Free Programming Tools and Utilities
Editors, Debuggers, Help Authoring, Setup, Version Control, etc
Free Programming Tools / Resources
You can find tools, resources and utilities for a wide variety of programming tasks below.
If you don't see the category of tools you want listed in the index below, please check out the Miscellaneous Free Programming Tools page, a catch-all page for everything that does not have its own page. Note that compilers and interpreters, source code and libraries as well as documentation are listed separately on their own pages.
Help and Documentation
Text and Source Code Handling
- Free Programmers' Editors, ASCII Text Editors and IDEs
- Free Java IDE and Editors
- Free Text Search and Replace Utilities
- Free Text and Binary Comparison / Merging Utilities (Diff/Merge)
- Free Clipboard Extenders and Clipboard History Managers
- Free Source Code Beautifiers
- Free Version Control Software
- Free Interactive Regular Expression (Regex) Testers and Builders
- Free Static Source Code Analysis Utilities, Source Checkers (Lint)
- Free Fonts for Programmers
Debugging and Binary Code Management
- Free Debuggers, Static Source Code Analysis Utilities, Source Checkers (Lint), Bug Trackers
- Free Disassemblers, Binary and Hex Editors, Hex Viewers
- Free DOS Extenders (Protected Mode)
- Free Text and Binary Comparison / Merging Utilities (Diff/Merge)
- Free Executable Compressors - shrink your EXEs and Binaries
- Free Windows Resource Compilers, Resource Editors, Resource Hackers, Icon Editors
- Free File Patch Makers (for Delivering Small Updates)
Compiler Construction and Grammars
Miscellaneous
- Free 3D Software Box Image Makers
- Free Interactive Regular Expression (Regex) Testers and Builders
- Free File Patch Makers (for Delivering Small Updates)
- Free GUI Builders / Application Builders
- Free Make Utilities (Program Maintenance and Building Software)
- Free Setup / Installers / Uninstallers
- Free Autorun/Autoplay DVD and CD Menu Creation Software
- Free Java Resources and Tools
- Free Command Line Shells
- Miscellaneous Free Programming Tools and Utilities
Engineering Software
Other Programming Resources
- Free Source Code and Programming Libraries - don't reinvent the wheel
- Free Compilers and Interpreters for Programming Languages
- Free Online Programming Documentation, Frequently Recommended Programming Books
- Free Emulators and Virtual Machines
Other Resources of Interest
- Free Security, Privacy, and Anonymity
- Free Utilities and Application Software
- Free Perl CGI Scripts
- Free PHP/Perl CGI Script Hosting
- Free PHP Scripts
- Free JavaScript, AJAX, DHTML and Web 2.0 Scripts
- Free Web Hosts, Budget Web Hosts
- More Free Webmaster Resources
- Free Tutorials and Articles for Webmasters
- Free POP3, IMAP, SMTP, Web Email
New Pages on thefreecountry.com
- Free PHP Web Based File Managers
- Free Electronic Circuit Simulation Software / Circuit Simulators
- Free Make Utilities
- Free Banner Rotation and Photo Slideshow JavaScripts: Rotate Advertisements, Photos, Banners
- Free Video Converters: Convert Movies/Videos between Different Formats
- Free Registry Cleaners and Registry Repair Utilities / Software
- Free Autorun/Autoplay DVD and CD Menu Creation Software
- Free 3D Software Box Image Makers
- Free DVD and VCD Players, Free Movie and Video Playing Software
- Free DVD Authoring and Creation Software
- Free Antivirus Software and Free Online Virus Scans
New Pages on thesitewizard.com
- How to Put a Clickable Email Address on Your Web Page Using Dreamweaver
- How to Install PrestaShop Shopping Cart on Your Website
- How to Make Your Links Change Colour When the Mouse Hovers Over It Using Dreamweaver: Creating Mouseover / Rollover Effects
- Will I Have to Continue to Pay a Fee to Keep My Domain Name After I Buy It? Can I Change Registrars? Can I Terminate My Domain Name?
- How to Put Multiple Feedback Forms on One Website
- What's The Difference Between Liquid, Elastic, Relative, Fluid, Flexible and Fixed Layouts?
- How to Add a CAPTCHA Test to Your Feedback Form Script: Reducing Spam in Your Contact Form
- How to Point a Domain Name to Your Website (Or What to Do After Buying Your Domain Name)
- What Does It Mean to Park a Domain Name? Domain Name Parking Explained
- Serif WebPlus X2 Tutorial: How to Design Your Website with Serif WebPlus X2
- How to Install Apache 2.2 on Windows Vista
- What is HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP and Perl? Do I Need to Learn Them to Create a Website?
- How Much Does It Cost to Set Up a Website?
- How to Design a Two Column Layout for Your Website Using CSS
- How to Create a Website with Dreamweaver CS4 (Dreamweaver Tutorial)
New Pages on HowToHaven.com
- How to Slipstream Windows XP Service Pack 3 to Create an Integrated XP Setup Disk with SP 3
- How to Back Up Your Hard Disk in Windows
- How to Securely Prepare Your Old Computer for Disposal
- How to Work Around the Missing Up Arrow Button in Vista's Windows Explorer
- How to Create a Bootable "Live" Windows Rescue CD
- How to Delete Undeletable, Locked, Busy or Currently In-Use Files in Windows
- How to Record or Save Streaming Music or Audio
Popular Pages
- How to Create/Start Your Own Website: The Beginner's A-Z Guide
- How to Create a Bootable Windows XP Setup CD/DVD on a Preinstalled Windows System
- Hard Disk Backup and Restore, Hard Disk Image and Cloning Utilities
- Free Spyware/Malware Removal, Detection and Prevention Tools and Sites
- Free Antivirus Software
- Free Device Driver Backup and Extraction Utilities
- Free DVD Authoring and Creation Software
- Free DVD/CD Emulators, Free Virtual CD/DVD Drives
- Free Data Recovery, File and Partition Recovery, Undelete and Unformat Software
- How to Create a Website with Dreamweaver CS4 (Dreamweaver Tutorial)
- How to Design and Publish Your Website with KompoZer
What's New
Stay Updated (Free)- Keep track of what's new on thefreecountry.com with your news reader
by pointing it to
thefreecountry.com's news feed
.
Note: this What's New column also includes information from
thesitewizard.com's news feed
and HowToHaven.com's news feed
.
- New page: How to Put a Clickable Email Address on Your Web Page Using Dreamweaver. For webmasters (especially those running businesses) who want to put an email address on their website, this article describes how you can make that email address into a clickable link.
- The new system programming language from the legendary Rob Pike, Ken Thompson and Robert Griesemer, currently named "Go", has been added to the Free Compilers and Interpreters for Miscellaneous Programming Languages page. Unlike the other commonly used system languages today, this one has built-in support for concurrent programming, a must with today's multi-core processors, and communication between concurrent processes. It is designed to be lean and mean, and have very fast compile and link cycles. Lovers of C and other lean systems programming languages should really take a look at it.
- For those who like to store their passwords, telephone numbers, serial numbers, etc, in a text file, the newest entry in the Free Secure Password Managers and Password Savers page lets you do so in a portable yet secure way. Your passwords are encrypted, and the entire file can be placed anywhere (a USB flash drive, your main hard disk, a floppy disk, whatever). No installation is needed and the whole program is extremely small. And free.
- New page: Free PHP Web Based File Managers. Install a web-based file manager on your website so that you can manage the files on your site simply by using a web browser. File managers let you do things like upload/download files, create directories, rename, delete, move, copy files, change file permissions, etc. Some of them even let you do things that you can't do with a normal FTP client, like extract files from archives (eg zip files, tar files) directly on your web server.
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Exciting news: Unreal Engine 3, the game engine used by lots of games, has now been added to the
Free Game Engines, Game Programming Libraries and Source Code page.
Both the engine and its associated tools are available in the free development kit, although you can use them only for non-commercial and educational
purposes. Now you can take advantage of the game engine used by professional game developers to create your own games, complete with a realistic
game environment, artificial intelligence (AI) for the computer controlled characters, 3D location-based sound effects, and so on.
It's all very exciting. And I almost fell off my chair when I found out it's available. If you've not heard of the Unreal Engine, chances are that you don't play many FPS (first person shooter) games.
- New page: How to Install PrestaShop Shopping Cart on Your Website. Are you selling goods or services on your website? Or perhaps you want to sell digital goods like ebooks, software, music MP3 files, etc, and don't know how to get your website to automatically deliver the goods sold to your customers after they pay for it. The PrestaShop software is a free (and open source) shopping cart program that you can install on your website to run your own online shop. This tutorial shows you how you can set it up.
- Looking for a way to sell goods, services or even virtual goods (like ebooks or software) on your website? The newest entry on the Free And Open Source PHP Shopping Carts page is PrestaShop, an open source shopping cart that has lots of features (a very long list; too long to mention here) that probably has the facility you want for your online shop. Check it out.
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A web host has been added to the Free Web Hosts
with Free Domain Hosting. This one provides 110 MB of disk space, 10 GB of traffic, PHP (with limitations), the ability
to host your own domain name, etc.
Sorry, I know that the list of free web hosts on that web page is getting a bit short nowadays, what with the frequent abrupt closure of free web hosts. I'll try to add more as time permits. As the maintainer of that list, I can tell you that free web hosts close very frequently, sometimes within a month or two of adding a new entry, so keeping that list up-to-date and populated is a big hassle. If you can afford it, it's really better to just go with a commercial web host. Just saying.
- New page: How to Make Your Links Change Colour When the Mouse Hovers Over It Using Dreamweaver: Creating Mouseover / Rollover Effects. If you're fascinated by how a link is highlighted when you move your mouse over it on some sites, including thesitewizard.com itself, this article teaches you how you can create the same effect for your website using Dreamweaver. It also shows how you can change the default colour ("color") scheme for your unclicked and visited links, add/remove underlines, etc.
- Are you thinking of creating a community for your website where users can interact in a forum? A new PHP message board software has been added to the Free PHP Forum Scripts page that may be just what you're looking for. Like all forums, your visitors can sign up and post messages and interact with each other (and you). The software supports customizable themes, setting up of sub-forums belonging to different categories, assigning users to different groups with different rights, setting up of polls and calendars, and so on (too many features to list here). Check it out. It's free.
- New page: Free Electronic Circuit Simulation Software / Circuit Simulators. Build and analyse your electronic circuits using these free circuit simulators. It's more efficient, often more practical and quicker. Oh, and did I say that they are free?
- I still see many valuable sites located on Geocities. Since Geocities is closing on 29 October 2009 (yes, it's official now), if yours is one of them, please move it before it's too late. See the guide How to Transfer / Move Your Website from GeoCities: Closure of GeoCities' Free Web Hosting to make sure you don't miss an important step.
- Do you want to write a web-based program for your website but hate the JavaScript programming language? The newest addition to the Free Python Compilers, Interpreters and Implementations page lets you use the Python programming language to write programs that run in your visitor's web browser. Now you can harness the power and readability of Python to create a dynamic website.
- A new painting program for Windows and Linux has been added to the Free Drawing and Painting Software, Image and Photo Editing Programs page. This program, mtPaint, supports layers, undo, pressure-sensitive graphics tablets, a variety of effects, brush patterns, user-defined gradients, as well as the usual assortment of features such programs have. Check it out, or any of the other (numerous) free image editors listed on that page.
- A new video converter has been added to the Free Video Converters page. This one can convert DVDs as well as other video files between a wide variety of formats. It also support the conversion of audio files and ripping of music CDs. It's free, as are the other free converters on that page.
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The Microsoft Security Essentials, a free antivirus software from Microsoft, has just been released, and has been added to the
Free Antivirus Software and Free Online Virus Scans.
The software is reported to be lightweight and unobtrusive by many testers.
Note: even if you don't like this program, there are numerous other free antivirus programs listed on that page, including free versions from commercial antivirus vendors, so there's no reason for you not to have some sort of antivirus program protecting your system.
- New page: Will I Have to Continue to Pay a Fee to Keep My Domain Name After I Buy It? Can I Change Registrars? Can I Terminate My Domain Name? This article answers some questions newcomers have about registering a domain name, namely whether they have to continue to pay a fee to keep the domain name, whether they can change registrars and whether they can terminate a domain name if they don't want it any more.
- Google Sites has been added to the Free Web Hosts with Site Builders or Free Web Templates page. They provide free web hosting with a rudimentary online web editor, and may be useful if you want to create a hobby website. It doesn't allow the use of a domain name, though, so it probably isn't all that useful if you want your site to last. (See my article on Is it Possible to Create a Website Without Buying a Domain Name? The High Price of "Free". if you don't know why this is so.)
- A new clipboard history manager has been added to the Free Clipboard History Managers and Extenders page. Clipboard extenders like these are useful if you are a programmer or webmaster, since they make your job of cutting and pasting snippets of code or text very much easier, allowing you not only to use the standard cut and paste but also to copy multiple separate chunks of text (or whatever) for later pasting. They are also very handy for normal computer use, and you'll soon wonder how you ever lived without them.
- New page: How to Put Multiple Feedback Forms on One Website. I've often been asked whether it's possible to put 2 or more contact forms on a website, using thesitewizard.com's Free Feedback Form Wizard. Some webmasters want to do this because there are multiple people that visitors may want to reach. This article shows you how to do this.
- New page: Free Make Utilities. The MAKE software on this new page allow programmers to automate the building of their computer programs in a convenient and efficient way. As usual, they're all free.
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A new utility to back up and restore the device drivers on your computer system has been added to the
Free Device Driver Backup and Extraction Utilities.
Such a program is useful if you ever want to reinstall Windows and your computer manufacturer did not give you a CD containing all the
drivers for your system, a very common situation if you bought a pre-built system like a notebook.
(That is, you can use the program to make a copy of your drivers before reformatting or upgrading the hard disk or whatever, then allow your newly reinstalled Windows to install those drivers, giving you a working system again.)
