This is an opinionated compilation of GUI software I use on Windows, and it is work in progress. I could have called it "an awesome list of the best applications and tools for Windows", but I am not that ambitious. I don't plan to add every app I use because some may be too specific (but some on this list are very specific too, so, I don't know, I may publish the criteria I followed later).

Updated 16/08/2020.

This list has been discussed on /r/windows and Hacker News.



JPEGView The fastest image viewer/editor. It can open the most common image formats (including JPEG, BMP, PNG, WEBP, TGA, GIF, TIFF and some RAW formats) and is extremely fast. The GUI is minimal but allows adjusting typical parameters. Unfortunately, it may have been discontinued, so I may invest some time to look at alternatives (maybe Honeyview, but it doesn't look there is something as good as JPEGView). For more powerful (heavier) alternatives that have an image browser, see XnViewMP below in the freeware section.



VLC Cross-platform multimedia player that can play most video and audio formats. It bundles its library of codecs (mostly based on the FFMPEG project) and supports hardware acceleration. See my default settings. VLC is also good on its Android version. For a more modern and probably better alternative, see mpv below.



mpv Fast, cross-platform video player. Uses lower resources, is faster, and plays UHD (4k/8k) content better than VLC. Unfortunately, it lacks some features (I still need to try this script) and I'm still not used to its UI, so I still combine it with VLC. For another open-source alternative, see MPC-BE below on this page.



7-zip File compressor that supports the most common formats. It can open many formats, including ISO images. Years ago I used the shareware application WinRAR, which in my opinion still has a slightly better UI (the interface in 7-zip is basic but works). The only other advantage of WinRAR is the possibility of compressing RAR files, but compressing files with open formats like .7z or .tar.xz is nowadays preferred, and WinRAR cannot do that. 7-zip by default adds a cascaded menu in the Explorer context menu for compressing and decompressing, and a separate menu for calculating hashes (all of them can be disabled and tunned in the preferences). Includes a command-line tool (7za.exe). There is a fork called 7-Zip-zstd which supports more formats: Zstandard, Brotli, LZ4, Lizard, Fast LZMA2 and decompression of lzip. p7zip is a 7-zip port to Linux/macOS (command-line only, and at this moment unmaintained).



ShareX Powerful screenshot/screen recording tool. It has many capture methods (region, window, scrolling, OCR...), a few upload destinations are supported, and can be very customized. Also, it includes additional tools such as a color picker, a hash checker (therefore, tools such as HashCheck are no longer needed), or a tool to change the DNS servers. Also, it adds an entry in the Windows Explorer's context menu to upload files to the supported services (that I always disable in the settings, because the same functionality is already available by default inside the "Send to" submenu). ShareX is a quicker, more powerful alternative to the open-source tool Greenshot, which is also very good, has a better image editor and may be easier to use. ShareX's screen recording functionality is very basic and probably can't replace the open-source tools OBS and Captura yet.



WinSCP SFTP client that also supports FTP, FTPS, SCP, WebDAV and S3. It is the SFTP/FTP client that has the best GUI (much better than FileZilla 3, for example). Remote editing works without issues, and it can store sites and credentials using a master password. The stored sites can be used to connect with Putty if it is installed (by default, it searches for the 32-bit version of Putty) and it has an option to "remember session password and pass it to Putty" in Preferences -> Integration -> Applications. Additionally, the different sites may be marked with different colors, which can very handy. See the settings I use.



Putty A simple and stable SSH client. It has support for other protocols such as telnet and rlogin, and can even be configured as a Cygwin terminal (I never tried that, though). Multiple enhanced forks exist, such as Kitty (this one works well). I haven't tried Superputty but looks good. Windows now has native OpenSSH client and server implementations, but I've had no reason to try them yet (and I imagine I would miss putty's ability to store bookmarks).



WinMerge Diff and merge tool. It has better performance than meld. I have to say that I don't have experience using other tools such as kdiff3 (cross-platform) or Beyond Compare (shareware), but with WinMerge I have never needed to use anything else.



DBeaver Multi-platform database tool. Supports all popular databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Oracle, DB2, SQL Server, MS Access, Amazon Redshift), has many features and its UI is intuitive. HeidiSQL is also good but has less database support and is Windows-only. Good shareware alternatives are Navicat and DataGrip. Other open-source apps that I haven't tried but that may be OK are SQL Workbench/J and SQuirreL.



qBittorrent Multi-platform, powerful BitTorrent client with a simple user interface. Deluge and Transmission are also good open-source BitTorrent clients, and that are cross-platform too, but I have found that on Windows qBittorrent works better. The freeware μTorrent used to be very good (until v2.2.1, I recall).



glogg Multi-platform GUI application to browse and search through long files. It can open huge files very fast in read-only mode.



KeePass A light-weight and easy-to-use password manager. For cross-platform compatible alternatives, see KeePassX and KeePassXC clones.



Sumatra Open-source PDF reader with support for other document formats. It can also open DjVu, EPUB, XPS, CHM, CBR, CBZ and MOBI files. It is less bloated than Foxit Reader (which now installs ads and other software by default, including a banner that must be disabled in preferences) and especially lighter than Adobe Acrobat Reader. There is also CDisplay Ex, but that comes with bundleware too. Nowadays, PDF support is bundled in Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, and these are usually fast enough at opening PDFs, so I don't always need to install Sumatra. When I install it, I add a simple change to the default configuration to speed-up the boot-up process.



Windows Terminal Terminal emulator for Windows 10, written by Microsoft. Finally, Microsoft published a better console, and made it open-source. It supports the Command Prompt (cmd.exe), Windows PowerShell, Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), and it has tabs. This makes ConEmu and probably Cmder obsolete.



PowerToys System utilities to maximize productivity, by Microsoft. Inspired by the PowerToys project for Windows 95, this is for Windows 10 only. It currently includes FancyZones (window manager), Shortcut Guide (Windows key shortcut guide), PowerRename (a Windows Shell Extension for advanced bulk renaming using search and replace or regular expressions), preview handlers for SVG and Markdown (that can be used with Directory Opus and Total Commander, for example), PowerToys Run (Keypirinha/Wox alternative), Keyboard Manager and Image Resizer (a Windows Shell Extension for resizing images).



calibre Cross-platform e-book manager, viewer, and converter. Especially useful if you own a Kindle.



BleachBit Cross-platform cleaner tool to preserve privacy. It can secure-delete files, folders, program's history, cache and temporary files. It can be an alternative to the problematic freeware/shareware CCleaner.



mRemoteNG An open-source remote desktop connection manager. Although it supports multiple protocols (VNC, SSH, etc.), I mostly use this when I need to connect to Windows machines via RDP protocol ("Terminal Server").



VirtualBox Virtualizer for x86 and AMD64 machines. It is a bit buggy, but I use it as a proper VMware alternative. Hyper-V could also be a free alternative for Windows Pro users, but VirtualBox allows sharing machines between Windows/Linux/Mac hosts.



Veracrypt Disk encryption software. TrueCrypt successor. If using Windows Professional, Microsoft's alternative BitLocker is available for free.



Audacity Cross-platform audio software.



HTTrack Website offline downloader.



Poedit Cross-platform translator for Gettext (PO) files.



GIMP Cross-platform image editor.



HexChat Simple IRC client. I rarely use IRC nowadays, but this is probably the best IRC client for Windows. It is much lighter than Quassel IRC, for example.



youtube-dl-gui A cross-platform GUI for youtube-dl. youtube-dl is a small tool to download videos from YouTube and hundreds of other sites. Can download/convert video and audio-only files in multiple formats. This includes the cli application and can update it automatically.



QGIS Open Source Geographic Information System.



Mobile Atlas Creator Offline map creator. I use it to create maps from WMS services to be used on LocusMap.



Zeal Offline browser of API documentation.



LibreOffice The open-source office suite. It is not perfect, but LibreOffice Writer and Calc can be useful alternatives to Microsoft Word and Excel.



Zenmap Official cross-platform GUI for the Nmap Security Scanner. The open-source Angry IP Scanner or the freeware Advanced IP Scanner may have a prettier interface, but they cannot compete with nmap discovery features.



Wireshark Network protocol analyzer.



HandBrake Multithreaded video converter. HandBrake is simple and stable video converter. For video ripping/compressing, the open-source MakeMKV and MKVToolNix are also applications to have in mind, especially if MKV can be the output format. Note that HandBrake is designed to be a video transcoder, and so it wasn't designed to allow passthrough. To be able to remux (that is: change the container format) or just re-encode the audio, see the alternatives Avidemux and XMedia Recode below.



Caesium Cross-platform image compressor. It provides an interface with a real-time preview, and can process multiple images at the same time. For lossless compression there is a separate app: CaesiumPH.



FileOptimizer Advanced file optimizer. Compresses many file formats without quality loss. For lossless compression of images, it can be an alternative to Caesium, especially when extreme compression is needed.



Goldendict Cross-platform dictionary program. Early access builds are available at GitHub. GoldenDict supports many offline formats (DSL, dictzip, Babylon, etc.) and has a (closed-source) Android version too.



SpeedCrunch Cross-platform, high precision calculator. Windows Calculator is probably OK too, and it is now open-source.



ConvertAll Simple unit conversion program for Windows and Linux. Current versions of Windows Calculator also allows doing conversions between the most common units.



Rufus Utility to create live USB systems from ISOs. balenaEtcher is a cross-platform alternative, also open-source, but unfortunately based on Electron.



CrystalDiskMark Small HDD/SSD benchmark utility.



CrystalDiskInfo HDD/SSD utility and health checker.