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Software not painful to use

My own selection of software for painless computing.

General

• Operating System : Mac OS X: heaven, after the purgatory of Linux and the hell of Windows.
• Browser: Firefox. On a Mac, Camino.
• Email: GMail, “search, don’t sort” really works.
• Text Editor: TextMate, you have to buy it, but it’s worth every penny. There are rumours that it’s been converting (recovering) Emacs users (addicts). Unfortunately, it’s Mac only. An alternative is jedit (GPL, Java).

Development

• Build system: cmake, throw the autotools away.
• Source code control system: ditch CVS for subversion.
• Project management: Trac tracks everything.
• Scripting language: Ruby is Japanese pragmatism (and has a poignant guide).

• Java IDE: JBuilder is great software and has a free version (IMHO better than Eclipse). Java is not a pain anymore since it gained generics and got opensourced.

• Mark-up language: HTML is so 2001, why don’t you take at look at Markdown?

• C++ libraries:

  • QT for GUIs.
  • GSL for math.
  • Magick++ for manipulating images.
  • Cairo for creating PDFs.
  • Boost for just about everything else.

Research

• Writing papers: LaTeX
• Writing papers & enjoying the process: LyX
• Handsome figures in your papers: xfig or, better, jfig .
• The occasional presentation with many graphical content: OpenOffice Impress (using the OOOlatex plugin ); the alternative is PowerPoint with the TexPoint plugin.
• Managing BibTeX: jabref: multi-platform, for all your bibtex needs.
• IEEExplore and BibTeX: convert citations using BibConverter.