It’s always exciting to come across some clever utility that resolves a long-standing (or sometimes a more recent) problem. Sometimes such utility simply makes life easier by simplifying or speeding up a process. Here are few such good utilities. Some of these programs have been around for years, and in some cases I used their inferior competition for long while before stumbling across the improvement. Others have been the staple of my toolbox already for some time.
ExtractNow (freeware) replaced a program called “Unziplify” I had used for years but that became eventually abandonware. Quite frequently an archive has been chopped into million segments and each segment zipped separately. ExtractNow makes it super easy to unzip those archives in a jiffy.
AutoHotkey (freeware) is an excellent keyboard hotkey mapping utility. It comes with a very versatile and easy to configure script language that allows mapping over Windows system hotkeys. This means that you can, for example, put your favorite file-search utility in place of Windows’ own search at Win+F. AutoHotkey also expands abbreviations so it might eventually replace another utility, ShortKeys, that I use frequently.
Roxip XStart ($30 shareware) is a very handy application launch utility. I like keyboard shortcuts, and XStart is an app launch utility that makes it easy to access frequently launched applications. Give it a try!
True Launch Bar ($19 shareware) takes the place of the Windows QuickLaunch, and adds pop-up menus, auto-sorting, differently-sized icons, and more. Finally it’s possible to organize the QuickLaunch in a meaninful way. With True Launch Bar and XStart I rarely access Start > Programs anymore.
Directory Opus is not exactly cheap Explorer replacement at AU$85.00 (about US$80), but it’s worth every cent! Directory Opus takes care of most every file operation you can think of. However, for find and replace operations I often use Advanced Find and Replace (for file content find+replace, also multi-line), and Effective File Search (better file name search which I’ve also mapped to Win+F using AutoHotkey). For more complex regex-based file searches Directory Opus’ file search or PowerGREP give more flexibility. To design and test the complex regular expressions for searches, nothing beats RegexBuddy. Finally, a handy shell extension HashTab adds configurable file hashes tab to file properties and also provides Hash Comparison making it easy to check whether file A is exactly the same as file B.