Software Endorsements

[Officer Barbrady]

I haven't seen these recommended yet so here's some mobile video editing apps I've been using.

For cutting and clipping videos I've been using the app VLLO for simple video editing on my phone. It's made by a South Korean company but it is in English and available for Android/iOS with decent reviews from others too.

Nice looking UI, easy touchscreen editing (with keyframes, captioning, splicing options, etc), it has a handy project library feature and they don't randomly plaster watermarks on your videos like I've found other editors do. There's a neat resolution/FPS tweaker too before exporting a project that let's you decide what you'd prefer the end file size to be.

It is free to use but they lock a number of features and cosmetic options behind a premium version you can buy, but the free version works fine without those things. On the free version there's also a 30 second ad that plays before it processes the exported file too thats fairly tolerable, but it's easy to find an unlocked premium version if you look hard enough.

---

On top of that, I've been using the Panda Video Compressor app for compressing the exported files from VLLO and other mp4 compression needs. It's basically Handbrake for Android but in a nice GUI format. There's also different levels of compression option presets depending on what video quality you want to sacrifice or there's a simple option to compress without losing any video quality too. It's pretty quick and it also gives a nice comparison afterwards on the before and after quality before you save or replace the original file through the app.

The ads aren't too intrusive either and only seemed to play once per compression. I couldn't find an unlocked version and just bit the bullet and got their yearly subscription for like $8 to remove the ads and it allows more videos to be compressed in one go, but the free version works absolutely fine and does the same thing minus the restriction on the number of videos you can compress at once (I believe for the free version it's three videos maximum per go).

I did notice on an old device that it would drain a percentage of the battery during compression depending on the original file size, but I've not dealt with that issue on my current device. It could just be an issue with older devices but I thought I'd point that out anyway.

 

[rando[Numbers]]

How to make Windows better than Linux (it already is):

• winget: Native windows package manager. Magically already knows everything you have installed (unlike Chocolatey, which uses it’s own directories and tracking) and gives you more control.
  • In PowerShell type: winget list to see everything currently installed. This will give you a more detailed list than the install/uninstall UI and has things like C++ Redistributables, App Runtimes, CoPilot garbage, etc. You’ll even see things like Steam games pop up in this list with their app id’s. (The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition ARP\Machine\X64\Steam App 489830)
  • winget uninstall even works for Microsoft Edge and CoPilot, which can’t be uninstalled from the UI. I don’t really recommend getting crazy with this. It’s better to disable these things in settings than to just uninstall them. Steam, for example, throws errors if you nuke Xbox Game Bar. Many apps assume you’re not removing these things. But you’re allowed to break your own system.
  • winget search "app name" I’m very surprised by what you can find by search. It’s not just what’s in Microsoft store, but also what’s in the community repository + you can add sources. It’s very rare I find something that doesn’t show up in search. These search results are the primary reason I think this is better than Linux package managers.
  • winget install Straightforward, but worth mentioning this does background installs as a default. No clicking next, most of the time you there's not even a UI popup. Just download and install.
  • winget upgrade --unknown --all --accept-package-agreements --accept-source-agreements --silent My magic "update everything" command I use a lot.
• PowerToys (winget install Microsoft.PowerToys): Microsoft built utilities for "power users". I use the environment variables UI all the time, advanced paste, the awake feature, file locksmith, explorer add-ons... there are dozens of awesome things in here.
• Greenshot (winget install Greenshot.Greenshot): Awesome screenshot utility. Way better than anything I’ve used on Mac or Linux. The alternatives are always... alternatives. Low-quality copycats. This is the OG.
• Everything Search (winget install voidtools.Everything): Indexes every file on your system for instant/live search. If you’re installing or deleting a lot, watch the file count in the bottom left change in realtime. I use this constantly to find logs, to clean up old data, to find executables, finding files when modding games, etc. Because it’s instant, works with regex, etc., it’s way better than find/dir.
• Everything CLI (winget install voidtools.Everything.Cli): ooohh yeah... now we’re talking. find can eat my ass
• Everything PowerToys (winget install lin-ycv.EverythingPowerToys): Integrate that search into Powertoys Run, the launch bar.
• Everything Toolbar (winget install stnkl.EverythingToolbar): Instant system wide search from the taskbar/shortcuts. Because why not?
• WinDirStat (winget install WinDirStat.WinDirStat): Classic for visualizing disk usage. When my hard drive gets too full, this is the first thing I reach for to find what I can remove.
• Warp (winget install Warp.Warp): Incredible terminal. They’ve been shoving AI into it, it’s free and kind of nice sometimes. But generally speaking, it just looks great and works better than Windows Terminal.
• HTTPie (winget install HTTPie.HTTPie): Remember when Postman was a simple test utility and not some kind of weird enterprise suite nobody wants? HTTPie!
• Jailer Database Tools: Super old school app for database subsetting. I’ve used this at work before when dealing with complex databases where relationships could be 6-7 tables deep and it’s challenging to find good join paths. There's a little tool in this that lets you give it Table A and Table B, and its shows you multiple paths to it via joins. Saved me so much time and headache.

 

[Niggergante]

WinDirStat

Incredibly slow compared to Wiztree. Also free and near instantaneous in my experience. Very good list otherwise friend.

 

[rando[Numbers]]

Incredibly slow compared to Wiztree. Also free and near instantaneous in my experience. Very good list otherwise friend.

Sweet will look at it. I haven't felt the need to look for a WinDirStat alternative in 20 years. But if a better one exists that's cool.

 

[Delta Integrale]

Greenshot (winget install Greenshot.Greenshot): Awesome screenshot utility. Way better than anything I’ve used on Mac or Linux. The alternatives are always... alternatives. Low-quality copycats. This is the OG.

You should try out ShareX.

 

[rando[Numbers]]

You should try out ShareX.

Looks bloated tbh, same features, but multiple in your face ways to do the same thing. Very modern.

 

[They were once men]

winget: Native windows package manager. Magically already knows everything you have installed (unlike Chocolatey, which uses it’s own directories and tracking) and gives you more control.

UniGetUI Is a GUI for managing winget applications and I think you can also use it with other package managers like choc. It might've already been posted on here.

 

[long waters]

Hydrus is a desktop booru-styled multimedia manager, and it's as robust as you'd expect. Tags and searches, imports image URLs from the clipboard, has a built-in duplicate filter, etc, and there's a(n extremely large) community run tag database.

Yes, it's almost entirely made for nicking shit from porn sites, but I've used it to collect a surprisingly accurately tagged collection of chan shit. It does take some setting up and some work to tag your own shit if you'd rather not download almost 40gb worth of mappings, but I've been using it for almost four years and it hasn't let me down once. Just remember to cycle your imports tab after every 10,000 or so images, it tends to bog down once it hits five digits.


Would anyone happen to have a file duplicate searcher they'd recommend? I remember CCleaner had one, but apparently it got backdoored out the ass, and I'd rather not keep it.

I would like to second this endorsement for Hydrus Network. I have been using it for a couple of years myself to manage memes I have saved and it has been working out great for me.

When you have hoarded over 20k meme images, it's a lot more convenient to have tags than just folders/file names. Like say you have a Pepe of Chris Chan, would you put that in your Pepe folder or your Chris Chan folder? With tags you can just add both as tags and find it when you search for either Pepe memes or Chris memes.

Czkawka for general purpose is basically a swiss knife, although I still like using AntiDupl.NET for just images, has a far comfier interface.

I would second this too. Have used Czkawka a bit and it seemed neat for finding duplicate images/vids.

 

[Niggergante]

Hydrus Network

I have honestly been looking for something like this for a long time but every time I Google "windows tagging software" it's trying to utilize the base tagging which sucks ass

 

[rando[Numbers]]

UniGetUI Is a GUI for managing winget applications and I think you can also use it with other package managers like choc. It might've already been posted on here.

I think I tried this at one point, but I have "update" and "goodnight" PowerShell scripts that do more than update software. Global pnpm, MikTek packages, Get-WindowsUpdate -MicrosoftUpdate -AcceptAll -Install, with the PSWindowsUpdate module. Not need for a UI.

 

[Slav Power]

How to make Windows better than Linux (it already is):

Instead of PowerToys Run, or PowerToys' Command Palette which has superseded Run, I highly recommend Flow Launcher. It's the most robust keyboard launcher for Windows around.
As for ShareX, it's not that it's "bloated", for a .NET it eats an acceptable amount of resources for what it does, and it being a small Swiss Army Knife is very nice. A lot of quality of life features like being able to upload files directly to your file host of choice, tools like the color picker, screen ruler or QR code reader, and it's screenshot functionality is much more robust than that of Greenshot.
When it comes to terminal emulators I just use Microsoft's Windows Terminal. Before that I used ConEmu, but it's too buggy and has seen zero updates for years now. wt just werks. Comes preinstalled with Win11 as well. And every terminal emulator will be slower than running conhost directly. There's also Alacritty and Hyper but those are more suited for Linux TWM's with how basic they are.

By the way, it's funny you say ShareX is bloated when your terminal emulator of choice is fucking Warp, which is an insanely bloated, resource devouring closed source piece of shit that runs third party telemetry and has a massive focus on AI techbro BS which is the last thing anyone has ever wanted in a terminal emulator. Unless of course you are the target audience for Warp, which are double digit IQ dalits that are incapable of doing the most basic tasks in a terminal without an LLM doing it for them.

I would like to second this endorsement for Hydrus Network

I tried it once and didn't like it since I really want to avoid software that has to create an entire copy of your media library to be able to tag and manage it. It's also why I have doubts about ever self-hosting Immich since it's a similar idea. However I have bookmarked this after someone mentioned it on /g/. It's called Panoptikon and it looks promising though I haven't tried to set it up yet. It's meant to leverage all sorts of modern autotagging techniques to create an index database without ever touching the data you're indexing, which is exactly something that I'm looking for.

I have a disdain for any sort of software that needs to move your data into it's own closed black box to do anything. The data is there, look at it and index it, there's no point in you holding it all hostage just so that you can do your job.

Have used Czkawka a bit and it seemed neat for finding duplicate images/vids.

I can also recommend it, despite being all kinds of wonk it succeeds in it's purpose. I also like how the author not only named it in a way that'll give foreigners an aneurysm trying to pronounce it, he even left a little easter egg for his fellow countrymen to have a chuckle out of in the About menu.

"Maybe the program's interface isn't ergonomic, but at least the code is unreadable."
Trust me, there is a very good reason this quote is only in the Polish locale.

 

[rando[Numbers]]

I'm too retarded to know why I can't hit reply on mobile sometimes.

But the reason I say ShareX looks bloated is because it does too much and has a fat ass UI that likes to tell you it does too much.

All I need is a shortcut to capture region that opens a small context menu. Not a gay swiss army knife.

Couldn't care less about resources when I only need to run like 3 things at a time.

 

[DavidS877]

I'm too retarded to know why I can't hit reply on mobile sometimes.

Because on long posts reply is turned off to keep people from replying to the whole thing. Highlight a section and choose the quote or reply button.

I read all these software endorsements and just think. Yea, I'll stick to the command line and the simplest possible tools. And a web browser to use the rest of my 64GB of RAM.

 

[rando[Numbers]]

View attachment 7831300
Because on long posts reply is turned off to keep people from replying to the whole thing. Highlight a section and choose the quote or reply button.

I read all these software endorsements and just think. Yea, I'll stick to the command line and the simplest possible tools. And a web browser to use the rest of my 64GB of RAM.

Ohh thanks dude.

For the record, the philosophy behind Chrome is that it views unused RAM as wasted RAM. It takes all unused memory it can from the OS for caching under the understanding that the OS will take it back if needed.

People look at its usage in task manager and complain, but never talk about how it slows down everything else. Because it doesn't.

Weird strat, but if the complaint is the # of GB it uses... I don't see that as a complaint.

 

[long waters]

I use Windows 10 and I have this program, FileConverter, installed that embeds into the right-click properties menu that can convert images to different formats.
You can alter compression and quality settings and the like.

Just tried it out and I like it so far. Cheers!

 

[b0glim]

MightyGrep plaintext search tool, good for searching code and scripts

File Pilot file explorer formerly known as disk voyager, currently in beta, much better than the one provided by windows

 

[long waters]

MightyGrep plaintext search tool, good for searching code and scripts

How is it different from just using Notepad++ to search for text in files?

Edit: At a quick glance on the itchio page, other than perhaps the incremental mode, it seems to me that it offers about the same features.

 

[rando[Numbers]]

How is it different from just using Notepad++ to search for text in files?

Edit: At a quick glance on the itchio page, other than perhaps the incremental mode, it seems to me that it offers about the same features.

lol, who pays for apps on Windows? Only a Mac user...

 

[long waters]

lol, who pays for apps on Windows? Only a Mac user...

What's wrong with paying for software?

Speaking of paid software, I have been using Directory Opus for almost a year now. Windows explorer has been shit for a very long while and I had been previously using Total Commander to access stuff I have on a hard drive, because apparently Windows 10 is just too slow and retarded when accessing something that isn't an SSD and it was pissing me off. However, Directory Opus is a lot nicer / more user friendly, and I love it as a full explorer replacement.

Also on the topic of file utilities, I have been using Free File Sync for a few years too, mostly to synchronize folders with my NAS. So far it has not let me down. I did donate to them after a couple of years of using their software because I like it.

EDIT: On the topic of explorer alternatives, other than good ol Total Commander, I am also aware of XYplorer and Explorer++ . The latter is free, but XYplorer is paid, although cheaper than Directory Opus. I tried it too for a short while but I just liked DO better so I ended up getting that myself.

 

[Slav Power]

Windows explorer has been shit for a very long while and I had been previously using Total Commander to access stuff I have on a hard drive, because apparently Windows 10 is just too slow and retarded when accessing something that isn't an SSD and it was pissing me off. However, Directory Opus is a lot nicer / more user friendly, and I love it as a full explorer replacement.

As robust Directory Opus is I still prefer Total Commander, mainly because a) I've been using it for years so I know it very well and b) I only had to pay for it once and I get a perpetual license that works retroactively, instead of the nickel and diming that DO does. If I'm going to pay for software, I'm expecting for it to be a one-time purchase for a perpetual license. Total Commander is that. The apps like Tasker and Poweramp are that. Software on Steam like Lossless Scaling or Wallpaper Engine is that.

Meanwhile Directory Opus expects me to buy into a long term subscription just so that I get the privilege of installing it on more than one machine. Fuck that. Wouldn't be surprised if it also uses very intrusive DRM to ensure you can't abuse an infinite trial. Unlike Total Commander which will nag you every time you open it but it will still let you use it indefinitely, and you'll still pay for it out of respect to the creator.

By the way, I've attached some registry tweaks that force the OS to redirect every opening task to Total Commander. As per the command line documentation:
/O - opens the path in an already running instance instead of starting a new one every time
/T - opens the path in a new tab as to not disrupt whatever you're doing at any given moment
/A - ensures that it won't automatically navigate to archives since sometimes I just want to copy the archive itself
/sneed - used so that the next parameter will open the path in the target (focused) panel
/L=\"%1\"" - finally passes the path that's meant to be opened to the left panel, or with the /sneed parameter, the target panel

And of course it directs it to the x64 binary installed in C:/TOTALCMD. Feel free to adjust it according to your own needs.

This may seldom cause issues, but in 99.9% of cases it'll simply always keep you away from Windows Explorer. Use add.reg to add and activate it, and if you want to toggle it then enable.reg and disable.reg will switch between the default and modified behavior,

Also a small recommendation: Total Registry. It's a bit rough around the edges since it can't deal with registry permissions all that well in my experience but otherwise it's a solid regedit alternative.