Which one of your programs (portable or not, free of cost or not) you consider is closest to perfection?
@m^(2): Your opinion is always welcome. Please tell us which one occupies the second place. We already know that TC is the first.

"We already know that TC is the first."
Actually you're wrong. TC is rubbish. Hugely powerful and quite customisable and for me clearly the most useful on the market, but very far from perfection. That's because:
1. it's extremely quirky. The most common word on Ghisler forums is 'workaround'.
2. it's buggy
3. extensibility leaves a lot to be desired
4. it's noob unfriendly
And actually a lot of TC usefulness comes from its community which is definitely the best when it comes to file managers. They provide great support and wrote a ton of plugins and addons, which are what makes TC the most powerful. If I were to judge bare file managers that I tried (not all, but most of them), Directory Opus would win.
Actually I considered writing my own file manager, starting last summer.......one that would share many of TC problems, because this is the way that gives the best dev time/effect ratio. Anyway, I failed to find a team.

Thinking about the best software that I use....it's hard to say what's best. And certainly none of the programs that are the most important to me. Maybe because I just don't know problems with them?

I'm rewriting this part of the post for the 3rd time already because after long thinking the first 2 candidates turned out to be not so great, Programmer's Notepad crashed a few times and XmPlay has too inflexible GUI. So the prize goes to Process Hacker. A very powerful task manager. It's quite complex, but despite using it a lot I'm yet to find any bug. It can do a lot, works fast, is quite ergonomic. The only compliant that I have is that after changing sorting of processes from the default tree mode, you can't restore the tree, at least in an intuitive way.
I think I could find some trivial programs that *are* perfect, but nevertheless I think that Process Hacker is more praiseworthy.

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PowerPro
It performs so many tasks for me that I am able to forgive its rare crashes.

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The criterion for perfection is going to be different for everyone, but I have a difficult time calling something close to perfect that's not a constant companion on my system. However, that's a very short list there's only a few programs that I have running ALL the time.

Of these, I think NotePad++ is probably the best. Of course there are some minor annoyances, but it never crashes and has a long list of nice extras. I have it running with a white-on-dark grey format with an easy to read font, making it very easy on the eyes. At any given time I have 12+ tabs open for various projects including my todo list, PFW stuff, etc.

The other programs constantly running on my machine are Firefox, Pstart TrueCrypt, and TaskSwitchXP.

Edit: here's how I set it up. I look at this at least once a day.

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it's not portable, but i'll choose Winrar.
also, +1 on notepad++, and xmplay cause of it's total awesomeness[if you don't mind it's inflexible gui, as very well stated by webfork]

Nobody mentioned Opera so far, I guess that's my favorite. It is far from perfection of course but gives the best online experience to me. It also serves as a bookmark manager and a snippet library, though I use Breevy since a few months for this purpose.

The second place goes to Adobe Fireworks. You may hear that Photoshop is the application for web design - no, Fireworks is.

I like Notepad++ a lot but just a few days ago switched to PSPad. So far so good.

PowerPro is also very powerful but I use only a fragment of it, some hotkey and window thingies. Sometimes I make scripts to spare time and then it is a real lifesaver.

Breevy is my new favorite. It's a text expander but a very well built. Unfortunately not free but worth the money. It completely changed my coding behaviour, speeding up the process significantly.

StrokeIt is also close to perfection in its field, I use it all the time.

I also have to mention Dropbox, I use my usb stick only occassionally since I found it.

NexusFont is also a newcomer to me. Since I learned it enables to load fonts without instaling them, I use it whenever a new font is needed. Clean & simple.

I'm also a great InDesign fan though nowadays I rarely use it.

And finally Total Commander I like its simplicity and the internal file associations feature. It enables me to use my favorite apps by double-clicking on associated files, even without admin rights.

Closest to perfection, for me, is Executor.

Even though I'm a fan of the following programs -- XMPlay, AkelPad, Opera, Pale Moon, PDF XChange Viewer, Open++, SearchMyFiles, Everything, Locate32, MPlayer WW -- they all have their issues.

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is it stealth?

- Opera
- XMplay
- FastStone Capture

Opera web browser is feature-rich, fast and rock solid. In addition, its user interface is highly customizable: you can freely edit the content of most toolbars and move nearly any toolbar to any side of the window.

The productivity tool I use is 7plus, but it isn't close to perfection. It's one of the most buggy pieces of software I have ever used. (However, it means a lot that I mention 7plus here despite of its bugs.)

I also find the media players which I use (Media Player Classic Home Cinema and mplayer2) almost perfect.

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Opera by far, great software by a company with a sense of humour.

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Added 177 Applications: Portable and an AutoIt MVP
SoftwareSpot - Portable Apps

Google's Picasa. Nor essential, neither a constant companion.
Maybe, with the help of PortableApps.com, one day portable.


This is the response I was expecting. I wanted to know the reasons


I actually can't see good reasons to pay for a license of Winrar. There is a large offer of freeware and FOSS archivers at the same level. And there are new players from the far east. Bandizip (korean, mentioned by I am Baas here) and the chinese Haozip and Kuaizip are very interesting and rich featured apps.

- Opera
- Everything
- Fastone Capture
- POP Peeper

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<<---It's have to be STEALTH !!!--->>

How sneaky!

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Indeed. I've tried a lot of archivers, like 7zip, and peazip, but at the end of the day, nothing can convince me to ditch winrar. (although 7zip comes very close to do so). Guess i'm too accustomed to it.i like it's clear interface, it's usability, small size too...as for the chinese players, i haven't used them, but they surely do look a lot like winrar, and this says a lot

I do miss the "estimate compression" function that WinRAR used to have. Is that in any of the OSS offerings out there?

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