A typical programmers toolbox

A typical programmers toolbox(jeremymorgan.com)

21 points by celticbadboy 13 years ago | 17 comments

duaneb 13 years ago |

All of a sudden it occurs to me that two people can be called 'programmer' and do radically different things. Surely the typical programmer's toolbox is: an editor, a compiler/interpreter/magic lisp box/whatever, and possibly a debugger.

tomjen3 13 years ago | |

Don't forget a version control system.

yitchelle 13 years ago | |

similar to my toolbox, as an embedded engineer, the number of compilers that I have on my computer is about 8 installation for various different micros, along with this is the same number of debuggers.

phektus 13 years ago |

I think the title should be "A typical .NET/Microsoft programmers toolbox", as most of the tools listed are useable by MS devs. Case in point, I'm a web developer and I don't have/need most of these in my working laptop (an mba11).

guilloche 13 years ago |

I use none of them. Maybe it should be renamed as a windows programmer's toolbox.

avargas 13 years ago |

... really? All I use is Sublime, Terminal, and Google Chrome.

styts 13 years ago | |

Exactly. An editor, a shell and a browser is all you need.

I feel sorry for all MS devs who have to use so many platform-specific tools.

Stratoscope 13 years ago | | |

> An editor, a shell and a browser is all you need.

That's great that those are all you need, but they aren't all I need. I wouldn't be able to do the work I do with only those tools. And you wouldn't be able to do the work I do with only those tools either. :-)

Not comparing the value of my work or yours or our skills in selecting and using tools, just saying that the work we do is quite different, and requires different tools, even though we may both be called programmers.

> I feel sorry for all MS devs who have to use so many platform-specific tools.

Don't feel sorry. I'm not even an MS dev these days and I have a very lengthy list of tools I use routinely. (See elsewhere on this page.) And I like it that way: I'm happy that there are so many great tools available to me.

ralph 13 years ago | | |

A shell and all the tools that come with it; grep, sed, awk, diff, sort, uniq, comm, paste, join, cut, find, ... :-)

viseztrance 13 years ago | |

Don't forget about git or any other form of version control.

Stratoscope 13 years ago |

OK, here's my list, just the things I use frequently in my programming work and not all the other apps I have installed:

- 3Dconnexion 3DxSoftware (3D mouse driver)

- 7-Zip

- ActiveState Komodo IDE

- Araxis Merge

- AutoHotkey_L

- Camtasia Studio

- Corel PaintShop Pro X5

- Evernote

- Everything (fast disk search)

- Eye-One Match (display calibrator)

- Fiddler (debugging proxy server)

- FolderSizes 6

- Git and various git clients (none I'm crazy about)

- Google App Engine

- Google Chrome (and Canary)

- Google Earth

- GraphicsMagick

- HM NIS Edit

- iDisplay (use Android device as extra display)

- ImageMagick

- IntelliJ IDEA

- JetBrains ReSharper

- JKLmouse (my keyboard home row mouse control program)

- Manifold System (GIS)

- MarkdownPad

- Microsoft Office 2010

- Microsoft Visual Studio 2012

- Mozilla Firefox

- Nullsoft Install System

- PaymoPlus (automatic time tracking)

- pdfsam (PDF split and merge)

- PostGIS

- PostgreSQL

- PuTTY (just for Pageant to use with git)

- Python (several versions)

- Quantum GIS

- Ruby

- Safari

- SciTE4AutoHotkey

- StorageCraft ShadowProtect

- Sublime Text 2

- Take Command

- TortoiseGit

- TortoiseHg

- TypeScript

- UEStudio

- UltraMon

- VanDyke Software SecureCRT and SecureFX

- VistaSwitcher (better Alt+Tab menu)

- VMware Workstation

- WebDrive

- XML Marker 2.1 (great editor for JSON as well as XML)

- Zeus for Windows (Go IDE)

plant42 13 years ago |

I find there's very little that is typical about programmers other than in an abstract way. Compilers/editors/etc.

It largely depends on the domain in which they are working, and their own preferences to the tools the use.

Posibyte 13 years ago |

Seems more like "A typical Jeremy Morgan Toolbox". Most of that would be superfluous for being typical in the general sense of a text editor, a reader of some sort, and an execution environment.

phatbyte 13 years ago |

This should be renamed to "My typical programming toolbox"

Except for Skype (I'm moving to google talk very soon tho) I don't use any of these tools. And I highly doubt anyone on HN use any of it as well :P

binarydreams 13 years ago |

- Google.com (and stackoverflow.com that's mostly reached via google search queries)

- Sublime Text 2

- Gtalk+Google Hangout

- Gmail

- Decent Operating system with decent package management and shell (for example ubuntu + apt-get + bash)

- Git

- Google Chrome

- Cloud

- HackerNews

viseztrance 13 years ago |

I'm surprised no browser has made the list. Though odds are it's Internet Explorer.

6ren 13 years ago |

Maybe, a (typical programmer's) toolbox.