Software for Windows

I use the following Windows software having no sufficiently good counterpart running on Linux, for my purposes:

• Adobe Acrobat (for creating PDF files from PostScript and MS Word files)
• Beyond Compare (excellent directory/file compare shareware, $30)
• Xenu (excellent website link checker, free)
• Eudora¹
• Microsoft Office XP (Word, Excel, PowerPoint)
• Quicken
• TurboTax
• Various software that came with hardware add-ons (see below)

All of the above are available for Mac OS X except Beyond Compare and Xenu. Beyond Compare will probably be ported to Mac OS X at some point (and FileMerge/opendiff are available in the meantime), while Xenu will probably never be ported (judging from remarks on its website).

I use the following Windows software having perfectly fine (or superior) counterparts in the Linux world, for my purposes:

• GNU Emacs (most critical for my quality of life under Windows)
• Cygwin Tools (for providing UNIX commands in an Emacs shell -- very important)
• ctrl2cap (for switching Ctrl and Caps-Lock -- very important for Emacs users)
• Audacity (excellent free sound editor/player)
• Ghostscript
• Ghostview
• psutils
• Mozilla Firefox web browser
• Various browser extensions
• Winamp (classic sound player)²
• Adobe Acrobat Reader (for reading PDF files)
• MiKTeX (very nice TEX/L^ATEX distribution for Windows)
• MP3ToWaveConverter (shareware, $15)
• DiskPie (decent shareware pie-chart disk-usage analyzer)
• ActivePerl
• Tera Term Pro and ttssh (secure telnet shell)
• WinZip
• ws_ftp