It’s hard to find the good apps for Windows these days. You have a specific problem that seems like it should have been solved a long time ago, and you don’t want to hear about how you can pull the arm of an LLM slot machine and maybe get a sort of solution for $??.99.
I’ve collected a few apps here that I would put on any new install of Windows. They work great, have no AI features, and are mostly free and open source.
Wiztree
Are you constantly filling up your hard drive(s)? Have you accepted the grim reality that you may never be able to buy an HDD again? Wiztree can help you find all the stuff clogging up your disk and turn it into an overwhelming piece of abstract art.
It scans your drives super fast and points out the biggest space hogs. Using Wiztree also taught me more about all the weird little (and in some cases, big) files Windows creates. Why the hell do you need hiberfil.sys? Delete it and find out!
Winmerge
Winmerge is an open source file diffing and merging tool. It’s not exciting, but it’s very useful for finding what changed between single files or whole sets of folders.
Oh wait here’s something exciting. The documentation is available in English, Hebrew, and Japanese and in all three translations the Copyright notice is for “Thingamahoochie Software”. So neither Jewish nor Japanese people have a word in their languages for “Thingamahoochie”. Fascinating.
Everything
The first time you search for a file in Everything and it appears instantly, it’s infuriating. How is this not the default search tool for Windows? Why wouldn’t Microsoft pay the developers whatever they wanted to make this work forever? They could hire a person whose sole job is to yell at people who slowed it by trying to make Windows more “agentic”.
Anyway, download this and never use the built-in Windows search again. Ask yourself what else they took from you.
PowerToys*
PowerToys is actually a bunch of tools that would be nice to have on Windows by default. The docs for PowerToys say its for “power users”, but there’s some really useful basic stuff in there.
Ever wanted to keep one window on top all the time? How about switch between dark and light themes based on the time of day? Or, you know, open apps quickly? Whoa there power user! You’ll have to get this DLC.
My favorite and the best named Toy is ✨FancyZones✨. You can create a window layout and quickly snap windows into that layout. This is perfect if you are a vertical monitor weirdo who wants to stack up windows when you’re not poring over full pages of POPEYE “Magazine For City Boys” on the Internet Archive.
*Had to add the asterisk because one of the Toys, Advanced Paste, now has an optional AI feature. It is really easy not to use because it requires an LLM API key.
ripgrep
You may know about grep, the search utility available on UNIX-based operating systems. You give it a regular expression, it searches for lines matching that expression within files. ripgrep is like that, but for Windows. In most cases it seems like it’s faster than good ole grep.
This one is probably the most power user-y tool I’m recommending, but it really comes in handy if you’ve ever wanted to hit Ctrl+F on a whole directory, or even a whole hard drive. Of course you can do much fancier searching than Ctrl+F allows by using regular expressions.
For example, you can look for a word in files with a certain extension. Let’s say you only care about finding the term “AI” in markdown files. Your ripgrep command might look like this:
rg AI -g '*.md'