Notepad++ - This is the definitive notepad-related software you’ll ever need. Multiple tabs, keeps tracks of lines, lots of features and preferences. One of the most invaluable parts of it, is that you can close it or a update happens or maybe your PC will get knocked offline. You can come back to Notepad++, open it, and everything will be retained.

  • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
    61·
    23 hours ago

    I don’t know about “all that you’ll need to use”, and this might arguably considered cheating, but I’d take emacs. I think that it’s safe to say that there isn’t another software package that has the same degree of coverage of functionality. I use it for doing statistics notepad work, as a word processor, as a spreadsheet, as an email client, could use it as a web browser if necessary, as a version control client, for interactive diff merging, can use it as an LLM chat client, IRC client, text editor, IDE, orthodox-file-manager-style file manager, media player frontend, agenda manager, outliner etc. If I run M-x list-packages on my copy to run the package manager, it looks like I have 6,794 emacs software packages available in it.

    Unless you’re going to take a broader sense of “piece of software” that would let, say, a Linux distro be taken, I think that it’s pretty hard to compete with.

    EDIT: Maybe in the present-day world, you could manage with a Web browser, if you treat that as being a frontend to essentially all SaaS software, count that as being bundled with the Web browser. I guess you could argue that that might be broader, and you could probably function with basically nothing other than a Web browser on a thin client and get by.

    EDIT2: I guess you could also make an argument that the kernel is more-essential, because without that, nothing else can run, but I assume that you’re basically treating the kernel as a given and just asking about userspace software.