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R is an open-source statistical software package. Many users contribute by writing their own packages. Some favorites are ggplot2 for plotting, reshape for restructuring and aggregating data, plyr for a user-friendly interface to apply, and tikzDevice to save R graphs as LaTeX output. This will give consistent fonts for pictures and text and simplifies defining axis labels containing formulas and greek letters. The package data.table performs fast operations on large datasets, such as summarising, grouping or joining data. |
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Notepad++ is a free source code editor with many features, such as syntax highlighting and regular expression search and replace. It is very easy to call external programs from Notepad++, for instance to compile TeX documents or run Stata programs (see also my downloads page). Also available as a portable application. |
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Octave is free open-source software primarily intended for numerical computations. The language is very similar to Matlab. Most of my Matlab scripts work in Octave without having to change anything. |
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Portable MiKTeX is a portable version of MiKTeX that you can install to and run from a USB stick. Also useful if you don't have administrator rights on a computer. |
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TortoiseSVN is an easy to use version control system. It integrates with Windows Explorer so you can easily see which files or folders in your working copy have changed since you last updated from your project repository. |
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SumatraPDF is a free lightweight open-source portable PDF viewer. Two benefits are the option of inverse searching (i.e. you can double click on a line in the .pdf, which brings you to the correct place in the original .tex file) and the fact that SumatraPDF doesn't lock the file that you are viewing. This means that you can keep your .pdf open, while re-compiling the original .tex file, and SumatraPDF automatically detects these changes and re-loads the file. To setup inverse searching with Notepad++ as the editor, you have to run SumatraPDF once with the following options (e.g. from the command line) SumatraPDF.exe -inverse-search "\"C:\Program Files\Notepad++\notepad++.exe\" -n%l \"%f\"" Note the escaping of quotes. You have to change the path accordingly if you installed Notepad++ somewhere else. See the links below if you want to use a different editor. To use reverse searching, you should compile with the synctex option, e.g. pdflatex -synctex=1 file.tex or place\synctex=1 in the document preamble. As far as I know, this only work with pdflatex. More information, for instance on how to use inverse search with a different editor such as WinEdt, can be found here, here, here, and here. |
