Some free programs I use

Here are some of the cool freeware I use regularly. I work both on Windows NT and on Solaris.

  • Vim: Uh! I maintain a complete page on it! Needless to say, my most favourite program, available on all platforms. Here is the official website of vim, from where you can download the latest version.

  • teraterm: Tera Term is the nicest free telnet client I know of. It allows the user to Serial port connection, TCP/IP (telnet) connections. VT100 emulation, and selected VT200/300 emulation. Download it from here

  • mutt(unix only): A beautiful and powerful text based mail client for Unix operating systems. Find out more about it from the official webpage of mutt.

  • WordWeb thesaurus and dictionary : An excellent free dictionary for windows. I have a shortcut key ctrl-alt-d pointed to this program and whenever I find a difficult word, I just call my dictionary in a flash. Get it free here.

  • cygnus tools(for windows NT) : An excellent collection of all the important UNIX utilities for Windows NT. Download the file setup.exe from Cygwin and then run it in a temporary directory. The setup program will automatically download the required files from the mirror you chose (Damn! Why can't they give ONE setup file like they used to do previously?).

  • tcsh : A very nice shell for Windows. I use this and not the bash that comes with the cygnus tools. It does a better job with the drives and also has the "clear" command built into it (unlike cygnus bash). Download it here. I have just one small problem with it. It doesn't executed shell scripts unless the top line contains #!/bin/tcsh. Moreover if you are in a different drive, the top line needs to be something like #!c:/bin/tcsh (which is probably quite fair).

  • ncftp: A lovely, free, text based ftp client - available both on windows and unix. It has a lot more features than the standard ftp program. Get it from NcFTP

  • ftpexplorer: A GUI based ftp client for Windows. The interface is very similar to the windows explorer. Get it from The FTP explorer homepage

  • tidy: A cool command line tool which helps me fix my mistakes when editing HTML files. If you don't use any WYSIWYG editor for HTML, this is an extremely handy tool. It can fix most bugs itself (though I always prefer fixing them myself). It is available on all platforms. To download or to find more info, visit the official webpage of tidy.
    Got questions on any of the above programs? Let me know! Send me an email at aziz at freeshell dot org.

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