Whats your favorite OS Power tool?

Whats your favorite power tool that helped you the most? OS doesn't matter.

Please note this is a community wiki. I would like this list to help all of us in finding more powerful tools.

If possible, list down one tool (or multiple tools for multiple os) per answer. This will make voting for tools easier

From stackoverflow

• Launchy

• For windows - Process Monitor, Process Explorer

• RapidEE for (finally!) painless environment variable management on Windows

• Does cygwin count? Being able to "grep" on Windows is HUGE.

  Jonathan Leffler : Yes - see my proposal (Perl and Shell - same reasoning).

  Tomalak : There is a native port of grep for Win32, along with many other gnu utils. Look for GnuWin32 on sourceforge.

• So many to choose from...

  • Perl (because I've been using it for a long time and haven't migrated to Python)
  • Shell (Bourne/Korn/POSIX/Bash)

  Both count in my book for generality and availability.

• Powershell

• I would have to say one of the following:

  • GCC
  • Text processing utilities (sed/awk/grep/tail)
  • Perl/Shell scripting
  • On MySQL servers mytop to view the queries that are happening
  • For debugging both gdb and ktrace/strace

  I am a programmer and power tools to me may not be power tools to you! I like writing my own when I need them as well.

• Berkeley Utilities

• On Linux (and many other Unix) systems strace. It allows me to debug system administration problems by looking at a command's interface to the operating system. It works on any binary (doesn't require compiling with debug symbols), and is especially useful if I don't (or can't be bothered to) have access to the command's source code. It can pinpoint configuration errors (where is this program looking for its input files?), uncover undocumented features (why is the program trying to open this file?), and performance problems (the command is writing to the file a character at a time). Similar tools are ltrace (Linux; works at the level of library calls), truss (FreeBSD and Solaris), and, of course, dtrace (Solaris, Mac OS X, and FreeBSD).

• Bash. It does so much stuff well that would be cumbersome in a GUI.

• Perl , of course :)

• UltaMon (for Windows) . I love being able to have my task bar stretch across all three monitors and easily move apps from one monitor to another without having to minimize and drag.

  On the Macintosh it would have to be TextMate.

• SlickRun

  And TCPView from SysInternals. Much easier that continually running "netstat -ban" in a shell.

• Autoruns from Sysinternals (Mark Russinovich and Bryce Cogswell). An essential cleanup tool.

• For Windows, Far Manager + lots of plugins.

• UltraMon, as mentioned above, and PowerMenu, which allows me to set any window to be Always On Top, or semi transparent, and really helps with laying things out on the screen.

• • Gnome-DO
  • APT (Advanced Package Tool on Debian and Ubuntu)

• I can't imagine life without GNU screen. There are so many features that just make things a bit easier. Stuff like being able to detach a session and then attach to from any computer anywhere, with all programs still running. Or searching through the scroll history. Or running several screens in the same terminal window. And lots of other stuff.

• Mac: Quicksilver Win: Slickrun

• Windows Key + R = Instant access to everything. In addition, I create batch files in the windows directory so I could do tasks that usually takes multiple commands with one command.

  Eclipse : This has kind of been replaced in Vista by just Winkey. I have a folder in the start menu now that just consists of shortcuts to batch files that gets picked up by the search.

  MrValdez : I haven't tried Vista but thanks for the heads up. I'll be keeping an eye out for this feature once Windows 7 is released (I'm hearing good things about it. Hopefully, once I get familar with it, it will make me switch permanently from XP)

• Dexpot + Clipx + Winsplit revolution + Input Director

  Multiple desktops, clipboard history, fast & easy window positioning and using networked computer screens as simply as a multi-monitor setup.

  And launchy, but has already been mentioned.

  And Vim, of course.

• Ditto

  Ditto is an extension to the standard windows clipboard. It saves each item placed on the clipboard allowing you access to any of those items at a later time. Ditto allows you to save any type of information that can be put on the clipboard, text, images, html, custom formats, .....

• For Mac OS X: QuickSilver

• The Everything desktop search tool. It's face-meltingly good. Fast, flexible, unthinkably small (the complete download is 334Kb!)

  The first thing I do on a new computer is install this and Autohotkey, and remap Win+F to run it.