= A Tools Overview

I love tools that make my life easier. There are many open source software tools for windows that you can use to help you. There are a few that are free but not open source. And there are some that are commercial but I would be reluctant to give up. I'll try to concentrate on the open source tools, but try not to be upset if there are other tools described here.

== Image tools

[[gimp|Gimp]]

[[oos_draw|Open Office Draw]]

== Remote access tools

I am going to presume you have website that is hosted on a remote server. How do you access the files on that server? One way to access your web files is to log onto your hosting account and use your hosting company's control panel. You probably have a file manager and a FTP client in your control panel.

However, if you need to upload (or download) a large number of files, it is easier and faster to use your own remote tools. Almost all hosting accounts allow you to access your files with a FTP client. Secure FTP (SFTP) is an encrytped FTP session. The advantage isn't just security. Many hosting companies throttle FTP connection speeds and limit connection times for non-secure, standard FTP access. Using SFTP you will be able stay connected longer and transfer files at a higher speed.

You can only use SFTP if your account has been setup for SSH. SSH is only available on Linux (and other *nix) accounts. SSH is doing the encryption for the SFTP. SSH also allows you to log onto a command line session on your server. I've read posts from people who believe that console sessions (command line shell) are only available if you have a dedicated server. This is not true. Many companies are now providing this option for shared hosting accounts. You will have to verify your identy in order to have your account setup for SSH. Not all companies offer SSH.

Here are some Microsoft Windows clients for FTP, SFTP and SSH.

=== FTP & SFTP

There are two free and open sourced FTP clients that I use on my computers. The more popular one seems to be [[http://filezilla-project.org/|FileZilla]]. It has many nice features. However, my favorite client is **[[winscp|WinSCP]]**. Both will do SFTP as well as FTP.

=== SSH

[[putty|PuTTy]]

== Text editing tools

Text editors are often referred to as **Notepad** replacements. **Notepad** is the plain text editor that ships with Windows. Many are also called Programmers Editors because they automatically highlight keywords of various programming languages and can be set to automatically indent lines for pretty text. Most have many other features which make them much more powerful than Notepad. Yet they can all edit plain text like Notepad. And probably can edit larger files than Notepad.

I have a number of Text Editors on my computers, both free and commercial. But the two I would recommend as general purpose editors for non-programmers are **jEdit** and **Notepad++**. **jEdit** is written in Java and therefore is a cross platform editor. The other feature I love about Jedit is it has a great regular expression search feature. Regular expressions can look scary but are very powerful. The downside of **jEdit** is that, because of the Java, cross platform design, it doesn't look like a Windows program.

**Notepad++** is my favorite Text editor and I use it every day. It is based on an editor for the "Scintilla" project. You can find a number of other editors based on the same open source code. But **Notepadd++** is one of the more popular and is the one I use. It can do regular expressions (but not as well as jEdit). It has many add-in features and is easily customized.

[[jedit|jEdit]]

[[notepadpp|Notepad++]]

== Utilities

[[grep|File search tool]]

[[keypass|Password Manager]]

[[zip|Zip Archive Manager]]

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