A curated list of awesome applications, softwares, tools and shiny things 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.

Table of Contents

• Applications

  • Audio
  • Chat Clients
  • Compression
  • Data Recovery
  • Documents
  • E-Book Utilities
  • Email
  • Games
  • Graphics
  • Online Storage
  • Productivity
  • Terminal
  • Text Editors
  • Utilities
  • Video

• Developer Tools

• Setup

• Security

• Miscellaneous

• Discussion Forums

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.

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.

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.

Email

• 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.

Graphics

• Blender - Fully-featured extensible cross-platform 3D content suite.
• Gimp - Open source image editor.
• 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.
• 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.

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

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

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

• Power Tools
• Show hidden files
• list of Shortcut keys

Discussion Forums

Windows

• Windows Support Communities
• Stackoverflow

IRC channels

• #Windows
• #microsoft

Reddit

• /r/windows
• /r/windowsapps
• /r/microsoft

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.
• Tower - command-line git client for windows.
• Zsh - A powerful command line shell.
• Redis Desktop Manager Cross-platform open source Redis DB management tool.
• 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.