Good PAID Software -- Your Favorites

[Quin]

Easier to just use Astro-Grep.

installer is 10 MB in size, 45 MB of space is required. I think that's too much for a search program. Compact programs ten times smaller have been proposed above.
grepWin-x64-2.1.8_portable.exe = 1.5 Mb

There's also the totally free and open source ripgrep, weighing in at around 5 MB.

[Randy Walker]

Easier to just use Astro-Grep.

installer is 10 MB in size, 45 MB of space is required. I think that's too much for a search program. Compact programs ten times smaller have been proposed above.
grepWin-x64-2.1.8_portable.exe = 1.5 Mb

My laptop came with a 2TB SSD. Who doesn't have at least a 1TB drive these days? Astro-Grep may not be the smallest, but i like the results enough I don't care about the 45MB. Until someone ports 'grep' over to Windows, I'm using it. Even then, if grep's not free, I'll stick with Astro-Grep.

[Randy Walker]

There's also the totally free and open source ripgrep, weighing in at around 5 MB.

Huge learning curve and readme doesn't really help. Give us some syntax or a UI to go with it.
And, Linux has the real 'grep' so I don't understand why they bothered to do a Linux release.

[BarryG]

Who doesn't have at least a 1TB drive these days?

Me. My refurbished ThinkPad has a 256 GB SSD. I don't do gaming anymore so it's more than enough for my needs. And my desktop's SSD for C: is only 100 GB in size. It's a mistake to assume everybody has oodles of space free, even in 2025. People are more frugle than you think, especially in this current worldwide cost-of-living crisis.

[Randy Walker]

Who doesn't have at least a 1TB drive these days?

It's a mistake to assume everybody has oodles of space free, even in 2025

Why? MS assumes you do, and they assume it all belongs to them to do with as they wish, copy it all to their cloud, sell it, whatever they want. Mutant SOBs that they are.
Your 256 GB SSD is probably 50% free space or more. 256 GB is a ridiculous amount of drive space. Not to mention 1TB and more. My friend back in Florida has at least two 1TB SSDs in each of his machines. The way MS bloats with each new release, overkill is a prime requisite for pretty much all PCs today. Even Linux is trying hard to catch up in that race.
It's just not early DOS days any more.

[BarryG]

MS assumes you do

The space MS requires for an entire Operating System is different to the requirements for a single app.

And yes, you'd be surprised how little free space the non-technical end users have. I ask my users when doing support for my app (using a function in my app to tell them, so they don't get it wrong) and a heck of a lot of them have around only 50 GB free on average. It's really not uncommon at all.

[Piero]

Huh?
Did you miss this thread?
dnGrep lets you make a custom install, so it's "heavy" only if you want…
regexpeditor seems interesting too (just saying; didn't test it; I'm Mac…)

Oh, wait… this is a PAID soft thread; ban me Fred!

[CDXbow]

The only 3 pieces of paid software I use are PB (of course) and Corel's Paintshop Pro and Video Studio. You can often get them as a bundle for around $150 USD. Pretty good value, especially compared to Adobes prices for similar products. I've used PSP for 25+ years so it's an old friend, I only bought a new version recently because W11 would not install my nearly 20 year old version. I got the bundle with Video Studio because I wanted to do some video editing. Both products have a pretty good support ecosystem, though not as big as Adobes.

Bit off topic but I have got to give a shoot out to some folks who offer free web sites - infinityfree.com I've tried a few this year and this seems the best. You get 5 GB, 3 subdomains, support for PHP and MySQL and more 'web apps' than you can poke a stick at, including Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal. Almost seems to good to be true. Recommended.

[Piero]

https://www.popclip.app


https://redsweater.com/fastscripts/

[DeanH]

Who doesn't have at least a 1TB drive these days?

It's a mistake to assume everybody has oodles of space free, even in 2025

Why? MS assumes you do, and they assume it all belongs to them to do with as they wish, copy it all to their cloud, sell it, whatever they want. Mutant SOBs that they are.
Your 256 GB SSD is probably 50% free space or more. 256 GB is a ridiculous amount of drive space. Not to mention 1TB and more. My friend back in Florida has at least two 1TB SSDs in each of his machines. The way MS bloats with each new release, overkill is a prime requisite for pretty much all PCs today. Even Linux is trying hard to catch up in that race.
It's just not early DOS days any more.

Regardless of what Microsoft wants, my employer now only provides laptops to programmers and applications support people (like myself) that have a single 256Gb SSD. No desktops allowed. (They do allow docs.) Special application is needed for anything else, and from personal experience, they often reject it. No good blaming them, they're the bosses. When producing commercial software, I always assume lowest common denominator in terms of hardware because more often than I would like, that's what they have. The number of recently purchased low-grade, low-cost laptops with only 1366 x 768 resolution and 256 Gb SSD and 8Gb (not 16!) of RAM is appalling and very common. I would love to redesign my windows for 1920 x 1080 res only but I simply cannot as there are hundreds of the lower grade systems out there. That is my cut-off point nowadays. Not to mention all the 5-10+ yr old computers still being used. I have no control over what users have so must accommodate their situation. It may not be DOS days any more, but BarryG is correct: there are a lot of users with limited drives and space. Despite Mickeysoft ceasing official support for Windows 10 in October (apart from the paid extensions), I bet that O/S will be around for a long time, just like Win 7 and XP were. (I have several users still on Win 7.)

[PBJim]

Regardless of what Microsoft wants, my employer now only provides laptops to programmers and applications support people (like myself) that have a single 256Gb SSD. No desktops allowed. (They do allow docs.) Special application is needed for anything else, and from personal experience, they often reject it. No good blaming them, they're the bosses.

Are the laptops intended as these users’ only machines? Use of laptops causes poor posture and it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve overheard comments in IT departments at clients’ offices about staff wrongly using them as their main machines, when they should consider the effect they have on health.

If what you say is the case Dean, it’s rather worrying that employers can still think it’s okay to flout health and safety and disregard employees’ health in that way.

[Piero]

https://ettoresoftware.store/mac-apps/typeit4me/

For PB, you need to adjust prefs, and sometimes restart it (after making changes)

[DeanH]

Regardless of what Microsoft wants, my employer now only provides laptops to programmers and applications support people (like myself) that have a single 256Gb SSD. No desktops allowed. (They do allow docs.) Special application is needed for anything else, and from personal experience, they often reject it. No good blaming them, they're the bosses.

Are the laptops intended as these users’ only machines? Use of laptops causes poor posture and it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve overheard comments in IT departments at clients’ offices about staff wrongly using them as their main machines, when they should consider the effect they have on health.

If what you say is the case Dean, it’s rather worrying that employers can still think it’s okay to flout health and safety and disregard employees’ health in that way.

Everything is HP due to a state-wide contract. For admin and developers, we have a docking station with the laptop, standard keyboard, mouse, and two 32" monitors. However, out in schools, docks are rare.

My point is that one can say there's a minimum, ideal hardware set but that changes with time. If one is producing commercial software that could be used anywhere, what's in the real-world has to be taken into account. It would be great if I could rely on all displays being 1920 x 1080 and everyone having 1Tb drives, heaps of memory, etc, but that just isn't the case. I spoke just today with a school librarian who still has a desktop PC with 2Gb memory and 2 cores. I guessed it is more than 15 years old, maybe 20. At least it had Win 10, but there are still some 7's out there. Even an XP I know of. My minimum is Win 10 now. What I develop will work on that but may not necessarily work on Win 7, for example.

[Little John]

This thread becomes increasingly unreadable.
Dear admins & moderators, please remove all the offtopic blah-blah from the thread!