Name a little known program that you fancy quite a bit

[abolibibelot]

Name a little known program that you fancy quite a bit (freeware preferably).

I'll go with sfk, A.K.A. “Swiss File Knife”. It's a small command line utility (2.8MB) with a tremendous list of capabilities, to process files or text or code in pretty much every way imaginable.

“Amazing multi-platform single-file executable with built-in help and more features than I can reasonably list. If you need to do something with your system or its files or network or... or... [...], Swiss File Knife can probably do it.”
Review from “danlock” on SourceForge

I've used so far:
– sfk setbytes ~ “set bytes at offset within a file”
– sfk partcopy ~ “copy part from a file into another one”
– sfk hexdump ~ “create hexdump from a binary file”
– sfk hexfind ~ “search static binary data”
– sfk xfind ~ “search in text files using wildcards and simple expressions”
– sfk xed ~ “edit stream text using sfk expressions”
– sfk md5 ~ “calc md5 over a file, compare two files” (also md5var to calculate the MD5 checksum of a string of text, can be used for instance to generate complex 32 bytes passwords out of simple, easy to remember expressions)

It's 100% safe.

As an example, a script I made to list and download programs from French channel Arte's replay platform, since the GUI utility Captvty stopped supporting it (and its development is way slower than it used to be, while the purported replacement Captvty 3 has been in beta for years, and doesn't work on Windows 7). It's crude, but works. (Rename to .bat to try it. Requires sfk.exe, curl.exe, yt-dlp.exe. The layout of the HTML page presenting the list of available programs changes slightly every few weeks, then it no longer works and has to be tweaked, I have yet to find a workaround. Any suggestion welcome.)

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As an honorable mention: FART, A.K.A. “Find And Replace Tool”, which I discovered while updating sfk and haven't actually tested yet, but the classy name alone makes it a must-have. (Although whatever it does, sfk can probably do it just as well, and much, much more.)
Surely endorsed by that classy lady.

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While I'm at it, I am still looking for a command line tool or efficient script that would:
– compare two files, of any length, starting from a specified offset
– stop at the first difference found and output the offset of the first difference, relative to the beginning of each file.
It may be possible to do that with sfk, I have yet to try its file comparison features.

[Barrythecrab]

My pick is "Route Generator". A nice little program that you can use to make a map route, and use your own icon for the vehicle. I have also used it for plane travel routes. It certainly could be utilized for similar visuals. https://sourceforge.net/projects/routegen/

[abolibibelot]

My pick is "Route Generator". A nice little program that you can use to make a map route, and use your own icon for the vehicle. I have also used it for plane travel routes. It certainly could be utilized for similar visuals. https://sourceforge.net/projects/routegen/

For a similar purpose, and for a one time use, for the intro of a video I made a looong time ago, I had been looking for anything that would allow me to create an animated map, “Indiana Jones style”; the NLE I was using (Magix Video Deluxe) apparently had a dedicated plugin for animated itineraries but it required an extra .NET Framework component I couldn't install for some reason (or I decided that it was not worth the risk of screwing up my system just to be able to install said plugin, without even knowing if it would work as intended); then I found a basic little program called Itinéraire (created by a member of French video forum Le Repaire) which did the job; it had some quirks, and could only export in 720x576 resolution, but I found the result satisfying enough to not bother looking for another. The one you proposed seems way more polished.
Attached is the intro in question (music: “Lesson learned”, from the soundtrack of the cartoon series ThunderCats, known in French as Cosmocats – my brother was fond of that cartoon, I had downloaded the soundtrack for him, and found that particular tune beautiful, and perfectly fitting).
Oh, and I almost forgot the outro (set to the tune of the movie Rain Man).
The delightful lady cat in those videos had to go away in 2019.
Sadly, I couldn't possibly do that by now... not so much the video, but the whole thing – a ~1500km car trip in less than 3 days, just because I felt it was important that my brother (who has a mental disability) visit our grandmother very probably for the last time (he hadn't seen her in over 10 years, she was nearly 90 years old; and indeed, while she was still going strong that summer, her health went seriously downhill a few months later, and she died at the end of the next year, after a whole year of pointless intensive medication). As often it was a lot of effort for little effect, but I had a lot of spare energy at the time, and a tiny bit of luck sometimes. And it was, indeed, important; nowadays, nothing feels important anymore.