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NirSoft Freeware (2008)

nirsoft.net

201–210 of 241 posts

Re: NirSoft Freeware (2008)

#201

I can't claim to have used all of Nirsoft's tools, or even half of them, but I've used more than a handful, and they always do exactly what they claim. Quickly, quietly, and compactly. This guy is a personal hero of mine, and I'm proud to say I sent him a few bucks a few years ago to say thanks. I don't know how many others think to do so, but I hope it's a lot of us!

> Quickly, quietly, and compactly.

Just like a good cli tool should. There is currently a disturbing trend of tools coming from certain communities that are extremely noisy with garbage in various colours and even emojis (the community is the Mac community). I can't wait for it to end.

Re: NirSoft Freeware (2008)

#202
post #99
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still hard to understand that they haven't touched Notepad in such a long time. The effort to get a good editor must be tiny compared to a lot of other stuff they are doing. I am pretty sure I could improve Notepad substantially with just a few days of work.

I'm sorry for going off topic, but I keep seeing this kind of comment and I want to get an answer - how is Notepad not a good editor? It can take any ASCII/ANSI/UTF file and output it in plaintext. It has line-wrap as an option. It loads fast and can handle files of decent size without lag. Users can set display and print fonts, etc. I'm really lost as to why anyone says Notepad is not a good text editor for basic te…

> how is Notepad not a good editor?

- Line endings. It mauls anything not "windows line endings" format

- Crappy undo (it will occasionally eat 5 lines of text instead of one word)

- No redo

- Barfs on large files (on a modern machine) If by accident you double click on a 1GB file you better kill it.

Please note I did not mention anything which could be argued as "rather belonging in a professional editor". No syntax highlighting, brackets matching, collapsing code / paragraphs, diff'ing 2 documents, tabs, macros, etc etc.

Re: NirSoft Freeware (2008)

#203
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how is Notepad not a good editor? 1. Only understands Windows line endings. 2. Always saves UTF-8 with a BOM. Only the first one is really a significant issue, but the second one can be a pain in the ass sometimes. Granted, yes, it's a pain in the ass primarily because *nix applications often treat a BOM as data, but it's still a pain in the ass. > Heck, if I need a DOS batch file, I turn to either Notepad or Edit.…

>Edit? You've been gone awhile. Edit has never been released on any x64 platform of Windows, AFAIK. Why? Because it's a 16-bit application! NTVDM, the 16/32-bit DOS and 16 bit Windows emulator only runs on 32-bit Windows. WoW64, the 32-bit Windows emulator for x64 Windows, does not run 16 bit applications. I only use a 32-bit OS and a 32-bit processor for Win7. If it doesn't work in x64, you've just given me a reason…

[deleted]

Re: NirSoft Freeware (2008)

#204

> While many software companies create a bloated installation package with size of 1 - 3 MB, the size of single utility in NirSoft is usually less than 100KB. The early 2000s were a different time. While as modern day electron apps are regularly 100+ MB.

I've come to see the rise of Electron not as a shortcoming of other UI tech, not a problem with Electron. OSX, Windows and Linux failed to have any viable cross-platform UI solution[0]; Electron is what we deserve for this failure.

[0] I would be very happy with Qt/QML and would grudgingly accept GTK, but others apparently are not that complacent

Re: NirSoft Freeware (2008)

#205

I haven't used windows in years, but when I did, downloading all of the nirsoft tools was on my new box checklist. I can't go to the site to see what has been added though, my company proxy has it blocked.

He describes False Positives from antivirus software when scanning his utilities. Do you think your company's proxy blocks the site because of that?

Thats what I thought at first, but the message says that it was because it was in the "Shareware/Freeware" Category. Which is blocked unless specifically allowed.

Re: NirSoft Freeware (2008)

#206
post #20

> Each time that a popular AntiVirus software begins to detect one of my utilities as Virus or Trojan, my email is flooded with messages from worried people that think my Web site is infected with Viruses. Some of them even blame me that I spread Viruses through my Web site. I wonder if there is a defamation/libel type of lawsuit here. Anti virus vendors are making false accusations.

>I wonder if there is a defamation/libel type of lawsuit here. Anti virus vendors are making false accusations. Some (many? most?) will report these applications as 'potentially unwanted applications' (PUAs) and sidestep the issue of blame or malicious intent, often asking the user if they want to proceed rather than just denying access. Source: former Sophos employee.

My employer's security team, in their infinite wisdom, is entirely blocking access to the NirSoft site.

Re: NirSoft Freeware (2008)

#207
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Edit? You've been gone awhile. Edit has never been released on any x64 platform of Windows, AFAIK. Why? Because it's a 16-bit application! NTVDM, the 16/32-bit DOS and 16 bit Windows emulator only runs on 32-bit Windows. WoW64, the 32-bit Windows emulator for x64 Windows, does not run 16 bit applications. I only use a 32-bit OS and a 32-bit processor for Win7. If it doesn't work in x64, you've just given me a reason…

Interesting, can I ask what kind of work you do? I'm assuming programming, what kind of programming do you primarily do?

Actually, I'm just a teacher/office admin/etc for work - by passion and hobby I'm a writer but that hasn't turned into money and likely never will.

I don't do programming and never have, the closest I ever came was a brief scrape with BASIC back in the days before Windows. I do some web design, but not too much anymore because I don't do Javascript and I don't like off-page CSS (I sometimes use inline, but that's about it).

Re: NirSoft Freeware (2008)

#208

> While many software companies create a bloated installation package with size of 1 - 3 MB, the size of single utility in NirSoft is usually less than 100KB. The early 2000s were a different time. While as modern day electron apps are regularly 100+ MB.

Around 2000, I had a laptop with 5g of harddisk and 64mb of ram, now I'm at ~1tb and 16gb ram. Roughly a 200x increase in raw numbers, though lots of other things since then make the actual increase larger, so it sounds like we're using net-smaller apps :)

My personal complaint is that, with 200x more compute, we should be doing 200x more and/or more powerful things. Instead we're doing the same things ~200x less efficiently.

Re: NirSoft Freeware (2008)

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is "PWA"?

Progressive Web Apps, but I honestly can't explain exactly what they are.

It's the combination of various technologies helping make websites which pretend (poorly) they are applications.

Re: NirSoft Freeware (2008)

#210
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's better (and more efficient) to have a developer write (or waste, if you consider doing their job "wasting time") two interfaces than to waste the computer resources of a million people. Electron is just outsourcing cross platform development to the Chromium project.

Unfortunately waste of users' computer resources is an externality and developers are more expensive than ever. Revealed preferences show that customers would rather buy more hardware resources than pay higher prices for efficient software (within reasonable limits).

I would be careful talking about revealed preferences here - individual customers have close to zero choice in the matter. They select from what's available on the market, not from the space of all possible software.
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