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6 tiny programs I use to solve annoying problems
With the PC landscape filled to the brim with handy applications, there’s no shortage of cool tools you can install on your daily driver. But depending on the system’s specs, your everyday machine might have some trouble running LLMs, self-hosted utilities, and other demanding tools. So, here’s a byte-sized article about lightweight services that can solve annoying problems without taxing your PC.
PotPlayer
The only media player you'll need on Windows
If you’ve got different operating systems in your tinkering lab, you’ll probably pivot to VLC for your media consumption tasks. But when you’re on Windows, PotPlayer has enough features to blow every other media player out of the water. The URL playback facility lets you stream videos directly from YouTube, Twitch, and other websites, while its support for file-transfer protocols is great for folks with videos on NAS and gaming consoles.
PotPlayer also includes 360° navigation options to help you play video designed for VR headsets. Plus, you get a seemingly never-ending list of video processing and media playback settings to fine-tune your experience, and you don’t have to dig under different pop-ups or multiple menus just to access these options. Well, the subtitle generation facility can be somewhat demanding on the GPU, but PotPlayer as a whole doesn’t require a beefy system and can run on most devices without causing performance issues.
Greenshot
An ultra-lightweight snapshot tool
The snipping facility built into Windows 11 is pretty decent, but it still has certain problems. There’s no way to set custom keybinds for the utility, and if you’re anything like me, you’ve probably been in situations where the snipping tool refuses to appear even when you mash all the key combos associated with it as though the keys owe you rent money.
This leaves third-party services as the only alternatives, with Greenshot being my most recommended tool of the bunch. It’s a really lightweight snapshot tool that includes modifiable macros, built-in obfuscation provisions, and a built-in editor for quick image edits.
TeraCopy
If only the File Explorer had these media transfer facilities
When you’re on an SSD, you’re probably accustomed to blazing-fast file transfer operations. But the situation gets flipped on its head when you need to send hundreds of gigabytes worth of files to slow hard drives over a NAS share. That’s where TeraCopy comes in handy with its QoL-enhancing file transfer features.
For starters, it uses a checksum-based approach to confirm whether your transfer operations were successful, and logs failed tasks in a detailed list, so you can re-attempt them later. If you rely on external storage devices, you’ll be glad to know that TeraCopy automatically pauses copy and move tasks if your HDD/SSD gets disconnected and waits for it instead of canceling the operation or throwing an error. Likewise, TeraCopy lets you skip corrupted files when copying entire directories. Unlike Windows File Explorer, which tries to run multiple transfer tasks in parallel, TeraCopy can queue them in series, and that’s pretty useful when you’re trying to back up essential documents or archive old media.
AutoHotKey
It’s far more than a macro creator
Custom macros and keybinds are an easy way to boost your productivity, though Windows is fairly limited when it comes to letting you set dedicated key combinations for everyday tasks. Fortunately, AutoHotKey can help out with your productivity needs with its powerful automation provisions.
AutoHotKey’s obvious advantage is its ability to create scripts that can bind everyday tasks to custom hotstrings, though there’s a lot more you can do with this tool. You can define loops to bulk-transfer files, create dedicated scripts for specific apps, or even create mouse gestures with their own trigger-action automations. The only caveat to this lightweight tool is that it has a high learning curve, so you might need to spend a few hours getting the hang of it.
WizTree
Track down the storage-hogging files
As files and apps get more bloated with each passing day, it’s easy to choke your storage drives if you’re not careful – and the situation gets even worse when you factor in services that store data in the most random directories imaginable. WizTree can tackle this problem to some extent, as it analyzes your drives and generates a visual treemap depicting your files as interactive blocks.
Since each block is color-coded and sized depending on the amount of space it hogs on your drives, you can quickly spot the large files. Plus, WizTree is extremely fast at scanning storage media – to the point where it took less than 10 seconds to generate a treemap the last time I tried using it on a 4TB hard drive.
Everything
The search utility, I mean
As someone who’s accustomed to searching for packages, files, and apps on Linux using fzf, the Search tool on Windows might as well be non-existent for me. Fortunately, all hope isn’t lost, as Everything is a powerful indexing tool that makes searching for specific files on Microsoft’s flagship OS as intuitive as it is on Linux.
Despite its tiny size and minimal resource consumption, Everything displays results instantly and can pull results from every drive. Heck, Everything can index files in real-time, and if you rely on NAS shares as much as I do, you can even use it to find specific files on your network drives.
Some lightweight non-Windows tools to improve your quality-of-life
So far, I’ve only covered Windows-centric tools, but there are tons of Linux options that deserve a mention. Tmux is something I install on every Linux system in my arsenal, as it makes terminal tasks a lot easier, while GParted is my go-to utility for managing disk partitions. I also rely a lot on Rsync for my backup needs, while good ol’ Podman helps me containerize services. And this article would never end if I started listing all the tiny apps that I self-host on my single-board computers and low-power mini-PCs.
