Play OpenSource And Participate OpenSource - Part 1

We, the IT professional and user community, use many of the Developer productivity tools from OpenSource (more specifically FOSS - Free and Open Source Software) on a normal day at IT work -thanks to Richard Stallman and all the open source community. Many of these tools are simply great, and compete greatly with their commercial variants, and some of them are unique and has no commercial variant alternatives.

This post covers a list of OpenSource tools, that are very USEFUL and improves a developer productivity on a typical day at work greatly, and eases the work to make it smooth. 

The following are a list of FOSS software that we often use -there is no specific order has been followed covering these.

Notepad++___________________________

http://notepad-plus-plus.org/

Perhaps the best text editor that I know of on Windows platform. Here is how it looks:

Besides simple text editing, Notepad++ has great support for many of the following non-exhaustive features:

• Macros
• Support for multiple encoding styles
• Spell Check
• Support for configuring/plugin multiple language compilers - eg: C, C++, java, etc., and use it as a programming language development light weight IDE
• Also, user can define his own programming language (other than the ones  that are already support in the editor)
• FTP, yes it does support
• Plugin based architecture, and support multiple plugins including plugins to export the content as HTML, RTF, etc.
• Great support for XML editing support like Schema validation, etc., in the form of "XML tools"
• Lot more features to explore while we work with it

License: GNU GPL

Notepad++ accepts donations.

Portecle______________________________

http://portecle.sourceforge.net/

Portecle is a user friendly GUI tool to work with keystores, keys, certificates, certificate requests, certificate revocation lists and more.

If you prefer to work with GUI than command line, this is a good tool for you while working with keys, certs, etc. Use it to appreciate its features.

License: GNU GPLv2

Portecle accepts donations.

GreenShot____________________________

http://getgreenshort.org/

To describe it simply, this is a wonderful "screen shot utility" with a very small foot print. In Windows, it runs in system tray and is very handy to catch screen shots:

And an screen shot taken by Greenshot looks like this in the editor:

License: GNU GPLv2

Greenshot accepts donations.

FreeMind & Freeplane___________________

Freemind is a FOSS variant of Mindmap class of tools. Its one of the wonderful ways of organizing and presenting thoughts, far simpler than conventional presentation software for most uses.

A few minutes video tutorial of freemind 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsiwD4NMR68

"Freeplane was created because of short-comings in the design of the popular open source mind mapping program Freemind. Freeplane has been refactored from Freemind to make its code and packages more modular, make it easier for new software developers to contribute to Freeplane development, and to release new versions of Freeplane more often" 
- source: http://freeplane.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Here is how a typical map of freeplane may look:

Besides appearance  the feature enhancements are plenty. Walk-through it to appreciate the enhancements.

License: GNU GPLv2+

Dia

https://live.gnome.org/Dia

Dia is a diagram creation tool that support multiple types of diagrams including but not limited to Flow charts, UML, BPMN, Architecture Diagrams, Electronic Circuits, etc.

Here is a sample flow chart diagram:

And here is a sample UML use case diagram:

License: GNU GPLv2

WinMerge

http://winmerge.org/

WinMerge is a FOSS differencing and merge tool for Windows platform.

License: GNU GPLv2+

WinMerge accepts donations.

Last updated: 28 Mar 2013

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More FOSS software discussed in subsequent parts of this blog series.

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Author of this post believes-in and practices contributing/donating to OpenSource, and requests readers to consider contributing/donating to "any" of the OpenSource projects they use / like.