What pieces of software can you recommend that's free, efficient and does not bullshit around?
Notepad++ - This piece of software is a very advanced form of Notepad. Fuck that basic Notepad shit that Windows or any other OS gives you. This one is all you'll ever need for basic note-taking needs. But it does a hell of a lot more. One thing I love about it is that, if for any reason I put my PC to sleep, it crashes, power outage, I can run this again and everything I've ever written and no matter how many tabs - it's all retained.
AIMP - The definitive media player that you'll ever need for just playing stuff (music only, sorry if I mislead those thinking it can do video). Winamp and all the other software are just around for nostalgia (though Winamp has it's uses where you need it to play specific formats like video game music such as SNES with .SPC). One feature that attracted me to it was, it used to infuriate me when I am playing something and something crashes in any other media player. And you boot up that media player and you have to play your playlist all over again or that song from the beginning.
Not AIMP, if I accidentally close it, crash or whatever, I can bring it back up and it'll have the song or whatever on Pause so I can resume. Why isn't shit like this more implemented in software?
EMACS:- No I'm not kidding, Yes it has a learning curve but the real fun is AFTER you figure it out & find out that it can do more than just edit texts
I tried Emacs once a long time ago, and recoiled from the weird key combos. Especially how you have to first enter one combo and then a second one for what you actually want to do.
My memory is a bit fuzzy, but I remember it feeling pretty clunky.
Yeah I definitely prefer vim bindings over emacs. Though as other commenters have mentioned, it's totally possible to use vim bindings with emacs. I've never tried it but if the other features attract you it might be worth trying.
Because it all connects together, and you can program them jointly to help solve tasks.
Having email and version control inside emacs makes it easy to set up an email based patch system.
Of course this system will then benefit from the existing code highlighting, introspection, and an integrated debugger.
Integrating it with your time planner means you can automatically add commits to your journal as a way of tracking what you've been working on.
The old joke always was emacs is a great operating system, it just needs a good text editor.
The real downside for me is everything is just a little bit janky. It all almost works perfectly and the code is right there to fix it, if you can be bothered. Generally I can't.