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
  • Chat Clients
  • Compression
  • Customization
  • Data Recovery
  • Developer Tools
  • Documents
  • E-Book Utilities
  • Email
  • Games
  • Graphics
  • Online Storage
  • Backup
  • Productivity
  • Terminal
  • Text Editors
  • IDEs
  • Utilities
  • Video
• Setup
  • Windows 10
  • Windows 8.1 setup
• Security
• Miscellaneous
• Discussion Forums
  • Windows
  • IRC channels
  • Reddit
• Contribute

Applications

Audio

• AIMP - 32 bit audio processing and multi-format playback.
• Audacity - Free, open source, cross-platform software for recording and editing sounds.
• AudioNodes - Modular audio production suite with multi-track audio mixing, audio effects, parameter automation, MIDI editing, synthesis, cloud production, and more.
• CDex - CD Ripper (French site, English program).
• Dopamine - An audio player which tries to make organizing and listening to music as simple and pretty as possible.
• K-Lite Codecs - Collection of DirectShow filters, VFW/ACM codecs, and tools.
• 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.
• MusicBrainz Picard - Picard is a cross-platform music tagger that looks up and rewrite metadata tags.
• 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 nifty features too.
• Kodi - Free and Open Source home theatre software.
• Resonic - Fast and free audio player.

Chat Clients

• Hexchat - IRC client based on XChat
• Waow - Awesome WhatsApp Web Client to deliver you the best WhatsApp experience.
• LimeChat - Instant messaging application.
• Caprine - An elegant Facebook Messenger desktop app.
• 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.
• Quassel - Quassel IRC is a modern, cross-platform, distributed IRC client.
• Discord - Discord is a free voice and text chat client for gamers and non-gamers alike. You can use it from your browser and it's available on iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, and Linux.
• Riot - A decentralised encrypted comms app for the Matrix.org ecosystem.

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.
• Bandizip - A lightweight, fast and free All-In-One Zip Archiver.
• 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.

Customization

• 7+ Taskbar Tweaker - Allows to customize and extend Windows taskbar functionality with various productivity enhancements.
• Classic Start - Use Start Menu and Explorer like it's 2000.
• Clover - Add multi-tab functionality to Windows Explorer.
• EarTrumpet - Per application volume control from the system tray.
• Rainmeter - Rainmeter allows you to display customizable skins on your desktop, from hardware usage meters to fully functional audio visualizers.
• TranslucentTB - Make your Windows task bar transparent.
• QTTabBar - Extends Explorer by tabs and extra folder views.
• Windows 10 Login Background Changer - Lets you change the Windows 10 login screen background.
• ZBar - If you use multiple monitors, it lets you display a separate taskbar on each monitor.

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.
• PartitionGuru｜Eassos Recovery - Data recovery with partition recovery.
• 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

• Addict - Drop-in REST API for Active Directory.
• DB Browser for SQLite - High quality, visual, open source tool to create, design, and edit database files compatible with SQLite
• HeidiSQL - Powerful and easy client for MySQL, MariaDB, Microsoft SQL Server and PostgreSQL.
• Fiddler - Web debugging proxy.
• FileZilla - FTP, FTPS and SFTP client.
• Git Extensions - A powerful and easy to use UI for Git.
• GitHub Desktop - GitHub Desktop is an open source Electron-based GitHub app.
• GitKraken - A beautiful, cross-platform Git client.
• I'm Only Resting -A feature-rich WinForms-based HTTP client
• Insomnia - A modern REST client with a beautiful interface.
• Keylord Cross-platform GUI client for Redis, LevelDB and Memcached key-value databases.
• Mamp - Local server environment.
• Meld - A visual diff and merge tool.
• Open Server - Portable server platform and software environment (like MAMP, XAMPP, WAMP and very user friendly).
• Pixie - A simple color picker for developers.
• pngquant - Apply lossy compression on PNG files with or wi
• PostgreSQL Database - A comprehensive list of tools.
• Postman - REST client with intuitive user interface to send requests, save responses, add tests, and create workflows.
• Process Explorer - A powerful task manager.
• Process Hacker - Excellent full blown task manager.
• RazorSQL - A GUI for managing SQLite databases which requires major work.
• Redis Desktop Manager Cross-platform open source Redis DB management tool.
• Robo 3T - A lightweight GUI for MongoDB enthusiasts.
• SourceTree - A free Git & Mercurial client.
• Sql Wave - A MySQL database manager.
• SSLyog - A powerful MySQL administration tool
• TortoiseGit - Git client with full shell integration.
• TortoiseSVN - Subversion client with full shell integration.
• Vagrant - A tool for building and managing virtual machines.
• Velocity - Offline API Documentation Tool. (like Dash for macOS)
• Visual Studio - Ultimate Microsoft Developer Tool.
• Visual Studio Code - Lightweight Source Code Editor.
• Wamp - Web development environment.
• WinSCP - Free open source SFTP, FTP, WebDAV and SCP client.
• Wireshark - A network protocol analyzer.
• WMI Explorer - Provides the ability to browse and view WMI namespaces/classes/instances/properties in a single pane of view.
• Xampp - Apache driven web development environment.
• Xftp 5 - Flexible and lightweight SFTP/FTP client.
• Zsh - A powerful command line shell.

Documents

• FreeOffice - FreeOffice is a complete office suite with a word processor, a spreadsheet application and a presentation program – all compatible with their counterparts in Microsoft Office.
• LibreOffice - Open source office suite.
• Microsoft Office - Microsoft's own productivity suite.
• OnlyOffice - The most complete and feature-rich office and 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.
• WPS Office - The perfect free office software

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.

Email

• MailBird - IMAP and POP3 email client, featuring customization, complete touch support and multiple language support.
• Thunderbird - Email client with minimalistic design.
• Mailspring - A fast and maintained fork of Nylas Mail, built on modern web technologies.
• Nylas Mail - An extensible desktop mail app built on the modern web.
• Postbox - The Power Email App

Games

• 0 A.D. - A free, open-source real-time strategy game of ancient warfare.
• Warsow - Free & fast-paced FPS game for Windows.
• Awesome Games - List of games hosted on Github.
• Freeciv - A Free and Open Source empire-building strategy game inspired by the history of human civilization.
• GOG Galaxy - Steam-like DRM-free game platform.
• LuaStudio - Free game development tool/engine. Create games and other graphic focused apps on Windows using Lua/LuaJIT programming language. Export them to many platforms including iOS, Android and Mac.
• 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.
• Itch.io - Install, update and play indie games.

Graphics

• Blender - Fully-featured extensible cross-platform 3D content suite.
• Gimp - Open source image editor.
• Inkscape - Inkscape is a professional vector graphics editor for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
• Krita - Krita is a professional FREE and open source painting program.
• MapTiler - MapTiler generates zoomable raster maps from images in user-defined coordinate system.
• Paint.net - how can you live without paint.net?

Text Editors

• Atom - A hackable text editor for the 21st Century.
• Brackets - A modern, open source text editor that understands web design.
• 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.
• Neovim - literally the future of vim
• Notepad++ - A source code editor which supports several programming languages.
• Notepad2 - Tiny and fast Notepad replacement with many useful features.
• Oni - Modern Modal Editing - powered by Neovim
• Sublime Text 3 - The sophisticated text editor.
• Visual Studio Code - Build and debug modern web and cloud applications.

IDEs

• Android Studio - The official IDE for Android based on the IntelliJ platform.
• CLion - Smart cross-platform IDE for C/C++ that uses CMake as a build system.
• Eclipse - A powerful IDE.
• IntelliJ IDEA - A modern Java IDE with free community edition.
• NetBeans IDE - A free and open-source IDE.
• PhpStorm - Lightning-smart PHP IDE with major frameworks support.
• PyCharm - Python IDE for professional developers with free community edition.
• Rider - A cross-platform .NET/Mono IDE.
• RubyMine - An intelligent Ruby IDE that supports many modern frameworks.
• Visual Studio - Microsofts official IDE. Supports a multitude of languages via plugins.
• WebStorm - A smart JavaScript IDE that uses the full power of the modern JavaScript ecosystem.

Online Storage

• Box - Ability to sync more than 100,000 files and supporting both special characters in file names and file paths longer than 256 characters.
• Dropbox -Simple, elegant and versatile (PC, Macs, Android...) cloud storage solution.
• Google Drive - Cloud storage solution deeply integrated in the Google ecosystem.
• Hubic - Cloud storage for Windows, Linux, MacOsx, iOs & Android
• OneDrive - Best cloud storage solution for Windows users.
• Mega - Encrypted file storage.
• Mozy

Backup

• Arq - Backs up your files to your own cloud account (Amazon Cloud Drive, AWS, Dropbox, Google Drive, Google Cloud Storage, OneDrive, and SFTP).
• Bvckup 2 - Light, versatile data replication software.
• Duplicati - Free backup software to store encrypted backups online For Windows, macOS and Linux.

Productivity

• AutoHotkey - The ultimate automation scripting language for Windows.
• Chocolatey - A package manager for Windows.
• Cold Turkey - The only blocker for distracting websites that actually works. (even doesn't let you uninstall it when blocking is active).
• CommandTrayHost - A Command Line program monitor systray for Windows.
• Ditto - Clipboard manager.
• Easy Window Switcher - Switch between application instances, fast.
• Everything - The fastest file/folder search tool by name.
• f.lux - Automatically adjust your computer screen to match lighting.
• Inkdrop - The note-taking app for Markdown lovers.
• Launchy - The Open Source Keystroke Launcher.
• Listary - Keep files at your fingertips. An unique search utility.
• MultiCommander - File Manager for Professionals.
• Ninite - The easiest, fastest way to update or install software.
• One Commander - File manager featuring miller columns and dual-pane views.
• Scoop - A command-line installer for Windows.
• Total Commander - The best file manager for Windows.
• Simplenote - Simple cross-platform note taking app with cloud-based syncing.
• WordWeb - A very good English dictionary for windows.
• Wox - An effective launcher for windows.
• KatMouse - Utility that enables "universal scrolling" in Windows: scrolling does not need the window to be active/clicked first (i.e. how it works in macOS and Linux)
• Keypirinha - A fast launcher for keyboard ninjas on Windows. You can think of Keypirinha as an alternative to Launchy and a cousin of Alfred.
• Taskade - Smart task lists with real-time cross-platform syncing and team collaboration.

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.
• Hyper - A terminal built on web technologies.
• MobaXterm - Xserver and tabbed SSH client.
• mRemoteNG - The next generation of mRemote, open source, tabbed, multi-protocol, remote connections manager.
• MTPuTTY - Multi-Tabbed PuTTY.
• Putty - SSH and telnet client.
• Kitty - advanced Putty (SSH and telnet client).
• Terminus - modern, highly configurable terminal app based on web technologies.
• ColorTool - Set custom color schemes for the Windows Console with support for iTerm color schemes.

Utilities

• A-Z of Windows Terminal Commands
• AddToSendTo - This script lets you add your favorite Folder to Send To option, when you right-click.
• Carnac - The easiest way to record keystrokes during any screen recording.
• CleanMyPC - A clean computer in no time.
• CPU-Z - A free all-in-one CPU monitoring tool.
• Ext2Fsd - Open source ext3/4 file system driver for Windows.
• 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.
• Greenshot - Take and crop screenshots directly on the screen.
• GPU-Z - A free all-in-one GPU monitoring tool.
• HTTrack- Offline browser utility, allowing you to download a website from the Internet to a local directory.
• HWMonitor - A hardware monitoring program that reads PC systems main health sensors : voltages, temperatures, fans speed.
• IrfanView - A very fast, small, compact and innovative graphic viewer for Windows.
• LICEcap - Animated screen captures and save them directly to .GIF
• LightBulb - Reduces eyestrain by adjusting gamma based on the current time
• Link Shell Extension - Create symlinks from Explorer.
• rimraf - A deep deletion module for node. Help to delete files and folders with very long paths
• PowerPlanSwitcher - Provides a quick UI for switching power schemas & automatic switch on AC-plug-in on Windows10.
• qBittorrent - Free and reliable P2P Bittorrent client.
• Rufus - Create bootable USB drives the easy way.
• SetToStartup - This script will help you to add your favorite programs or self made scripts/folders to startup.
• SDelete - A command line utility that can securely delete a file, or clean the slack space.
• SpaceMonger - A graphical utility to display folders and files in blocks relative to their disk usage.
• 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.
• Unlocker - Unlock files Windows won't let you delete
• 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.
• winreg-cli - Command line tool with a fluent API for modifying Windows registry.
• ZoomIt - It is a screen zoom and annotation tool for technical presentations. It runs unobtrusively in the tray and activates with customizable hotkeys to zoom in on an area of the screen, move around while zoomed, and draw on the zoomed image.

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.
• ScreenToGif - ScreenToGif allows you to record a selected area of your screen and save it as a gif or video.
• PotPlayer - Multimedia player with a wide collection of codecs which also offers extensive configuration options for users.
• SMPlayer - Multimedia player that can save different preferences for any single video.
• Open Broadcaster Software - Free and open source software for video recording and live streaming.

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/
• Win10-Initial-Setup-Script - Powershell script to turn off or on various defaults in Windows

Windows 8.1 Setup

• http://windows.microsoft.com/en-IN/windows-8/clean-install

Security

• Acrylic DNS Proxy - A local DNS proxy which caches the responses coming from your DNS servers and helps you fight unwanted ads through a custom HOSTS file.
• AdwCleaner - Free removal tool for adware, PUP/LPI, Toolbars and Hijacker.
• Bitdefender - Best outright protection against malware.
• Cryptomator - Free client-side encryption for your cloud files.
• ENCRYPTO - Encrypt your files in an elegant way.
• GlassWire - Network security monitoring tool and analyzer that visualizes your network activity.
• IIS Crypto - A utility for configuring encryption protocols, cyphers, hashing methods, and key exchanges for Windows components (eg TLS/AES/SHA for Remote Desktop)
• KeePass - Free, open-source, easy-to-use password manager.
• SpyBot - Search and destroy malware, spyware and viruses.
• System Explorer - An enhanced task manager with support for monitoring and modifying system processes, start-up programs, system services, drivers, shell extensions, and more.
• UnChecky - automatically unchecks unrelated offers from installers.
• Malwarebytes - protects from dangerous threats that antivirus doesn't.
• NetLimiter - Internet traffic control and monitoring tool.
• 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

• Show hidden files
• list of Shortcut keys

Discussion Forums

Windows

• Windows Support Communities
• Stack Overflow
• Super User

IRC channels

• #Windows
• #microsoft

Reddit

• /r/windows
• /r/windowsapps
• /r/microsoft
• /r/sysadmin
• /r/microsoftsoftwareswap

Contribute

Contributions are most welcome, please adhere to the contribution guidelines.

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License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.