Indispensable Tools

I’m currently converting a few dozen Megascan packages over to the format for my project and it made me realize my overwhelming desire for a tool that specializes in categorizing texture data and doing texture packing where it makes sense. But that’s a future discussion. It made me realize that over the years I’ve created a list of tools that gets roughly divided into:

• This is handy!

• Neat but I don’t see myself using it.

• So simple, tied to a shortcut, will become used frequently.

• I will borderline refuse to work on a computer without this app.

This is far from a revolutionary blog post but, hey, I’m still sticking my feet back in the water. This list is largely for wider coverage of use cases; I’m working on a post for more workflow-specific software.

There’s no real rhyme or reason with what really sticks but when it comes to the Hall of Fame of computer tools we’ve got:

• Windows/Mac screen shot tool — The Mac one is more elegant but I argue the Windows one is more practical.

• Numi — A handy notepad-like calculator that lets you write down and reuse equations (or refer to them later). I just discovered this is a Windows app now too.

• VS Code — One of the greatest IDEs ever created; it’s accessible, expandable, obscenely well-supported, pretty lean (as those types of apps go), and serves a wide variety of utilities.

• Windows PowerToys — It feels unfair to bundle every program in this archive seperately since there are so many good ones, but some of the stand-outs:

  • FancyZones — Setup discrete regions on your desktop, when shift-dragging any window into one of these spaces it will take on its transform.

  • PowerRenamer — One of those programs every OS should make more accessible; this is a GUI-based tool that operates on seleceted files in Windows explorer and uses pattern matching or regex to rename files.

  • Color Picker — Press a shortcut, key an eyedropper to pick a color on the screen and adjust the resulting outcome in a gradient or just manipulate it then-and-there.

  • File Locksmith — Program to analyze references/holds on various files so that Windows can interact with them.

• Windows Terminal (iTerm 2 on Mac) — Just sublime terminal containers that support the variety actual types of terminals we all luse on a given day. The bonus points here go to Windows Terminal for hitting stability so quickly and because I really like how mine has integrated with oh-my-posh.

• Microsoft Edge — I swear, it’s good now everyone.

• OBS — Free, easy to use, variety of output formats supported, universal hotkey support; it’s perfect for recording video on-demand.

Examples