The Apps and Tools I Can't Live Without

This is a running list of software that I use constantly.

Some of it is well-known, but a good amount is pretty niche. Either way, everything here has earned a permanent spot in my day-to-day workflow. I'll keep adding to this as I think of or discover more.

I spend most of my time in the terminal and have a strong preference for small, lightweight applications. As a screen reader user that cannot use a mouse, lag is not something I am willing to put up with. Every millisecond of latency in a GUI is a millisecond of wasted time that compounds quickly. The tools on this page reflect this preference.

But what about {other app}? Please tell me about it. If it's particularly good I'll drop a link here.

Accessibility

NVDA

The free, open-source screen reader for Windows, developed by NV Access. NVDA is what I use to interact with my computer, and I hesitate to reach for anything else now. It's been in development for over 15 years and is used by more than 250,000 people worldwide. One of the biggest advantages is it's ability to be extended through add-ons that anyone can write if they know Python. If an app doesn't work, or I find myself doing something a lot, I can typically write a quick add-on to fix it.

If you're blind and on Windows, there's really no reason not to have it. If you're sighted and doing accessibility work, install and learn it because there is no substitute for testing with the real thing.

If your employer doesn't like the idea of open-source software and have hit you with "just use Narrator" or excuse after excuse for purchasing another screen reader that costs > $1000, point them to this guide for corporate and government deployment.

TDSR

A console-based screen reader for macOS, Linux, FreeBSD, and now Windows. It gives you speech output directly in the terminal with navigation by line, word, or character, adjustable speech rate and volume, a plugin system for app-specific handlers, and the ability to condense repeated symbols so you hear i.e. "42 =" instead of every equals sign individually. I find it significantly faster than what any built-in screen reader is able to provide.

show.exe

Reviewing output in the Windows terminal with a screen reader can be a pain. NVDA users in particular have historically only had easy access to the very tail of a command's output in a virtual buffer. The typical approach to get around this limitation is mark mode (Ctrl+M), but it has several limitations. show.exe lets you pipe command output into a read-only text box window instead, replacing the command | clip, open notepad, paste dance. It supports find (Ctrl+F), save (Ctrl+S), and handles multiple encodings including UTF-8 and UTF-16. Just add it to your path, then type command | show and you're done.

Dev Tools

Claude Code

My primary coding environment these days. An agentic coding tool from Anthropic that reads your codebase, edits files, runs commands, and integrates with your development tools. It lives in the terminal, VS Code, JetBrains, a desktop app, and the browser. You describe what you want in plain language and it plans the approach, writes code across multiple files, and verifies it works. It connects to external tools through MCP, supports persistent project instructions via CLAUDE.md files, and can spawn multiple agents to work on different parts of a task simultaneously. The terminal-native workflow is a natural fit for screen reader users.

Codex

OpenAI's lightweight local coding agent. Like Claude Code, it runs in the terminal and works directly with your codebase. Built mostly in Rust, available via npm or Homebrew, and also has IDE extensions for VS Code, Cursor, and Windsurf. I use it less frequently than Claude Code, but it's good to have options and sometimes a second opinion is worth the context switch.

Terminal

Scoop

A command-line package manager for Windows. It installs apps to your user directory without UAC prompts, keeps PATH clean, manages dependencies automatically, and makes setups reproducible through scriptable commands. Unless I have a seriously good reason not to, or something isn't working, I just scoop install {app_here} and it usually works. I'm a huge fan of getting as many apps as I can through package managers, and Scoop is the one that makes that possible on Windows.

Ripgrep

The last recursive file searching tool you'll ever need. Ripgrep searches directories for regex patterns while automatically respecting .gitignore rules, skipping hidden files and binaries, and supporting full Unicode. It's absurdly fast (benchmarks show it searching the Linux kernel source tree in under 0.1 seconds where competing tools take anywhere from 0.2 to 3 seconds). It's written in Rust, cross-platform, and supports file type filtering, PCRE2 regex, and compressed file searching.

TLDR

Community-driven simplified man pages. When I forget how a command works and don't want to spend a bunch of time sifting through a manpage, tldr {command} gives me practical examples for the most common use cases. Covers commands across Unix, Linux, macOS, and Windows. It's not always a replacement for man pages, but it answers the question I had probably 90% of the time.

LLM

A CLI tool and Python library by Simon Willison for interacting with large language models. Works with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and local models through plugins like Ollama. It stores prompts and responses in a SQLite database, handles images, audio, and video, and supports structured output extraction. Another one that has quickly become a must-have because it lets me ask a model basically anything from within a terminal. Being able to be like llm "How do I find the WPA2 security key for a network using windows CMD", or cat readme.md | llm "Translate this text to es-mx" > readme_spn.md is priceless.

zoxide

cd on steroids. It's written in Rust, works across every major shell including PowerShell, and remembers which directories you use most frequently so you can jump to them in a few keystrokes instead of typing out full paths. z my-cool-project takes you to the highest-ranked directory matching "my-cool-project", preventing the need for you to spend a few seconds typing out a long path. z foo bar narrows it to directories matching both "foo" with "bar" somewhere in the path. z .. goes up a level, z - goes back to where you just were. It builds a database of your navigation habits over time, so the longer you use it the smarter it gets. You can also import history from autojump, fasd, or z.lua.

Windows Replacements

Classic Windows 7 Task Manager

I prefer the classic Windows 7 Task Manager because it opens with practically zero latency. The same cannot be said for the one that ships with later versions of Windows. This standalone installer brings back the old Task Manager and the classic msconfig with its startup tab. It works on Windows 8 through 11, supports 32-bit and 64-bit, and installs alongside the modern version without replacing system files.

Notepad2

A fast, light-weight Notepad replacement by Florian Balmer with syntax highlighting, built on the Scintilla editing component. There is probably something better out there, but when it comes to text editing I'm looking for no frills, and this one has served me well for over a decade. It's a portable executable that doesn't touch the registry and can be set as your default Notepad replacement.

The version of Notepad that ships with Windows 11 has been completely rewritten and turned into a cautionary tale of software bloat. It's bad enough that a simple text editor takes over a second to launch, but they've taken it a step further by agressively integrating copilot, adding text formatting, spell check, and tracking the files that I open so I can no longer just start fresh.

Xplorer2

My replacement for Windows Explorer. It's a dual-pane file manager that is incredibly fast, supports folder tabs, Miller columns, advanced search, mass rename, duplicate file detection, macro automation, and a ton more. The whole thing is around 3 MB. The full version costs $29.95 but it's worth the purchase and has paid for itself plenty of times over at this point.

System Utilities

WinDirStat

For when you want to know what the hell is taking up so much space on your machine. WinDirStat reads your entire directory tree and presents it in a sortable tree view by size and file extension. Open source under GPLv2.

NirSoft Tools

A collection of small, freeware utilities by Nir Sofer that are almost universally accessible with a screen reader. The package contains dozens of portable tools covering password recovery, network monitoring, packet scanning, system information, browser data, and a whole lot more. They're lightweight, focused, and regularly updated. NirLauncher bundles the whole collection into a single zip file.

Productivity

Paperback

A fully accessible, native ebook and document reader that supports EPUB, PDF, Markdown, Word docs, PowerPoint, HTML, FB2, and more. It loads books with millions of words in seconds because C++/Rust, has full screen reader support and keyboard navigation throughout, collects no telemetry, and stores your library locally. Open source, lightweight, runs on older hardware.

Todoist

A task manager used by over 50 million people that helps me get things done. I've tried more than my fair share of to-do apps over the years and this is the one that stuck. It has natural language input for quickly capturing tasks (send invoices every other Wednesday), due dates, recurring tasks, priority levels, filters, and a calendar view. There are apps for every operating system, 160+ integrations with other tools, and a REST API that makes it straightforward to build your own automations on top of it.

File Sharing

Magic Wormhole

The simplest way to get a file from one computer to another with end-to-end encryption. It generates short, human-pronounceable codes using a phonetically-distinct wordlist, supports arbitrary file sizes and directories, and even has tab completion on the receiving end. Install the Python package (pip install magic-wormhole), run wormhole send, read the code to the other person, have them type wormhole receive {code}, and you're done.

If you're trying to send a file to someone nontechnical and/or that doesn't have a python environment Wormhole.app is a browser-based alternative with end-to-end encryption, 24-hour link expiration, and support for files up to 10 GB. Even larger files transfer peer-to-peer directly between browsers.

Rclone

A command-line tool for managing files and syncing them between your local machine and storage providers, often described as the Swiss army knife of cloud storage. It supports over 70 providers including S3, Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, and Backblaze B2 plus standard protocols like SFTP, WebDAV, FTP, HTTP(S), you name it. It can sync, copy, move, and mount cloud storage as a local disk, with checksum verification, resumable transfers, server-side copies to save bandwidth, and virtual backends for encryption, compression, and chunking. The commands are the same ones you already know on Unix.