Being a professional Drupal web developer, I try to practice my skills in as many environments as possible. That way if the need arises, I can still do my job efficiently. Because of this, I switch between a Macbook Pro laptop and my Windows Workstation to work with HTML, CSS, and PHP code. I choose to use a Linux web server environment, more commonly referred to as a LAMP stack. I do this because of the many advantages of running a Linux web server, which include security and advantages with running Drupal, more specfically Drush to manage my Drupal sites. I have heard a lot of good things about the Notepad ++ source code editor and Windows Notepad replacement, but just finally decided to check it out today. I have to say, so far I am very impressed.  Learn more about why I switched after the jump.

Open Office is the open source alternative to Microsoft Office, and does a great job of competing with it's commercial rival. You can open most, if not all Microsoft documents in Open Office with minimal formatting errors, and even save documents in Microsoft formats that open up pretty well in Office. Open Office also comes with a word processor like Microsoft Word, a spreadsheet component like Microsoft Excel, and a presentation component like Microsoft Powerpoint. Open Office even comes with a drawing component that has some nice options to create your own digital art. The only thing Open Office seems to lack right now is database capability like Microsoft Access, but not everyone needs that anyway.

DiffMerge is a useful tool for comparing 2 of the same text files, and merging the differences if you want. It is great for keeping track of the changes between different versions of configuration files, html files, and even revisions in documents. Diffmerge integrates with the Windows explorer, which allows for easy right clicking and merging files within the Windows explorer. It is highly configurable allowing rulesets and options to provide customized appearance and behavior. Diffmerge is also available in 42 different languages and has the same features across multiple platforms including Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux.