Software engineers are like children — we love to play with toys. Fancy IDE themes, Quake-style terminals, dozens of plugins for everything — it’s a lot of fun to play with all these lovely things, and it feels especially good when these tools do something useful. Today I’m going to share a list of my favorite software that I use and recommend.

No long descriptions, just a list of the best tools for developers. Get ready do download things 🍿

1. JetBrains IDEs

JetBrains is building the best IDEs on this planet. Period. Long time ago Resharper changed the world of .NET development once and for all. It was slow and greedy for memory, but it was a game changer. These days I mostly use Rider, DataGrip and sometimes GoLand. Try and buy JetBrains products if you haven't done already (*they don't pay me, on the contrary, I pay them for my license).

2. Warp terminal (macOS)

I used to use Hyper with a bunch of plugins, but recently switched to Warp terminal. It's fast, offers lots of features out of the box, looks awesome and its AI Command Search is fantastic (at first I underestimated it thinking it was just a marketing ploy, but my assumption turned out to be wrong, it's really cool).

3. Fig autocomplete (macOS)

If you don't use Warp, then take a look at Fig — an awesome autocomplete for your favorite terminal. It's much better than terminal autocomplete plugins I've seen so far.

4. Lens (UI for Kubernetes)

Lens Desktop is the only application you need to take control of your Kubernetes clusters. It's built on open source and free.

5. Plugins time🎉

My favorite plugins for JetBrains IDEs and Resharper (some of them are also available for Visual Studio / Visual Studio Code):

5.1 Heap Allocations Viewer

Highlights local object allocations, boxing, delegates and closure creations points.

A very useful and handy plugin to help you see, understand and, possibly, minimize heap allocations in your code.

5.2 NSubstitute Complete

If you use NSubstitute (the best mocking .NET framework), then you have to install this small yet useful plugin right now. It kindly generates mocks and Arg.Is / Arg.Any.

5.3 NUKE Support

This plugin makes Rider / Resharper more NUKE friendly by adding icons, live templates and runner features to your IDE.

5.4 CognitiveComplexity

This plugin will help you not to get carried away too much.

Implements live calculation of the Cognitive Complexity metric, which was proposed by G. Ann Campbell in Cognitive Complexity - A new way of measuring understandability (c) SonarSource S.A. 2016-2018, Switzerland.

5.5 .ignore

If you're a Git user, just install this one and keep reading.

5.6 Material Theme UI

The most popular set of themes for your favorite IDE.

5.7 Better Comments

Check out these comments. Aren't they beautiful?

5.8 Key Promoter X

Very annoying plugin that will teach you some useful hotkeys unless you remove it first.

5.9 GraphQL

If you work with GraphQL, then you'll like this one. Autocomplete, code highlight and query runner for GraphQL.

5.10 Rainbow Brackets

For those who loves brackets...

5.11 Structured Logging

For everyone who does logging (sounds like for everyone).

5.12 Ryan Progress Bar

And to top it off... the most useful plugin ever — cute progress bar 🙄

Alright, we've had a quick look at almost all plugins I use (except a few themes in addition to Material Theme UI), and it's time to wrap it up. I hope you found something useful (or at least entertaining). And feel free to share your favorite software in the comments section below 😉

Cheers!