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 Online Editors and Integrated Development Environment (IDE)
- 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 and Rapid Application Development (RAD) Software
- Free Make Utilities (Program Maintenance and Building Software)
- Free Setup / Installers / Uninstallers
- Free Autorun/Autoplay DVD and CD Menu Creation Software
- Free Command Line Shells
- Free Programmer's Fonts
- Free JavaScript Minifiers (Minimizers), Obfuscators and Compressors
- Free Java Resources and Tools
- 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 JavaScript Minifiers (Minimizers), Obfuscators and Compressors
- Free Image Pop-Up JavaScripts (Where Image Overlays Current Web Page)
- Free Royalty-Free Stock Photos
- Free Solitaire Games
- Free Start Menus for Windows 8
- Free Online Editors and Integrated Development Environment (IDE)
- Free PHP Compilers: compile PHP scripts to native code, .NET or Java bytecode
- Free Embedded Web Video Player Scripts/Code
- Free Image/Photo Slide Show JavaScript
- Free GUI Builders, Application Builders and Rapid Application Development (RAD) Software
- Free Autorun/Autoplay DVD and CD Menu Creation Software
- Free DVD Authoring and Creation Software
New Pages on thesitewizard.com
- How to Add a Contact Form to Your Website with BlueGriffon 2
- How to Publish (Upload) Your Website with BlueGriffon 2
- BlueGriffon Tutorial: How to Design a Website with BlueGriffon 2
- What Should the Width of a Web Page Be?
- How to Move Your Website to SSL (ie, Convert from HTTP to HTTPS)
- How to Redirect a URL
- Does the Price of a Domain Depend on the Name Chosen? Why do Some Domains Cost So Much?
- Do I Need a Web Editor if I Create a Blog?
- How to Use Web Fonts: CSS Tutorial
- How to Insert a YouTube Video into Your Website with Microsoft Expression Web
- How to Install and Configure Apache, PHP, Perl and MySQL on Windows the Easy Way (with XAMPP)
- Can you register a domain name directly with ICANN instead of through a middleman?
- Free Mobile-Friendly Two Column Layout Wizard
- How to Make Your Images Mobile-Friendly (Responsive Design)
- How to Make a Mobile-Friendly Website: Responsive Design in CSS
- Should I Use a Specialized Blog Host or Install My Own Blog Software?
- How to Reserve a Domain Name. Do You Need a Web Host if You Want to Reserve a Domain for Future Use?
- What's the Difference Between a Content Management System (CMS), a Blog, a Web Editor and an Online Site Builder?
- Should I Learn HTML or Just Use a WYSIWYG Web Editor? Pros and Cons of Using a Visual Web Editor vs Learning HTML
- How to Centre a DIV Block Using CSS
- What is MySQL? What is a Database? What is SQL?
- What is HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP and Perl? Do I Need to Learn Them to Create a Website?
New Pages on HowToHaven.com
- How to Boot a CD or DVD in Windows 8.1
- How to Change BIOS Settings on a Computer with Windows 8.1 Installed
- How to Shut Down Windows 8 (Full Shutdown and Normal Hybrid Shutdown)
- How to Set Up a Standard User Account (or Limited Account) on Windows Vista and Windows 7 for Daily Use
- 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
Popular Pages
- How to Create/Start Your Own Website: The Beginner's A-Z Guide
- Hard Disk Backup and Restore, Hard Disk Image and Cloning Utilities
- Free Antivirus Software
- Free DVD Authoring and Creation Software
- Free Data Recovery, File and Partition Recovery, Undelete and Unformat Software
- Expression Web Tutorial: How to Design a Website with Microsoft Expression Web
- Dreamweaver Tutorial: How to Design a Website with Dreamweaver CS6
- 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: for historical reasons, this What's New column also includes information from
thesitewizard.com's news feed
and HowToHaven.com's news feed
.
- A new implementation of Smalltalk has been added to the Free Smalltalk Compilers and Interpreters page. This one lets you write computer programs in the Squeak/Smalltalk language for execution on a web page without requiring your visitors to install any plugins. For those unfamiliar with Smalltalk, it is an object oriented language, second in the list of "most loved" languages among 64,000 developers surveyed in 2017.
- New page: How to Add a Contact Form to Your Website with BlueGriffon 2. Find out how to add a contact (or feedback) form to your website using BlueGriffon. This is the final chapter of the BlueGriffon 2 tutorial, so if you were waiting for me to finish the series before making a website, you can now find all the chapters online.
- A new SSH program has been added to the Free SSH (Secure Shell) and Telnet Clients page. For those not familiar with such things, SSH clients allow webmasters to access the computer where their websites are hosted through a command line window, as though they are seated directly at that computer. They are often used to perform various administrative tasks that are otherwise difficult (or impossible) to do.
- Are you setting up your own business (online or otherwise)? Then you probably need an accounting software to keep track of your finances. Check out the Free Accounting Software page, where a new program has just been added.
- Two open source programs have been added to the Free Clipboard Managers and Extenders page. Such software are especially useful to programmers and webmasters who may cut/copy and paste a lot of text (and other things like images, filenames, HTML, etc) between different windows. They allow you to paste something you copied some time ago, and that you may have already overwritten in the default clipboard.
- A new open source program for Windows has been added to the Free Screen Video Recorders and Screen Capture Software page. This one is a Windows program that can do video recordings of the screen (along with audio from a microphone or speaker) and webcam, as well as take screenshots.
- A new computer program has been added to the Free File Synchronization Software page. Such tools allow you to back up your files and folders to another location and keep the data in sync. This latest addition not only supports backing up to the usual hardware devices (like hard disks, USB drives, CD/DVD media) but also to FTP servers and over the local area network.
- New page:
How to Publish (Upload) Your Website with BlueGriffon 2.
This article deals with how you can transfer your website to the Internet. It is chapter 8 of the
BlueGriffon 2 tutorial.
(Note: for those who don't actually use BlueGriffon, but want to upload your pages or other files, please read my more general tutorial How to Upload a File to Your Website.)
- A free and open source program has been added to the Free TV PVR (Personal Video Recorder) and TV Recording Software page. This one handles a wide variety of inputs (DVB-C/C2/T/T2/S/S2, ATSC, ISDB-T, IPTV, SAT>IP, etc), supports EPG (Electronic Programme Guide), and can also serve as a TV streaming server. For those who are not sure what I just said because of the heavy jargon, the software essentially lets you record TV shows, and can also send those shows to other devices in your home.
- Another open source tool has been added to the Free Make Utilities page. For those not sure what "make" in this context means, it refers to a type of software used by programmers to automate the process of building a computer program from its source files.
- Another free computer program has been added to the Free Media Player, Free DVD / Blu Ray Players page. Like the others listed there, it handles a large number of media formats, in addition to DVDs and Blu Rays.
- New page: How to Create Multiple Pages for Your Website with BlueGriffon 2.x. This article shows you how to add multiple pages to your website using the free BlueGriffon web editor. It is chapter 7 of the BlueGriffon 2.x tutorial.
- Another host has been added to the Free File Storage Hosting site. This one is from Mozilla and it allows you to upload a file of up to 1 GB in size for download by one person within 24 hours. I have no idea how long this service will last though. Nearly all the services I previously listed on the page have long disappeared. (Free file storage hosts seem to have a half-life measured in months, if even that.)
- A new text editor has been added to the Free Programmer's Editors and Plain Text Editors page. This one runs on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux and is open source.
- New page: How to Add a Navigation Menu to Your Website with BlueGriffon 2.x. Find out how to add a navigation menu, complete with buttons that change colour when a mouse hovers over it, to your website using the free BlueGriffon web editor. This is chapter 6 of the BlueGriffon 2.x tutorial.
- Another Atari ST emulator has been added to the Free Atari Emulators page. This one is open source and comes with ROMs for Atari 520ST and 1040ST. For those wondering, an Atari emulator is a computer program that mimics the old Atari computers sold in the 1980s and 1990s, and can run software written for those machines on your modern computer.
- New page: How to Make Text and Images into Clickable Links with BlueGriffon 2.x. This article shows you how to make the words and pictures on your website into links using the free BlueGriffon web editor. It is chapter 5 of the BlueGriffon 2.x tutorial.
- New page: How to Change the Background Colour of Your Web Page in BlueGriffon 2.x. Find out how to change the background (and foreground) colour of the entire left or right column of your web page (or even the whole page, if you like) with the free BlueGriffon web editor. This is the fourth chapter of the BlueGriffon 2.x tutorial series.
- The new free version of Kaspersky Antivirus has been added to the Free Antivirus Software page.
- A new web analytics package has been added to the Free Web Statistics and Web Log Analyzers page. This open source software, consisting of JavaScript and PHP scripts, provide a wide plethora of statistics on your visitors in real time. If you don't want Google Analytics or any of the other remote-hosted web statistics services because of privacy concerns, you may want to check this one out since it's installed on your own web server.
- New page: How to Change Fonts and Customize the Text on Your Web Page with BlueGriffon. This article deals with how to change fonts, use bold, italics and underline, and change the text size and font colour with the open source BlueGriffon web editor. It is chapter 3 of the BlueGriffon 2.x tutorial series.
- New page: How to Add Pictures and a Site Logo to Your Website with BlueGriffon 2.x Find out how to insert pictures (including a logo) into your website using the free BlueGriffon web editor. This is chapter 2 of the BlueGriffon 2.x tutorial series.
- A dense linear algebra programming library that can fully exploit the power of multi-core CPUs and GPUs has been added to the Free Numerical, Mathematical, Statistics Libraries and Source Code page.
- Another computer program that can capture the text found on an image has been added to the Free OCR Software (Optical Character Recognition) page. This program recognizes a huge number of languages (eg, English, French, German, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Russian, Spanish and lots more) and can even translate those words to a language of your choice.
- New page: BlueGriffon Tutorial: How to Design a Website with BlueGriffon 2.x. If you are thinking of creating a website, this BlueGriffon tutorial shows you how you can design a mobile-friendly, multi-page website with the current version (2.x series) of the free BlueGriffon web editor.
- New page: What Should the Width of a Web Page Be? I was asked by a visitor how wide his web page should be. This article addresses that question.
- New page: Free JavaScript Minifiers (Minimizers), Obfuscators and Compressors. This new page lists free tools that can shrink the size of your JavaScript code (sometimes referred to as "minify") as well as some that can obfuscate it (that is, make it hard to understand). They may be useful if you want to improve the responsiveness of your website or perhaps obscure your JavaScript from a casual inspection.
- New page: How to Move Your Website to SSL (ie, Convert from HTTP to HTTPS). This article deals with the issue of moving a website from HTTP to HTTPS. Besides discussing the pros and cons of the conversion, it gives a checklist of things that you need to remember to do. You can also read the guide if you are planning to start a website, and want a better understanding of what this is all about.
- Another source of free pictures has been added to the Free Royalty-Free Stock Photos page. This one has both scenery and people photos which are released under the Creative Commons Zero licence, which means that they may be used for any purpose without attribution or payment, even on a public website that you created.
- Two cryptographic software libraries have been added to the Free Encryption / Cryptographic Libraries and Source Code page. If you are writing software for the Internet, or any other type of software, these libraries allow you to add encryption support for your program without being a cryptographic security expert. (In fact, these libraries assume by default that you aren't an expert, and so have appropriate options selected by default. You can of course override them if you wish.)
- New page: How to Redirect a URL. I was asked by a visitor last week how he could set things up so that when visitors go to the old URL of a web page, they will automatically be sent to its new address. This article shows you how to redirect URLs using .htaccess.
-
[Updated] The Free Feedback Form Wizard
now supports the Invisible ReCAPTCHA test. With this facility, you can generate a contact form for
your website with a test
that only shows if Google cannot figure out if the sender of the message is a human or a spam computer program.
(Note that you can still generate a form without any CAPTCHA test, or one with the visible "I am not a robot" test. It's up to you. It's just a new option for those who want it. And it's all free.)
Find out more from my guide on adding a CAPTCHA test to your form.
- New page: Free Image Pop-Up JavaScripts (Where Image Overlays Current Web Page). I'm sure you have seen sites where if you click a thumbnail, a bigger version of the image pops up overlaying the current web page. Now you can implement this on your own website with these free image pop-up JavaScripts.
- New page: How to Insert a DIV Block and Other HTML Elements into a Web Page Using JavaScript. This article discusses one way to insert a DIV block (or other HTML element) into a web page using JavaScript.
- Two new scripts have been added to the Free JavaScript Calendar and Date Picker Scripts page. They allow you to add a date picker to your web forms, where users can click a date field and select a date from a calendar that pops up.
- New page: How to Insert HTML Code into a Web Page with Expression Web. Find out how to insert HTML code into your website (whether in the main body of the page or in the HEAD section) using the free Microsoft Expression Web editor.
- Does the Price of a Domain Depend on the Name Chosen? Why do Some Domains Cost So Much? This article discusses some possible reasons why the total bill you get for your domain name differs from the price listed on your registrar's page.
