I keep thinking about making a post about the various bits and pieces I use on my PC(s) since it’s interesting to see how things have moved on, although I guess since I haven’t done this for a while it’ll be hard to see, but let’s go:

First up, the workhorses –

Thunderbird – my default email program, so far not yet to be surpassed because I can’t any other program to cope properly with multiple profiles on a single account (which rules out outlook), use google calendar, and CardDav. Others I’ve tried:

  • Mailbird – talked to home too much…
  • Outlook – failed on the aliases issue
  • eM Client – looked good, but the conversation view drove me nuts, and couldn’t handle multiple signatures, did work with multiple aliases.

I do have to say however that to make Thunderbird reasonable, I have to have the following plugins: Provider for Google data, Lightening (inbuilt now), CardBook, Enigmail, and most importantly Monterail Dark to update the UI. Ideally they’d fix the two line subject issue…

Firefox – although I have Edge around as well, I’m still big on firefox – mainly due to plugins, and now with the sync feature, it’s great for working across multiple machines. I’m not a Chrome fan.

Office – I caved and got Microsoft 365. It works. The “Free” versions just aren’t the real thing, and the web versions aren’t great when you’re at the other end of a overloaded Wifi connection.

OneNote – I suppose it’s part of office, but there is a “free” version, and since Evernote changed their terms, it’s a no-brainer. It works, it has search, and it allows a lot of different styles of markup and capture, and isn’t reliant on an external cloud unless you chose that.

Microsoft Todo – I was (am?) a huge Wunderlist fan, and since the guys moved to Microsoft, I ended up moving to the replacement… since Wunderlist itself is about to be shuttered as a product (if not already).

KeePass – Password keeper, enough said. Also has “HaveIBeenPwned” checker.

Diagrams.net/Draw.io – I’ve written about that in a past post.

Other stuff

  • PuTTy
  • WinSCP
  • Visual Code
  • Scribus 1.5 (Illustrator/Photoshop replacement)
  • Paint.NET

One thing I have dropped is the Emacs file editor – life is too short. I’m still making up my mind whether to go big on Visual Code or Sublime Text. Still missing a good XML editor.