An awesome & curated list of best applications and tools for Windows.
This Awesome Repository is highly inspired from ichait's Awesome osx. Special thanks to egeerardyn.
Items marked with
are open-source software. Items marked with
are free.
Applications
Audio
- AIMP - 32 bit audio processing and multi-format playback.
- Audacity - Free, open source, cross-platform software for recording and editing sounds.
- Qtractor - An Audio/MIDI multi-track sequencer.
- Reaper - Lightweight application with deep feature set and $60 for individual, non-profit, or small business use.
- Winamp - Music player capable of playing MP3s, MP2s, WAVs, VOCs and MIDI files.
- Mixxx - Free DJ software that gives you everything you need to perform live mixes, veritable alternative to Traktor.
- Musicbee - Like iTunes but better than iTunes.
- VLC - Free media player, works pretty well.
- Foobar2000 - Free audio player for Windows, supports a wide range of audio formats and has a lot of cool features.
- Exact Audio Copy - Transfer files from your CDs to your PC in almost every format.Comes with some pretty niffty features too.
- Kodi - Free and Open Source home theatre software.
Chat Clients
- Waow - Awesome WhatsApp Web Client to deliver you the best WhatsApp experience.
- LimeChat - Instant messaging application.
- Messenger for Desktop - An app for Facebook messenger.
- mIRC - An Internet Relay Chat (IRC) client.
- Telegram - A messaging app with a focus on speed and security, it’s super fast, simple and free.
Compression
- 7-Zip - Open source Windows utility for manipulating archives. Formats 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2 and TAR are supported fully, other formats can be unpacked.
- PeaZip - Archiver and file compressor. Extract 7Z CAB ISO RAR TAR ZIP archive files.
- Riot - Compress images either by file size or by many other image attributes.
- WinRAR - A powerful archive manager. It can backup your data and reduce the size of email attachments, decompress RAR, ZIP and other files.
Data Recovery
- Data Rescue - Comprehensive and professional Hard drive recovery software that can recover your photos, videos, documents.
- Ontrach EasyRecovery - Has filtering tools to help sort the large amount of data the software can recover.
- Stellar Phoenix Windows Data Recovery - Remote recovery option to recover data from another computer over a network.
- Recuva - Recover your deleted files quickly and easily.
- TestDisk - Powerful free data recovery software primarily designed to help recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again.
Developer Tools
- RazorSQL - A GUI for managing SQLite databases which requires major work.
- GitHub Desktop - A GUI for using GitHub.
- pngquant - Apply lossy compression on PNG files with or without transparency for more efficient files.
- I'm Only Resting -A feature-rich WinForms-based HTTP client
- Insomnia - A modern REST client with an beautiful interface.
- PostgreSQL Database - A comprehensive list of tools.
- Sql Wave - A MySQL database manager.
- Pixie - A simple color picker for developers.
- SourceTree - A free Git & Mercurial client.
- Zsh - A powerful command line shell.
- Redis Desktop Manager Cross-platform open source Redis DB management tool.
- Keylord Cross-platform GUI client for Redis, LevelDB and Memcached key-value databases.
- Visual Studio - Ultimate Microsoft Developer Tool.
- Fiddler - Web debugging proxy.
- FileZilla - FTP, FTPS and SFTP client.
- HeidiSQL - Powerful and easy client for MySQL, MariaDB, Microsoft SQL Server and PostgreSQL.
- Process Hacker - Excellent full blown task manager.
- Wamp - Web development environment.
Documents
- LibreOffice - Open source office suite.
- Microsoft Office - Microsoft's own productivity suite.
- OpenOffice - Software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more.
- NitroPDF - The best PDF Reader you'll ever get.
- Sumatra PDF - PDF, ePub, MOBI, CHM, XPS, DjVu, CBZ, CBR reader.
E-Book Utilities
- Bookviser - Awesome application for Windows 8 devices to read eBooks in a simple way.
- Calibre - Powerful software for e-book management and conversion.
- kobo - Incredibly ugly but powerful software for ebook management and conversion.
- MailBird - IMAP and POP3 email client, featuring customization, complete touch support and multiple language support.
- Thunderbird - Email client with minimalistic design.
Games
- Warsow - Free & fast-paced FPS game for Windows.
- Awesome Games - List of games hosted on Github.
- Unity - Free game engine. Easy to pick up and use with a number of tutorials.
- Unreal Engine - Another free game engine. Lots of documentation and easier to pick up, but you pay 5% royalties to Unreal when you make money from UE-based games.
- Steam - Largest online video game retailer. Desktop app allows you to organise your library of games and play them at any time. But you already knew that.
- Origin - Like Steam, but for EA.
Graphics
- Blender - Fully-featured extensible cross-platform 3D content suite.
- Gimp - Open source image editor.
- Paint.net - how can you live without paint.net?
- Inkscape - Free vector-based graphic design software.
- Krita - Free drawing software with a bunch of cool features.
Text Editors
- Atom - A hackable text editor for the 21st Century.
- Brackets - A modern, open source text editor that understands web design.
- Eclipse - A powerful IDE.
- GVim - (G)Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing.
- Light Table - A customizable editor with instant feedback and showing data values flow through your code.
- Notepad++ - A source code editor which supports several programming languages.
- Sublime Text 3 - The sophisticated text editor.
- Visual Studio Code - Build and debug modern web and cloud applications.
Online Storage
- Dropbox -Simple, elegant and versatile (PC, Macs, Android...) cloud storage solution.
- Google Drive - Cloud storage solution deeply integrated in the Google ecosystem.
- OneDrive - Best cloud storage solution for Windows users.
- Mozy
- Box - Ability to sync more than 100,000 files and supporting both special characters in file names and file paths longer than 256 characters.
Productivity
- Chocolatey - A package manager for Windows.
- Ditto - Clipboard manager.
- Everything - The fastest file/folder search tool by name.
- f.lux - Automatically adjust your computer screen to match lighting.
- Launchy - The Open Source Keystroke Launcher.
- Listary - Keep files at your fingertips. An unique search utility.
- Ninite - The easiest, fastest way to update or install software.
- Scoop - A command-line installer for Windows.
- Wox - An effective launcher for windows.
Terminal
- Babun - Alternative Windows shell based on Cygwin.
- Cmder - Console emulator package.
- ConEmu - Customizable terminal with tabs, splits, quake-style and more.
- ConsoleZ - Modified version of Console 2 for a better experience and a better visual rendering.
- MobaXterm - Xserver and tabbed SSH client.
- MTPuTTY - Multi-Tabbed PuTTY.
- Putty - SSH and telnet client.
- Kitty - advanced Putty (SSH and telnet client).
Utilities
- A-Z of Windows Terminal Commands
- Carnac - The easiest way to record keystrokes during any screen recording.
- Ccleaner - System cleaning utility which is more easy to understand and use for beginners.
- Far - File and Archive manager. Clone of the Norton Commander.
- Fraps- Video game capture screen recorder that can be used with all games using DirectX or OpenGL technology.
- FreeFileSync - An easy backup solution for files and folders, It supports mirroring/two way sync/update between source and destination.
- Glary Utilities - Provides many more advanced features which are non existent in ccleaner.
- HTTrack- Offline browser utility, allowing you to download a website from the Internet to a local directory.
- LICEcap - Animated screen captures and save them directly to .GIF
- rimraf - A deep deletion module for node. Help to delete files and folders with very long paths
- SDelete - A command line utility that can securely delete a file, or clean the slack space.
- Speccy -Detailed statistics on every piece of hardware in your computer.
- ShareX- Lets you take screenshots or screencasts of any selected area with a single key.
- Sysinternals Suite - Tool suite by Mark Russinovich that provides access to Windows internals for troubleshooting: processes, physical ports, disk activity etc.
- Waltr - Transfer any movie or music file to your iPhone w/o iTunes.
- WinDirStat - It is a disk usage statistics viewer and cleanup too.
- Windows 10 Login Screen Changer - Changes the Windows 10 Login Screen Background.
Video
- K-Lite Codecs - Collection of DirectShow filters, VFW/ACM codecs, and tools.
- mpv - Media player.
- HandBrake - High performance video encoding and conversion tools with a nice GUI.
- VLC - Multimedia player and framework that plays DVDs, Audio CDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols.
Setup
Windows 10 Setup
- http://www.theverge.com/2015/7/31/9077997/microsoft-windows-10-clean-install-how-to-guide
- http://www.howtogeek.com/224342/how-to-clean-install-windows-10/
Windows 8.1 Setup
Security
- AdwCleaner - Free removal tool for adware, PUP/LPI, Toolbars and Hijacker.
- Bitdefender - Best outright protection against malware.
- CCleaner - For PC Optmization and cleaning computer.
- SpyBot - Search and destroy malware, spyware and viruses.
- UnChecky - automatically unchecks unrelated offers from installers.
- Malwarebytes - protects from dangerous threats that antivirus doesn't.
- Tor Project - Enable anonymous communication.
- Windows 10 Paranoid's Guide
- Disable Data Logging - Make Windows 10 more private and safe.
- Viscosity - Fully-featured OpenVPN client, ready for enterprise deployment.
Miscellaneous
Discussion Forums
Windows
IRC channels
Contribute
Contributions are most welcome, please adhere to the contribution guidelines.
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
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