My Software

Though I want to get to a place where I can use solely free and open source software for my personal computing, I am not quite there yet. I use a mix of CLI-based software for mostly programming tasks on my Ubuntu Linux system, and GUI software on my Windows 10.

IDEs

Microsoft Visual Studio

I am a C++ Programmer. If you do any real programming for a MS-OS in C++, Visual Studio is your default IDE. I don't particularly care for this IDE too much. Though it is chock full of useful functions (Intellisense being #1), it is incredibly bloated. It crashes often, and build times are slow. I suppose this is a trade off for its wealth of functions.

Compilers

GCC

Light-weight, seamless, comes with all (most) distros of Linux; GCC is a great compiler. I don't even use an IDE on my Linux box. I just edit in vim, and compile with GCC via a makefile. For C/C++ programmers, I highly recommend gcc/g++.

Text Editors

vim/gVim

Vim is probably my number one favorite piece of software ever. My coding speed increased substantially once I started learning to use vim. Its light-weight, and never crashes. It's customizable so you can tailor it specifically to your text editing needs. Before using vim, I used to just edit all my source code within Visual Studio. I will never go back to that. Vim is free open source software, which makes it even better. If you use Linux, it's installed by default; you can start using it in your terminal right away. If you're a Windows user, I suggest gVim. gVim is the GUI version of the program, but aside from opening in a window rather than a terminal, there's practially no difference.

I've open-sourced my vim configuration file on Github. Have a look!

Game Development

OpenGL

In college, I did most of my game development with Direct X. Since graduating, I've been teaching myself OpenGL by programming my own game engine, and using it to create games.

freeglut

When making an opengl game, a windowing and event manager is really the first thing you need. Creating one myself seemed like too much of a hassle, so I decided to use good ol' glut. There are other window managers (perhaps better?) out there, but I just use glut because I'm used to it.

Gimp

I'm not much of an artist, but when I need to make graphics, I use Gimp. Its free software, multi-platform, and powerful. It gets the job done, especially for my terrible programmer art ;-).

Blender

I actually used to be able to make fairly decent models, albeit in 3ds Max. Autodesk products are way to expensive and way to proprietary for my tastes these days. Blender is an excellent alternative. Its got a steep learning curve, but you can make stunning 3d models/animations/scenes with it. Highly recommend.

Games

GOG

I'm not much of a PC gamer, but I do occasionally play games on my PC. I refuse to buy PC games with DRM, which leaves me with few options since most PC games these days have DRM. Great Old Games (GOG) has no a DRM policy, so I use it almost exclusively to buy computer games. If there is a Steam game you want, and the same game is on GOG, I encourage you to get it on GOG.

[go to home page]