Windows 10

I moved from macOS to Windows 10 in July of 2019, after thirteen years of living in the macOS and iOS ecosystem.

It took about a year of poking and prodding but I'm starting to feel like I've got a lot of the functionality in place that I need to work the way I did on my Macbook Pro. Here's what I'm using, and when applicable, the Mac equivalent they replaced.

(I installed quite a few of these things via Ninite to avoid having to download and run lots of individual installers when I could avoid it. You can see which apps on this list can be installed with it in this screenshot.)

Start Bar

• Terminus (command line, for managing remote server stuff)
• VMWare Player (running an Ubuntu server VM locally)
• Firefox (with Firefox Sync enabled for bookmarks)
• Thunderbird (email, synced to my GMail accounts)
• Google Voice (Electron-ified app)
• Facebook Messenger
• Discord (text channels & voice chats, lots of communities here)
• Chatty (Twitch stream chat app)
• Spotify
• MusicBee (using only for Podcasts, with a lot of panels turned off)
• Whatever To-do app I settle on (currently Microsoft but it's not great)
• Typora (Markdown app with folder view & document outline, where I do a lot of drafting)
• Freemind (Mind mapping tool)

Notification Area

• EarTrumpet (audio control per app & device)
• Wox (Alfred/Spotlight app launcher replacement, mapped to alt-space)
• QOwnNotes (nvAlt quick temporary note window replacement, note search hotkey mapped to ctrl+space)
• CopyQ (Clipboard copy/paste history, Jumpcut replacement)
• AutoText (TextExpander replacement for repeatable text snippets)
• AutoHotkey (Keyboard macro scripting tool)
• ShareX (screenshots & image uploads to Dropbox)
• Plex (home video streaming server)
• Ubooquity (home comic/ebook server)
• qBitTorrent & jDownloader (download management, esp. for archiving YouTube videos I want to keep around)
• Keepalive (keeps external drives awake, esp. for quickly accessing videos and comics via Plex / comic reader apps)
• XMouse (Mac-like natural scrolling on Windows)
• Game library apps (Steam, Epic)
• Dropbox (not using much anymore but still syncs notes to a few iPad apps)

Pinned to Start

I have the Start menu organized into four categories lined up in a row: Games, Media, Tools, and Creative. I actually launch most of this stuff via Wox (alt+space > type the first few letters > hit enter) but sometimes I can't remember what an app's name is so it's helpful to have them in the Start Menu too, since I'm not going to use that space for anything else.

• Games column:
  • Emulators folder
    • Mesen (NES)
    • SNES-9X (SNES)
    • Project64 (N64)
    • mGBA (GB/GBC/GBA)
    • DeSmuME (NDS)
    • Lunar IPS (for patches/romhacks)
    • Folder link to game library
  • Launchers folder
    • Steam
    • Epic
    • GOG
    • Media:
  • Minecraft folder
    • Minecraft Launcher
    • AutoClicker (GitHub)
    • Amidst (seed preview tool)
    • NBTExplorer (world/player data editor)
• Media column:
  • Plex (desktop app for the server)
  • CDisplayEX (comic reader)
  • Misc. media folders
• Tools column:
  • A lot of stuff in Notification area is also pinned under Tools in case I need to relaunch them
  • SharpKeys (remapping keys, i.e. Caps Lock >> Ctrl)
  • Filezilla (FTP client)
  • Spybot & Malwarebytes (free versions installed from Ninite.com)
  • HFSExplorer (Java app that can mount and read files on Mac-only HFS drives)
  • WinCDEmu (mount CD/DVD/disk image files)
• Creative
  • Personal wiki link (also bookmarked in Firefox)
  • Writing folder
    • Notepad++ (mostly for minor code editing)
    • OpenOffice Writer (part of OpenOffice, which is fully installed)
    • Causality (Screenwriting / timeline app)
    • Trelby (Text only screenwriting app)
  • Design / Images folder
    • FontBase (free font manager with Google Font browser/installer)
    • Darktable (photo library management, LightRoom alternative)
    • Inkscape (vector art, alternative to )
    • Krita (raster/pixel art app)
  • Audio & Video folder
    • OBS Studio (video recording)
    • Audacity (basic audio editing)
    • Voice Recorder (built into Windows)

Other Bits & Pieces

• DokuWiki (my personal wiki runs on it and holds lots of useful scraps; the content of this page originated there)
• PeaZip (a much nicer 7zip/WinZip/WinRAR tool)
• CutePDF ("print" documents to a PDF file you can save)
• Foxit Reader (PDF Reader & basic editor, set to default for PDF files)
• Zoom (used for work often, but increasingly avoiding due to privacy concerns
• Slack (used for work rarely when working with a team that uses it)
• Media Player Classic codec pack (Edit > Options > Formats to associate with video files)
• ShellMenuView and ShellXView for cleaning up your context (right-click) menu in Windows 10 (see the HowToGeek guide here for a walkthrough)