just as I like it.

I’m currently playing around with adding the [Nix package manager](https://nixos.org/). It offers more up to date packages and I really like how it works.

## Utilities

For screenshots I use [Greenshot](https://getgreenshot.org/). I also like a good clipboard manager, so the [Ditto clipboard manager](https://ditto-cp.sourceforge.io/) is installed. I want to like [ShareX](https://getsharex.com/) for screenshots, but I haven’t had a chance to get comfortable with it.

I use [Microsoft PowerToys](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/) for two things. **Powertoys Run** is how I launch applications under Windows. **Fancy Zones** offers the ability to customize the snapping of Windows. **PowerRename** is very powerful, so if you need to rename a bunch of files, check it out.

To store/backup my files, I use Google Drive Backup and Sync. Twenty bucks a year for 100GB is hard to beat. In my homelab I have FreeNAS set up as a file server, but I haven’t set up remote access to it yet. When I’m at home I connect to it though.

Compressed files are handled by [7-Zip](https://www.7-zip.org/). I really like being able to right click on a compressed file and expand it to a folder named after the file.

Finally, the utility I can’t live without, [espanso](https://espanso.org/), a cross platform text expander. I don’t know why it isn’t talked about more, but it is great!

## Windows settings

The defaults work pretty well. Since I use virtual desktops, I change the default behavior for alt-tab to show the windows on all of the desktops, not just the desktop I am on. I also uncheck “When I snap a window, show what I can snap next to it”.

## Miscellaneous

My programming font of choice to install is [JetBrains Mono](https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/mono/).

[RetroArch](https://www.retroarch.com/), [Steam](https://store.steampowered.com/), [Epic](https://www.epicgames.com/store/en-US/), and [GOG](https://www.gog.com/) are installed for games. I also use [Parsec](https://parsec.app/) to connect to my desktop when I need more horsepower.

All in all, my needs are pretty simple. A browser and command line gets me 80% of the way there. What Windows apps did I miss that you can’t live without?