So much of IT comes down to tools. I love getting a recommendation from a colleague that improves my workflows. Here are a few of my favorites that can benefit anyone, no matter what your specialty. I do database work, so my examples come from that area. I use these on Windows, but some tools are available for other platforms.
Keepass: Password storage. Put this auto-type behavior on the folder that holds all your sql logins and press control-v after you’ve just come from a sql query window. So great!
CREATE LOGIN [{UserName}] WITH PASSWORD=N'{Password}', DEFAULT_DATABASE=[master], CHECK_EXPIRATION=OFF, CHECK_POLICY=ON
For my personal info I use 1password. People without password managers drive me crazy. Watching them work the internet makes my head hurt.
Sublime Text: This text editor can do multiline editing better than SSMS does it. Say you have a list of tables you need to drop. Copy that list into Sublime Text, do a little key command to get your cursor on every line and then start typing the drop statement. Sure you could do this with some powershell, but some reason, this is just really fun. This one costs money.
Ditto Clipboard Manager: Back at the beginning of my career, I had a co-worker who wouldn’t stop raving about his clipboard manager. I ignored him and I was WRONG to do that. Eliminates so much extra tabbing and thinking. If you copied it – it’s in a little pop-up menu you can activate with a key command. I use ctrl-~.
Path Copy Copy allows you to copy UNC paths from your mapped drives. Instead of getting L:\folder, you’ll get the shareable UNC path like \\server\sharename\folder.