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 Programmer's Fonts
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
- Free Programmer's Fonts
- 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 / Open Source Non-SQL Database Servers and Engines
- Free Royalty Free Music and Sounds
- Free Programmer's Fonts
- Free Font Manager Software
- Free Text User Interface Programming Libraries and Source Code
- Free Alternative Operating Systems
- 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 Make the Meta Tags for Your Website into an Editable Region in a Dreamweaver Template
- How to Create Bulleted Lists (Unordered Lists) for Your Web Page with KompoZer
- How to Point Multiple Domain Names to One Website: And How to Avoid Search Engine Problems When Doing So
- How to Create a Bulleted List (Unordered List) for Your Website in Dreamweaver
- The Decline and Fall of Internet Explorer 6: Implications for Webmasters
- Should You Choose a Linux or a Windows Web Hosting Package? Is There Such a Thing as a Mac Web Host?
- How to Redesign a New Website without Affecting the Old Site Until the New One is Completely Finished (Using Dreamweaver)
- Is There a WYSIWYG Editor for PHP? Should I Use PHP or HTML for My 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
- 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 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 Change the Disk Signature of a Drive Without Losing Existing Data or Reformatting
- 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
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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 Make the Meta Tags for Your Website into an Editable Region in a Dreamweaver Template. A meta description tag provides a short summary of what a web page is about, and is meant for search engines to display underneath your web page's title in search engine results. Templates are used by the Dreamweaver web editor to let you manage multiple pages on your website in an easy and efficient way. This article answers a question asked by a few visitors on how the two can be made to work with each other.
- New page: Free / Open Source Non-SQL Database Servers and Engines. Looking for a free database engine for your program or application, but don't want the overhead of an SQL-based database server? Check this new page out for a list of some free and/or open source non-SQL database servers and engines.
- New page: How to Create Bulleted Lists (Unordered Lists) for Your Web Page with KompoZer. Unordered lists are useful if you want to place a list of loosely related items on your web page. This article shows you how to do this using the free KompoZer web editor.
- Looking for a way to create and update your website simply from your web browser, without having to learn a web editor? Check out the Free Content Management Systems (CMS) PHP Scripts, where yet another web-based software has just been added. This one is fairly new on the scene and even allows you to do page level customisations ("customizations"), where different pages can have different layouts (if you need that sort of thing).
- A new uninstaller, Uberstaller, has been added to the Free Uninstallers page. Third party uninstallers like this are used by some people to completely get rid of a program from a computer, particularly when the program's own uninstaller leaves bits and pieces of itself (eg in the Registry or in the Windows system folders). There are now 8 uninstallers listed, so even if you don't like this one, there are others you may want to try, including one that actually monitors a new software installation so that it can track all the modifications a setup utility makes to your system.
- New page: Free Royalty Free Music and Sounds. The new Free Royalty-Free Music and Sounds page lists websites that provide free royalty-free music, songs, and sounds that you can use on your websites, videos, powerpoint presentations and so on. If you are a non-musician and want to spruce up your work with some music or sound, and don't want to run afoul of copyright law, check this out.
- Is your website usable by the blind and the disabled? Find out with the newest free online accessibility validator that has been added to the Free HTML & CSS Validators, Broken Link Checkers, Browser Compatibility Checkers page. No installation required; all you need is your web browser.
- Not satisfied with the fonts you have? Design your own with the newest program to be added to the Free Font Editors and Font Creation Software page. This one, DoubleType, is open source and lets you create TrueType fonts. It works on any system with a Java runtime (eg, Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris).
- Symbian, a popular operating system in mobile phones, has been added to the Free Alternative Operating Systems page. This OS is designed with mobile devices in mind, and features a real time kernel, pre-emptive multitasking, etc.
- New page: How to Point Multiple Domain Names to One Website: And How to Avoid Search Engine Problems When Doing So. Find out why you might want multiple domain names pointing to your website and how to do it correctly so as to avoid the problems that it might have on your search engine rankings.
- A new fixed-width font, Anonymous Pro, has been added to the Free Programmer's Fonts page. Like most (if not all) of the other fonts suitable for use in programmer's editors, the font visually distinguishes between characters that can be easily mixed up.
- Photoshop Express from Adobe has been added to the Free Online Photo Editors page. This is a rudimentary photo editing software that you can access from any computer using only a web browser. It allows you to do simple touch-ups of your photos (cropping, resizing, red-eye removal, sharpening, etc) as well as store your photos online.
- New page: How to Create a Bulleted List (Unordered List) for Your Website in Dreamweaver. This article deals with how you can create one of those lists with bullet points preceding each item using the Dreamweaver web editor. It's very handy if you want to list things but don't want to use numbers since that would suggest some sort of sequence or order to the items. (And yes, I use this type of list a lot on thesitewizard.com.)
- New page: Free Programmer's Fonts. This new page lists monospace (fixed width) fonts that have special features useful to programmers, as well as webmasters who hand code in HTML/CSS. The fonts listed here were moved to their own page from the Free Fonts page, which has a wider variety of fonts that is useful for both documents and visual design.
- A new free anonymous proxy service has been added to the Free Anonymous Surfing and Proxies page. This one gives you a German IP address and is able to remove cookies and scripts from the web pages you visit. There is also a HTTPS (secure) version available. Such services allow you to surf the internet without leaving a trail of information about yourself wherever you go.
- New page: The Decline and Fall of Internet Explorer 6: Implications for Webmasters. Yes, Internet Explorer 6 is finally dying. While webmasters and security pundits the world over breathe a sigh of relief, this article deals with some of the practical aspects of that demise where webmasters are concerned.
- Looking for an email program that you can run on your own computer? The newest addition to the Free Email Clients page works on Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris, and can handle multiple email accounts, email filtering, spell checking, all the usual email protocols, and even has built-in support for encrypted email (using GnuPG). Check it out.
- A new web server has been added to the Free/Open Source Web (HTTP) Server Software page. Tornado is a scalable non-blocking web server designed for real-time web services. It is able to handle thousands of simultaneous standing connections. It is the open source version of the server developed for FriendFeed.
- New page: Free Font Manager Software. Looking for a program to manage your collection of fonts? These free font managers let you organize your fonts into categories, install and uninstall fonts, load them on-the-fly into your system so that you can use them with a particular program without permanently dumping them into your system font folder (thus potentially slowing your system down), see sample text of fonts (even if they're not installed), check out the font licensing, font metrics and other font information stored in a font, etc.
-
A new CAPTCHA script has been added to the Free PHP CAPTCHA Scripts
page. The script allows you to add a test to your contact forms to make sure that the person submitting the form is a human and
not a spam program.
Note: for those who would rather not modify your own PHP scripts by hand, you may prefer to use my step-by-step tutorial on How to Add a CAPTCHA Test to Your Feedback Form which uses a different set of (free) programs to do the job.
- New page: Should You Choose a Linux or a Windows Web Hosting Package? Is There Such a Thing as a Mac Web Host? Those who are thinking of starting a website will have noticed that some web hosts advertise Linux packages, others Windows, still others FreeBSD. Should you choose a Linux web host or a Windows one? What if you have a Mac? When do you need a Windows web host and when a Linux or FreeBSD? This article attempts to answer these questions.
- Microsoft's research operating system, Singularity, complete with source code, build tools and documentation, is now listed on the Free Alternative Operating Systems page. If you're thinking of creating your own OS, check this out to see how it implements advances in software engineering to make a more reliable system.
- Another frequently asked question (FAQ) has been added to the How to Add a CAPTCHA Test to Your Feedback Form Script: Reducing Spam in Your Contact Form tutorial. This one deals with the error message from ReCAPTCHA about using the "JavaScript free version of reCAPTCHA" in a browser that has JavaScript. Note: if you do not already have a contact form on your website with CAPTCHA support to filter out spam, read that article for an easy way to do this.
- Thinking of creating your own fonts that will have the exact design you're looking for? Check out the newest addition to the Free Font Editors and Font Creation Software page. This one, Type Light, handles both OpenType TrueType fonts (.ttf) and OpenType PostScript fonts (.otf). And there are a number of other free font editors listed on that page too, if you prefer something else.
- A new shopping cart software has been added to the Free And Open Source PHP Shopping Carts page. Besides the usual features that most shopping carts have, this program (OpenCart), supports product reviews and ratings, the display of related products, downloadable products (for those who are selling ebooks and software), multiple currencies, multiple tax rates, shipping weight calculation, unlimited categories, and so on. If you're thinking of selling anything from your website, check it out.
