Essential Software Developer Tools

1. Notepad++ is a free (as in "free speech" and also as in "free beer") source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages. 


2. WinMerge is an Open Source differencing and merging tool for Windows. 


3. 7-Zip is a file archiver with a high compression ratio. 


4. Visual Studio Community. A fully-featured, extensible, free IDE for creating modern applications for Android, iOS, Windows, as well as web applications and cloud services. 


5. Visual Studio Code is a lightweight but powerful source code editor which runs on your desktop and is available for Windows, OS X and Linux.