▼ screenshots ▼ downloads ▼ system requirements ▼ features

Your PC games sortedBy purchase date, duration played, date last played, price paid, price per hour, by longest session or even randomly (persistent) ...

Well over 40 sort criteria, explicitly usable in a 5 level sort hierarchy, individually ascending/descending, directly accessible from the table header.

The complete column, sort, and filter situation can be saved to presets and is also persistent between program sessions.

Some criteria have multiple variants, e.g. instead of precise date last played, it can be set to time-before-now in weeks, months, 3 months, 6 months, and years resolution. Imagine adding duration played as the secondary criterion here, or price per hour ...

Since this will likely make you pull old games to the front (regarding date last played), SlaloM records every single session (played via SlaloM), so later there can be features to display meaningful history information regardless. And a feature is planned to derive historic sessions from the file date of screenshots. :) An example for how outside-the-box the SlaloM project is. and filteredFreely create and assign tags. Clicking a tag (de)activates it and switches it through 3 filter states: "And" (Game must have this tag to be listed.), "or" (Will be listed in addition.), "not" (Any filter result so far that does not have this tag will be excluded.)

Create name search tags that function in the same way, except they are not assigned, they just filter by name, exactly like the filter box. E.g. click "truck" to green (=and) and "simulator" to red (=not), listing truck games that "are" not simulators. The name search tags are certainly a source of management inspirations.

Both tag types can be assigned to groups and even to sub-groups which can individually be collapsed.

The filter box, like you know it from Steam, is very powerful: Every word (separated by space) has to occur in a name. If a word is preceded by ! then it must not be in a name. "Quotation marks" combine several terms into one. Can search for beginning of name and also for Steam's appIDs. - manage your game library like a pro!

FreeNo payment, no subscription, no ads, no collecting your data, and no server dependency: Once you've downloaded it, you're autonomous. SlaloM's exclusive purpose is to get things done. After all, I am its primary user. launcher for all PC game clients and manually installed gamesThe concept is simple: Tell SlaloM about root folders (e.g. via drag&drop) where you or your non-Steam clients install games or applications. (Steam is handled automatically.)

Whenever SlaloM starts, a background process will look for new folders in those folders. If any are found (that are not on the ignore list), they will recursively be scanned for executables (Windows: exe, com, jar, bat, lnk; Linux: desktop, sh, jar, x86, x86_64) and documentation files (pdf, txt, doc).

The games will "permanently" be added to the library using the folder name. (You can rename the games freely.) You can easily define a launch menu for each of these from the scanned files. A streamlined tool for just defining one executable pops up automatically on first launch attempt. All this may sound crude and too much of a hassle, but in practice it's very easy and, most of all, it gets the job done just fine!

No game client has this feature because it is not newbie-friendly. I say: Just because there are people who have to roll over ramps, this must not mean that the rest of us will be denied the existence of stairs! Now you know what kind of user SlaloM was created for. Yes, noobs can make use of it to some degree, but to go all the way, you have to be a bit sophisticated.

Face it: You will finally have ALL your PC games in one library! That is worth the price of admission. with renaming, tags, big screenshot display, sorting by purchase date, install size, etc., with special Steam features.The list of your owned Steam games is read automatically from local Steam files. This includes DLC items, a game's list of available DLC, and more obscure stuff like "tools" (e.g. servers). This scanner is not 100% correct, but you can add the automatic download of your owned Steam games list into the mix (which you should because it also has the total time played per game). This local scanner brings a feature that no Web based solution can give you, namely the date you last played a game, by which you can of course sort.

Supports Steam family sharing and multiple library folders.

Local Steam screenshots are shown whenever you select a game that has any. Screenshots are a rather central feature of SlaloM, so it's finally time to take some. "Selecting a game in a game client shows me what it actually looks like right away? Preposterous!"

You can also open a game's Steam store page in the client or browser, you can also open a game's news and achievements page and your Steam review of the game, if you made one already. While we're at it: You can also go to a game's PCGamingWiki page, search it on GOG, isthereanydeal.com, steamdb.info, or Google.

You can also trigger the (un)installation of Steam games and comfortably open an installed game's appmanifest file. And you can open Steam's activate-product-key dialog (hotkey [F9]) which even does the initial two Enter-presses automatically, so you can paste your key right away.

But there's more: You can download the transaction data of all games bought via the Steam store, allowing you to sort by price actually paid, by discount at that time, purchase date, etc., and for other Steam games, there's a >70% precise importer via the copied text from your Licenses and Key Activations Steam page.

But there's still more, e.g. you can get the list of Steam games you and some other people have in common so that you can make meaningful LAN party decisions.

Forget the sad normality of torn apart PC game libraries, it's OVERCaveat: You still have to consider the games in your other game clients that you didn't yet show to SlaloM by having them installed, which of course includes games you buy in the future.

But regarding choices like "What should I play next?" and "What's my gaming history?", you can focus entirely on SlaloM with its superior management&filtering features and its awesome screenshot display(s).!

No adware, does not install crap, etc. - this is just a hobbyist product that makes it irrelevant for which game client (if any) a PC gamer bought their games, wrapping all libraries into one and adding sorely missing features like e.g. showing a screenshot when selecting a game. It's not just for occasional sorting/searching, it's meant for permanent use.

The filtering / sorting is far more powerful than you've ever experienced in any game client. I can pretty much guarantee that you've never had this much of a grasp of what's in your game library and what kind of gamer you are. Now you can bring order into the chaos and even change the way you make purchase decisionsFor example, I'm much more aware of the amount of good unplayed material I still have lying around, so I'm much more strict, stopped falling for the permanent "But it's discounted!" carrot.

Let's do the experiment .... click click click ... ok, everything listed but non-game entries (e.g. DLC hidden) ... 2881. Of these, played for longer than 20 minutes ... 565, which is about 20%. Of the rest (2316), only 2156 are on Steam (can't download purchase information for other types), and for only 497 of those I could download the transaction info - most probably because the rest are keys that came via bundles and are therefore not recorded by the Steam store. When I select those, SlaloM automatically displays the sum: About €1200 actually paid but (basically) never played. Plus all the unknown prices (probably dirt cheap, but still ...). It also displays the money spent per day: €0.5755 (Those summary currency calculations use BigDecimal, and the downloaded prices are stored as text right away - no floating point errors.)

That money is not wasted - it's just a far too large backlog. The confidence I gained via SlaloM makes it easy for me to boldly sail past the siren islands of all those great discounts. Hence: Less spending, more gaming and coding.

Btw., when I select all games in SlaloM that I have price information for, I get a spent daily amount of €1.6963 - and I also see the average discount: -68% See, I was talking about actual data and control. That's what you can have with SlaloM. And it's still mainly about playing games! Even more so than other clients since you see screenshots right away and have all games under one roof!!

You should think of SlaloM as a Swiss army knife and of yourself as someone who has never seen one before: You might judge it by the color of its casing and by the fact that you have to fumble a little to get your screwdriver. Best defer your judgment. SlaloM is more about features/ functionality than appearance. Wait until you have discovered the bottle opener. And the blackjack table. And the hookers. Whirlpool is somewhere on the loooong to-do list. Stick around, the average release cycle from v18 to v36 was 5 days! (90 day span)

So, I took a long hiatus from March 7th 2017 until now, February 24th 2019. I don't consider it to have ended, I just felt like fixing and improving a few things. Don't expect new versions anytime soon (only fixes if I find out I just botched something.)

Update 2022-05-20: I realized that on my NEW computer, SlaloM for some reason does not see the second Steam library folder. In case someone out there suffered the same fate: You could have told me, I'm an eager fixer if there's a reason (aka someone who cares). For myself I just added a hack in the source - not for release. I guess I'll have to add a dialog for manual definition of those folders. *sigh* Old code. And SO much to do ... no time ... I'll leave it like this for now.

▼ usage ▼ known bugs ▼ FAQ ▼ spread the word

For future visits, just remember this address:

gamelibrarymanager.com

Screenshots  ▲

SlaloM is a standalone Windows / Linux application (English only.) meant to be used instead of the Steam Library screen (but mixed use is no problem). Its features make it vastly superior. Examples: Tag-filtering, radically powerful sorting (e.g. by when last played, for how long, price paid, your best games in half-year steps, ...), automatic adding of games, screenshot display with various options, surf library as screenshot tiles. For Steam, the key information is automatically read locally - so, just run and done. But it can also download additional information, adding features and precision. To un"install", just delete the folder.

Make sure you join the 350+ members SlaloM users Steam Group or at least subscribe to its moderator-exclusive comments thread, because it announces new releases (incl. what's changed). Full disclosure: Most members seem to only be there for the free game keys I keep dropping on keygiveaway.com

Downloads  ▲

!AGE 16 OR OLDER! As per the new EU General Data Protection Regulation 2018-05-25 and according changes to German law, a person must be 16 or older (or their parents or such must agree) to accept privacy related agreements. Out of the box, this does not apply to SlaloM, but you can use it to send/download data, and you have to be old enough for all SlaloM decisions that leave data breadcrumbs. (Those features very explicitly tell you when you're faced with them.) I can't verify this, because guess what - I'd need a lot more data about you, kinda counter-productive. That's why I have to tell you that to use SlaloM, you must be !AGE 16 OR OLDER!

Please also read the text folded into the little "[privacy policy]" link half a screen further down. TL;DR: No need to worry, but be informed.

If you already have Java 8 installed, you only need this one small file which works on Windows and Linux. Do create a folder and move the file there before double-clicking it, because it creates a couple of files. Due to rights issues, you can't create it in your Programs folder, but you can later move the folder around without issues (incl. to your Programs folder), so at first, just create it for example on your desktop. Btw., here's the Windows icon in case you want to use it in a shortcut.Here's how you can properly integrate the SlaloM.jar, which is a version-neutral launcher created by running the downloaded SlaloM_vXYZ.jar, into your Windows taskbar, incl. highlighting of the button while the application is running:

1) Create a shortcut in its folder to the "SlaloM" file, which is really "SlaloM.jar". (Too many people use Microsoft's insecure default system settings that hide file extensions, ending up opening "pic.jpg" that is really "pic.jpg.exe", aaaand it's time to overwrite your whole PC with the latest backup image.)

Easiest way to do that: Right click the file without releasing the mouse button. Drag a bit. Release mouse button. In the context menu that appeared, select "Create shortcuts here".

2) Edit the shortcut's path and icon: Right click the shortcut, select "Properties", replace all text of the "Target:" text box with this (without the quotes): "javaw.exe -jar SlaloM.jar"

Press and hold shift, right click the file "icon.ico" (maybe seen by you as "icon"), and select "Copy as path". Back in the shortcut properties window, click "Change Icon...", click "Browse...", paste your clipboard text into the "File name:" text box, and click "Open". The one icon that's inside the file is automatically selected, so click "OK".

We're done editing the shortcut properties, so click "OK" again.

3) Rename the shortcut you created to "SlaloM" (or whatever you want), right click the shortcut, and select "Pin to Taskbar". Drag the new taskbar icon next to your Steam icon :)

4) DONE! Now SlaloM's Taskbar behavior is like that of any other application. If you minimize the program, you'll see that it has the highlight that means "Application is open.", and if you click it, it will be maximized again instead of starting again. Side note: If you'd ever start a second instance of the program from the same folder, the program would prevent itself from running twice in that place and would instead call the running instance to the front.

DOWNLOAD v[39, 2019-02-24 14!00 UTC] (~2.0 MB) What's new?

DOWNLOAD incl. no-install Java (Windows x64 only), needs above download!
v[2, 2017-02-11 05!00 UTC] (~40 MB zip)

This second download is required only in case you don't have Java 8 and also do not want to install it, otherwise you don't need it. Unpack it anywhere, then ALSO (!) download the above small file and put it into the subfolder "SlaloM" (not into the folder with the SlaloM.exe), start the exe to run. The exe also has a built-in icon, contrary to the small download.

System Requirements  ▲

PC, Windows/Linux, optionally Java 8 (see above). Steam is recommended but not required: SlaloM's features focus on Steam games, but it can also easily be used with other clients and manually installed games, because you can manually add games, and SlaloM can automatically add games via its root folder feature introduced with v27 on 2016-12-30.

Features  ▲

• Easily get all your local PC games into one library!While you can manually add games, applications, batch files, folders, shortcuts to SlaloM (e.g. via drag&drop), it's much more wise to make use of the automatic feature:
  
  Again with simple drag&drop, you can define root folders (e.g. where GOG Galaxy, Uplay, Origin etc. install their games, or where you do that manually). SlaloM will find new games in those places on every start, with a proper background scan that does not obstruct you, and will permanently add them, all combined under a dedicated "game client" tag.
  
  You can define as many root folders per "game client" as you want. E.g. create a set called "applications" and add your two "Program Files" folders to it. What, there's a sub-folder called "Adobe" with more programs that doesn't make sense in this form? Then just delete the automatic "Adobe" entry from your library, which optionally adds it to the ignore list, and add the folder itself as yet another root folder to the same set.
  
  This is a unique feature that you can hardly over-estimate: The mental hurdle of having to remember to add new games e.g. to Steam entirely falls away! So - without this nagging feeling that you probably forgot to add some games, and also that you have to keep adding new ones you buy in the future - for the first time you'll have it all under one roof, and it will feel SO natural and normal, you won't believe it until you've lived with it for a while! (Speaking from experience.)
  
  You probably subconsciously experienced it already: You're quasi addicted to your main game client (probably Steam), you rarely buy games for other clients and rarely use those other clients to play games. Because having multiple libraries requires you to basically decide what you will play before you have even opened the respective library whose job it is to ... help you decide what to play. This is all wrong!
  
  It's obvious that game client companies are asleep at the wheel: No screenshots when you select a game? No renaming, only rudimentary tag systems? But in my opinion, this rabbit hole goes a lot deeper: I believe that the best a relatively small store / client like e.g. GOG can do is to build an awesome client that can easily manage and launch all your PC games, like SlaloM does it, except polished.
  
  Because then people are extremely likely to use it since all their games are in there. And said company would always be in direct contact with the player. And since that client would solve "Steam addiction" and such, they would sell more games, because people have a strong reason less to not buy their games. I even suggested this to GOG, but it landed in corporate talk-to-the-hand hell. - With small reservationsYou can only add games that are placed / installed on your PC. (Well, if you absolutely insist, you could create a shortcut to a Flash game or something like that and then manually - not via root folder feature - add this to SlaloM.)
  
  For automatic adding, the games need to exist as folders/ files, so if you have games in your non-Steam clients that you haven't installed, they will not show up in the SlaloM library until you install them, after which they will stay for good. So, you have to still keep an eye on those individual libraries, but in practice, you trigger an install and forget about it. And next time you start SlaloM, a green blinking message will tell you about new games that have been found. And if those are ever not installed, well then you go through the necessary motions in those other clients.
  
  That's of course far from ideal, but given the simplicity of the concept and how versatile it simultaneously is, plus you just don't have this ability in any other game managers, it's worth a lot. It would be nice to be able to also add games that haven't been installed yet, and more importantly, to be able to join duplicate game entries with full control over what happens with each data field. (For the latter, something is planned, but I'm reluctant to implement it, because it would add yet another dimension to all changes/ extensions to the App class.)
  
  What I'd actually like to happen eventually is that we, the PC gamers whose purchases drive this billion dollar industry, create a heavily plugin-driven game library manager that only uses crude solutions like root folders as last resort fallbacks, but which otherwise directly and automatically supports all available game clients. Weird that this hasn't happened yet. Also weird that almost all game volume sliders are broken. And that most FieldOfView sliders have too low range or are even absent. And a gazillion other things. Almost as if we have to plug some holes in the world first through which Light is draining out before we can really have nice things.
  
  There's another reservation: When SlaloM automatically adds games from root folders, it can not decide which executable (or batch file etc.) to use, it can only create a list of candidates. So these games will show up as red entries in the list until you have either defined one or more executables (or even documentation files) via the launch menu editor, or, which is much more straightforward, until you just try to launch them, which will give you a list of only the executable-type files. Pick one, which launches (hopefully) the game and also "permanently" defines this as the executable to use. In most cases, this works just smoothly..
• rename gamesGive any game or DLC any name you want. Here are some examples from my library. Take advantage of the alphabetical sorting and add numbers to a series of games or years to a series like X-COM. Remove ™ ® © etc. and RENAME ALL UPPERCASE games to something that integrates better.
  
  These are YOUR games! You paid for them, but you aren't even in control of their name!? What are you, a guest in your own home? Take the damn power back already!
  
  The changed name will only be visible in SlaloM. You can switch display back and forth from the default name (aka the name you decided for) to the original name by just middle-clicking on the name column header, or you can choose this and some more options by right-clicking on the name column's checkbox for a menu. Sorting will not be affected by this, but starting v39 you'll have the option to sort by original name, too, so you'll be able to enjoy the great improvements your renaming caused.
• Screenshots everywhere!When you select a game, you'll see a big screenshot in a dedicated part of the GUI. Merely hovering on the screenshot switches it to fullscreen temporarily. You can set a duration for automatic change of the screenshot for both these situations, so lean back and enjoy! And when you toggle the narrow game list to fullscreen, the screenshot is even overlaid over the whole list (adjustable transparency).
  
  Clicking on the screenshot opens a fullscreen grid view (1x1, 2x2, ..., 5x5) with a random screenshot for each game of your current filter result list. Clicking on a game here opens said grid view with all screenshots of that game in chronological order, scrolled to the random screenshot you clicked before.
  
  You can mark screenshots as favorites and show those exclusively, preferred, not at all, or without special treatment.
  
  The Steam client writes a local image file with every screenshot you take, and those files stay until you move to a new computer. SlaloM shows these automatically, just like it shows your local Steam games automatically with no setting up required.
  
  Some non-Steam games have their own screenshot feature, or they are maybe on a client (e.g. Uplay) which also has a screenshot taking overlay like Steam. You can assign a custom screenshot path for every (non)Steam game, and images in that folder will be shown in addition to whatever other screenshot sources SlaloM may have.
  
  And finally, you can create a folder called "(screenshots)" with an application. Images in that folder will be shown in addition, so if all else fails, you could download screenshots (automatism for Steam games is on to-do list).
  
  SlaloM creates this folder automatically if you use it to take screenshots, which only works for a very limited amount of games, but has often enough lead to results where no other means were available. SlaloM also makes sure that screenshots that consist of almost entirely the same color won't be saved, so as opposed to Steam which happily takes all-black screenshots, SlaloM doesn't do that. On the other hand, you may take a screenshot with SlaloM and later realize that all you got was the game's launcher screen etc. - well, it's very limited.
  
  Just in case you didn't see this - you can use SlaloM as a general purpose application launcher, showing screenshots for all of those, so in case you wonder "WTF was this program again?", just look at it in SlaloM.
• Play Memory with your screenshots!But SlaloM-style, so there's something extra. Yes, you can just play good old memory where you have cards lying on their faces with pairs of image cards (all from the same game) and then click/guess/remember.
  
  But how about this: Have the cards revealed right away, but the pairs don't have an identical image, the pairs are just from the same game.
  
  Or play "guess the game name" by having one card being an image, the other being the game's name. Or the game's price you paid, or the date you bought it, amount of screenshots, genre, publisher, release date, install drive, etc.!
  
  But you don't have to play with images at all, or with only two cards, for that matter. It's all freely configurable.
• permanently hide gamesYou can (un)mark a game as hidden with a dedicated feature at any time. All other program functionality will obey this setting, so you can easily hide games for good.
  
  It's very easy to take a look at all the hidden games (with full availability of all the other features), but they won't show up unless it is your decision.
• assign and filter by various types of tagsThere are about six types of tags. Simply left-clicking one will change it from inactive to green (AND filter - a game must have this tag, else it won't be listed), then yellow (OR filter - these games will be shown in addition), then red (NOT filter - no matter what, these games will not be shown). Right-clicking gets you to inactive immediately.
  
  You can switch as many tags to as many different states as you want. The effect is always immediate. You can also define what the default state of any individual tag is (incl. inactive) and set all tags to said state with the "reset tags" button, but you'll mostly use the "clear tags" button which sets them all to inactive. There's also a "clear visible" button that only sets all to inactive that are visible in the current list: Tags in collapsed (sub)groups or in other tabs won't be affected by this.
  
  The tag types:
  
  1. your tags - You can freely create and assign these to games. They can also be put into groups and even sub-groups. Example: Make one called \"completed\" and assign it to all games whose end credits you reached. Or make several of this kind (just completed versus 100% and such) and put them into a group.
  
  2. name search tags - Yon can create but not assign these, because they just search the games' names using the exact same name filtering scheme as the game list's text filter box. Can also be (sub-)grouped.
  
  3. Steam properties and Steam user tags - They allow to filter by things like "Multi-player" and "Story Rich", but they are only available for the majority of games and are also fairly outdated. (It's on the to-do list.)
  
  4. status tags - They refer to a game's status like whether it's installed, whether you own it, if it's renamed, if it has screenshots, ...
  
  5. game clients & root folder tags - Each of these refer to a group of folders (A group name being e.g. "Origin" or whatever you want.) in which SlaloM automatically on every start finds new installed apps/games. Steam (for Steam games) and SlaloM (for manually added games) exist by default.
  
  6. Steam type tags - For the majority of Steam items, SlaloM knows whether they're DLC, a game, an application, a demo, a video, etc.
• sort like a maniacChoose from 30+ optional columns with well over 50+ sort and data display options, e.g. purchase date, price actually paid, price per hours played, date last played (optionally in (half) year steps etc.), randomly, install-drive / install-size, Steam user reviews (outdated and not for all games, but also has genre, developer, publisher, release date). The settings (columns, their options, sorting, filtering) are all saved between sessions and can also be stored as presets.
  
  As opposed to most other applications, in SlaloM you can explicitly define and see what your primary, secondary, ... sort criterion is (up to 5, with alphabetically ascending as the (invisible) final word), incl. individual ascending/descending, and you can do this with a click directly from the table header.
• powerful text filterEvery word that you enter in SlaloM's little box atop the game list has to occur somewhere in the game's name so that it's listed.
  
  If you directly precede a word with ! then that word must not occur.
  
  If you wrap a few words in "" then they will be treated as one word.
  
  If you precede a word with # then it has to occur at the beginning of a name.
  
  You can combine all these (but have to adhere to a certain order).
  
  All these features can be used in the name search tags.
• freely edit play timePer Steam game, you can enter a HHHH:MM:SS offset and even a factor (applied before the offset) in case this somehow suits your offset-entering habits for that game better. The result is how you'll see that Steam game's time in SlaloM. So, wiping hundreds of idling hours or hung tasks off the table is easy. Nobody on Steam will see the change - SlaloM was made for people who want to be the master of their own game library, not for people who need to pun here.
  
  Steam duration played is imported via an automatic Internet download that you have to activate (with your profile set to public). Btw. Steam date last played is read locally, the only way to obtain this information. Web-based solutions can't give you that!
  
  Game time for any non-Steam games can be edited freely. It is recorded via the rather crude but 100% compatible-with-everything method of "Click here when done.", which opens a dialog with the measured time, which you can edit right then and there, and you can also dismiss it, not recording this session/time (good for taking screenshots).
  
  SlaloM records every single play session of every (non)Steam game (date/time, duration), but so far this data has not yet been made use of - that's on the to-do list.
• Take notes for each game and tag.Personally, I have the date/shop/transaction/key page URLs and the copied game-key list of (some of) my purchased bundles stored as notes stored in the tag I made for that bundle, a tag that's of course in the sub-group for the respective store and in the group "bundles".
  
  You could also draft your Steam reviews as game notes in SlaloM. Also useful in case your Steam review gets lost, though I've never heard of such a thing.
  
  Or take note of known bugs or things to do (e.g. "still have to do Emily low-chaos / stealth playthrough"), though these might often be better expressed in the form of tags (e.g. "uninstall", "write review").
• open Web pages like PCGamingWikiFor Steam games, you can open the store, news, achivements pages in the client and again the store page and your review page (If you've reviewed the game already.) in the browser.
  
  For all games, you can open their PCGamingWiki page (that's the place where you get a nice overview with facts and solutions for common problems). And you can search the game on GOG, isthereanydeal.com, steamdb.info, and Google.
• great easy review scoringYou know when you're pondering if a game should get 4 of 5 stars or only 3, 50% or 60%, 71% or 78%? You're doing it wrong. Instead of imprisoning yourself in a strict review system that you henceforth have to live with at all times, instead of ignoring that little voice in your head that tells you that you're not quite all that certain about the score you gave ... make a statement about the score AND about your certainty!
  
  Sounds complicated? Isn't. By default, every game has a SlaloM user review score of 0%-100% (~50%) because you've got only one step in your scale, which is selected, because one always is. This score means that you're perfectly undecided.
  
  If you've checked the game out a bit, you might have the impression "This is at least on the positive side.", so you increase the available range by 1 and select the higher of the two: [0 | *1*] = ~75% (50%-100%), or if you're certain that it's bad, select the lower: [*0* | 1] = ~25% (0%-50%).
  
  The more certain you are, the more you can increase the scale and pick the appropriate level, e.g. increase it to 3 steps right away and choose the middle one: [0 | *1* | 2] = ~50% (33%-67%). But maybe it is not all that mediocre. Maybe it is a wee bit better than that. So, now you have no choice but to increase the scale even more (by 1 or 2, which toggles back and forth between the availability of a perfectly-mediocre score, logically).
  
  See, using a scoring system that scales with your certainty means that your statement about a game's score is more true than if you're forced to always express the same certainty - which you most probably do not have! This also increases the stability of your judgment over time.
• and review scoring for prosLike for example game magazines. Here, you define aspects of all games at once (e.g. graphics, how well the graphics are used, ambient sound quality, simulation quality ... it's entirely up to you), the score range for these aspects (e.g. from -5 to 0, or from 1 to 3), what each individual level means (in text) for each individual aspect, and then you take a game and define the importance of each of these aspects for the game, so in a jigsaw puzzle game, drag "physics" to 0%. And then score each (of the non-zero%) aspects. SlaloM will calculate the resulting score.
  
  Note: There may be a bug somewhere in there, I am not sure, so if you note an odd score that does not compute - that's the reason. I'll hopefully get around to that problem eventually.
• figures out if you own gamesYou can copy text from any game store Web page and let SlaloM analyze it for game names. You'll get a list with games you probably don't own or do already own, etc. - the quality of the results varies, of course, but the tool is still a time-saver.
• import Steam categories and custom appsThey are imported automatically on first start (when there are no categories yet), but you can also call this manually.
  
  SlaloM also imports apps you manually added to Steam, but this only works for apps without arguments. If you have defined arguments for an app in Steam, the import of that app will fail. (It's on the to-do list.)
• import Steam purchase date and price paidFor game keys unlocked on Steam, SlaloM can read through a clipboard-copy of your Licenses and Product Key Activations list with >70% correctness (The appIDs are not in there.) and probably very few false positives. This records the purchase date.
  
  For games bought directly on Steam, SlaloM can read precise purchase date, price actually paid, undiscounted price at that time, discount percentage, discount amount, tax paid, and transaction method directly from your logged-in Web browser with some help from you, but no extensions etc. required. This is >95% correct. (SlaloM can't handle refunds.)
  
  Price actually paid and the purchase date can also be entered manually, which has an overriding effect: Removing this information will return to whatever other information you already had.
  
  For a long time SlaloM user, it's of course easiest to just run SlaloM (or trigger Steam data update) after purchasing games, so that SlaloM records this date of first seeing the games as owned. That's how I always did it.
• data exportSince the Steam transaction data with precise date, price paid, tax etc. could be pretty interesting for people who like to toy with Excel and banking software, you can export this data to a CSV file.
  
  You can also just select some entries from your current list (with all the current columns, sorting, data display options) and copy them to the clipboard. E.g. you can make SlaloM display the game name in the form of a Reddit link incl. the two spaces at the end, so you can paste directly into Reddit comments, effecting a text list with links. The link goes to the Steam store or, for non-Steam games, to a Google search.
  
  Or export the shown list to a file incl. info about active tags, amount of (hidden/selected) entries, and sort orders.
  
  Or export a list of all Steam games with sub-lists about which DLC you own, don't own, and unknown (therefore probably not owned).
  
  Or export the game list in the form of URLs, which is similar to the simple copy&paste method, except it only uses the name column, and two of the three lists (URL name, Steam link, Reddit link) have bullet points.
• automatic data backupNot only are SlaloM's files written as safe saves, so only once a file has completely been written, the intended target file will be replaced with it, but there's also an automatic backup of your database with a 100 file rotation! (Settings only have 1 backup.) Plus the rotation is not shifted before "tags.bak01" (The second backup.) is at least 15 minutes old, letting "tags.bak99" drop into oblivion. So, even with ferocious saving, you'll have at least 24 hours of backups.
  
  The data file, by the way, is (kind of) human readable, so if you really know what you're doing, you may adjust missing or incorrect data. While that format is wasteful, who cares about that extra half gigabyte (with all backups and thousands of games)? When you install one of those newfangled 20GB game monstrosities, do you look for every GB? And this isn't just an arbitrary shovel of game textures, this is your game library!
  
  Due to the high similarities between the files and the wasteful format, the data compresses well if you use an archiver that supports solid archives (meaning that all files are compressed as one data block instead of individually, so don't use ZIP for this), like e.g. RAR or, what I'd recommend, 7z which for some odd reason has not yet become the de-facto standard.
• 4K-ready!As opposed to Steam, which is still automatically scaled by Windows. So, if your desktop is set to 200% scaling, just change the 50-400% scaling in SlaloM accordingly and restart it. Done. Actually don't, because SlaloM does this automatically on first start. (Note: You should not set too different scaling than your desktop because some of SlaloM's elements are automatically scaled by the system, and I didn't bother to deal with that).
  
  Btw., some tech background: A modern application detects such desktop scaling settings automatically, but for applications that don't do that, Windows scales them automatically (as images, so it doesn't look perfect). For this, they introduced the flag "dpiAware". If it doesn't exist, or if it says "false", Windows will automatically scale the application. This can interfere with some games e.g. on 4K screen, so if you can't use the mouse or something, disable display scaling in the program's compatibility settings.
  
  It's interesting to note that at some point this was introduced for Java, too: Every Java program, via the "java[w].exe", tells Windows that it is dpiAware without any choice for the developer. In case that's bothering you: You can actually hex-edit the java or javaw.exe, and this works (if you're careful)! You'll find "<dpiAware>true</dpiAware>" and just have to change "true" to "false". (Let it grow to the left, because there's a new-line character to the right.)

The following texts are from an earlier version of this site, not yet updated to the new format:

• Tags! Make tags for your current favorite games - and later, just activate all your favorite-tags at once, allowing only your all-time faves to pass through the filter. Or create tags for genres, or property tags like "1st person 3D", or describe the setting like "space", "cyberpunk", "urban". Or create review score tags like "graphics 4 of 5 - great", "graphics 5 of 5 - exemplary". (But that's not the ingenious review system I was talking about :P)
• Configurable launch menu for non-Steam games: For manually added entries, you can define several launch argument strings, and if there's more than one, you'll get a menu every time you try to launch the game via SlaloM. For entries automatically added via the root folder feature: You can freely decide which of its files (Supported: exe, com, jar, bat, lnk, pdf, txt, doc) appears where in the menu, and for each of these, you can define several launch argument strings.
• Built-in help the way God intended: You just point at something (while helpmode [F1] is on), and it tells you - tool tip texts, except done right: They appear immediately, don't vanish halfway through reading, and they don't prevent you from clicking. (Seriously, someone do a brain charity drive, the world needs it. Just think volume sliders or field of view.)
• Just select a bunch of games and immediately see how much money you spent there, or how much it would have been had the games not been discounted (which the publishers totally don't factor into their full prices :P), or how much money you paid per day!
• Like in Steam, the game list shows white or gray entries depending on whether a game is installed or not, but you can easily choose a different option: Owned or not. Non-Steam or Steam. Has tags or not. Been played for at least 10 minutes. Played in the last 3 months. (These numbers will probably eventually be adjustable.)
• Optional auto group feature: If you click a game whose name begins with e.g. "LEGO ", this text will be put into the instant-filter box (incl. the # option) so that only games that start with "LEGO " will be shown. Press ESC to return to the full list. Since you'll often sort by something else than alphabet, this feature is great to get an overview of all entries with similar name.
• Reads your Steam game info from disk on each startup instead of downloading it (incl. custom games you added yourself, but the command line options will not be imported; on the upside, you can add as many shortcuts (even to the same program) to SlaloM as you want, and the individual launch options edited into those shortcuts will work as expected, which doesn't work in Steam).
• Supports Steam Family Sharing: Games shared with you will show up as "owned" in SlaloM.
• Works with multiple Steam library folders.
• SlaloM makes sure that you don't see the same images again as far as reasonably possible. (The rotation keeps going, but novelty is maximized.) Each click on the list entry (or hitting space) shows a new random screenshot from any available source, that's why double-click does not start a game: Use middle mouse button for that, or use the popup menu, or press Enter. By default, the screenshot is shown in the right top quarter of the screen, but you can also have it overlaid transparently over the whole screen instead. Additionally, since the app/game list can be maximized to replace everything else on screen, there's an option to show the screenshot as a transparent overlay only in this situation (has individual transparency setting).
• Tiles that don't have a screenshot are just shown by name. From here, you can launch games, open the context menu, or just select them and return to the normal list. That is how you want to surf your library! Well, maybe not the whole library, but what about the 20th favorite set that you created and that is the current focus of your gaming interest? Throw it in tiles mode and pick one for the afternoon.
• Slideshow feature that keeps automatically showing a different screenshot of the currently selected game after a set time. Great in fullscreen mode! Select game, move mouse over screenshot to maximize view, lean back, feel the game. Seriously, how Valve missed to properly show screenshots when selecting a game in the library ... WTF is wrong with them. Why does everybody invest all possible effort to become the main player on the market, and once they have conquered this part in everybody's life, they become stagnant, almost an obstacle? Not true? Go look at the majority of your bank websites' password forms&rules - e.g. PayPal. For some reason, the more prominent the player, the harder they fail - on average, that's just true.
• Play Memory using screenshots - a built-in game with many configuration options, e.g. more than two cards per set, cards visible right away, different screenshots per set (so, "pair" different images of one game), text cards (with e.g. name, purchase date, date last played, duration played, installation size). More "data games" probably coming eventually, e.g. sort screenshots of a given day chronologically using Mastermind-style feedback. Or play jigsaw puzzles with screenshots, but optionally with several images at once from the same pile of pieces! Yeah, I know. Just stick around. ... Wait, you wanna hear about some more neat ideas somewhere on the much too long to-do list? How about a game name generator fed with the words from your library? Or deriving past not-recorded play sessions from the file dates of your screenshots?
• Shows list of available DLC for a selected game, incl. whether you own that DLC yet (but the latter only works if Steam's local database has yet picked up on the DLC, else only the appID of the DLC is shown in the list).
• Check if you have a set of games by copying selected text from a website (e.g. Bundle Stars - Btw., you must have a very good reason not to subscribe to their email newsletter!) and invoking the function via the main popup menu (at the top). It will show you an editable/copyable text with all possible hits (incl. probability).
• Create list of Steam Store links from selected games. The list will contain these URLs in three flavors: Just a URL, a Steam forum URL, and a Reddit URL. In the case of non-Steam entries, a Google search link will instead be created. This comes in handy when you want to inform others about some games and don't want to go through the trouble of having to search the game on Google, click the link, then copy the URL from the addressbar, and all that again for the next game etc.
• Selection presets save all current view/filter settings (apps/tags filter text incl. autogroup mode, selected tags, which tag groups are collapsed/expanded, the current gray/white coloring mode, the sort settings, which columns are currently visible, and even which list entries are currently selected) so you can save/recall the complete situation.
• Anonymous feedback feature, so if you find something wrong, have a suggestion, or wanna give me the impression that anyone but me is using the program :P, drop me a note.
• Screenshot of the first of two review features:
  one-click export a graph image of the review score. Examples: 1 2 These images also explain the concept nicely. Games can be sorted by this score. If scores are identical, the game with the greater certainty will be listed first. This works very well: You're more certain about a game's score if you have a more intimate relationship to it, so it's likely that you want it higher up. If this still leads to identical sort position, the next sort criterion you chose will kick in (of which there currently (2017-01-24) are 4 plus the default alphabetical ascending fallback).
• Functions for any entries: launch, rename, open the game's PCGamingWiki page, search GOG.com, search isthereanydeal.com, search steamdb.info, search Google, property editor (Supports multiselect.), open installation folder, open screenshots folder, define (Additional!) custom screenshots path, scan installation size and screenshots, delete database entry.
• Persistent activity log so if you wonder "WTF did I just click?", you can look it up.
• Had multi-select before Steam :P
• Functions exclusive to Steam entries: install, uninstall, store page, news page, achievements page, activate product key (Calls Steam's dialog, but goes to the key input page right away, so just hit F9 in SlaloM, CTRL+v and ENTER in the dialog, and that's it.), "Can I run it?" (Calls an obscure Steam function that supposedly answers this question.), open appmanifest file in your editor
• Functions exclusive to non-Steam entries: add non-Steam app/document/folder/shortcut, edit launch menu, reset executable (Allows to select a new one on launch-attempt.)
• Other functions: set Steam path, update information from Steam, set timezone, set proxy server and timeout, set SlaloM update check, set Steam data download, set telemetry, open SlaloM data folder, flush Steam download cache (helps fixing some kinds of download problems, also available from the Steam preferences window), Steam dev console, save all data, view SlaloM version history, send feedback, screenshot mode/transparency/selection/frequency, minimize, toggle fullscreen vs windowed mode (By default, SlaloM is a fullscreen window, allowing you to be completely alone with your games.), quit.

All this and more comes with SlaloM, the Steam game library manager I wrote for myself Dec2013/Jan2014 and have been using and evolving for more than 3 years. It's free, just like the rest of my stuff. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Valve/Steam.

It's not flawless - but "What's the catch?" can best be answered with "Your hesitation."

SlaloM is a gigantic improvement over the Steam library, and you can use it as one launcher and manager for all game clients (and manually installed games) combined, it will automatically add all those games if you tell it to. It's also heavily screenshot-focused, so get ready to take some. Yep, now you actually have a reason.

Think about this: Investing in powerful graphics equipment has become such a priority, people might even forget to invest in their screen, too, and the industry focuses on letting things look good first and adding meaningful gameplay second. But the available game clients completely ignore the importance of a game's in-game graphics! Head - meet desk. And what's more, they do think about making themselves look good. I don't know if that's irony, but it's definitely like 10,000 spoons.

Usage  ▲

Like in Steam, the app/game list is on the left. To run a game, just click it with the middle mouse button, or use the right button and select "launch" from the menu, or select the game and press Enter.

When you select a game, a big screenshot is shown right away (if there are any) and items in the context menu become (de)activated. Some items are not available (but visible) in "use mode".

Next to the app/game list, there's the tag list. Use the mouse or F5/F6/F7 to switch between the three interface modes (use library, edit library, edit tags), which will enable/disable a few functions and change the way the lists behave and whether or not external drag&drop has any effect.

• "use library" (blue color): Clicking in the tag lists can only change a tag's current state, but it doesn't assign them, so this is a harmless mode. SlaloM will always be in this mode when it starts.
• "edit library" (red color): Clicking tags assigns/unassigns them to/from games, so you don't want to do this accidentally, hence the red color for this mode. In this mode, you can drag&drop new games/applications/folders/links into the game list (with confirmation), and all functions in the app list menu will be available. You can also rename games - check this to form an opinion on how relevant this is to you.
• "edit tags" (green color): Clicking tags selects them so that you can delete or rename them or set their default state to which they will be set whenever you click the "reset tags" button. You can also assign tags to groups, causing a headline that you can collapse/expand.

When you run a game, SlaloM's screen goes blank except for the game's name being shown in big letters. Clicking the right mouse button will return you to the interface. Clicking the left mouse button does that, too, but only after 10 seconds to prevent accidents. Because: The duration the launch screen is shown is the duration of the current game session. (You can sort by the duration run.) The total duration run of Steam games can be auto-downloaded, and there's even a definable offset, so if you know that you have hours less in a Steam game, even with official data from Steam you still have it your way. When you click the launch screen away, a dialog will show, allowing you to edit the time that will now be added to the database, or even to cancel the update completely, which is useful for launching a few games and taking screenshots. Why would you take screenshots? Indeed, before SlaloM, there was a lot less reason to do so.

Start SlaloM after you have bought new games so that it can "see them" for the first time, which will be written down. You can sort by this date. You can also edit this date, and import it for all games you bought in the Steam store, and via a different feature for >70% of all Steam games you have in your library.

When you close SlaloM, you will be asked if you want to save changes to your database file, or if you want to forget about them, or if you want to cancel the quit. You can also save the data via the main popup menu at the top or by pressing CTRL+s, and you might want to do that whenever you've made a few small changes or have "seen" a few new games so that SlaloM recorded the date.

Known Bugs / Missing Features  ▲

• There's no way yet to join duplicate entries for e.g. when you mix manually and automatically adding games, or when you move to a new machine with changed paths, leading to the same automatic discoveries another time. It's a planned feature somewhere down the road. Once that is properly implemented, it will also make sense to make a feature that allows adding of entries that don't exist yet at all: Games you want to buy (Wishlist!), or games you have on GOG etc. but just don't want to download yet for automatic discovery. Once you do have them, those ghost entries should easily be joinable with the real thing, however it ended up in the list.
• All Steam accounts on the PC are treated as one. This isn't necessarily a bug, rather a missing feature (or maybe even desired for a certain use case): If there are several Steam users on the same PC, then the games of all of them will be treated as one set, the same applies to whether or not a game is owned. Obviously, if account X is logged in on Steam trying to play a game of account Y via SlaloM, Steam would say "nope". But don't worry, this can't become a problem: The API to launch games is official, all one would have to do is execute "steam://run/12345" (or whatever the AppID of the game owned by the not logged-in account is) to effect the same situation, so it's impossible that Valve would react with "DUDE! WTF!?"
• Custom apps added to Steam will be imported, but custom launch options set via Steam will not be imported.
• Some very few games/DLCs might not be recognized as owned by SlaloM, e.g. some Shadow of Mordor DLCs I have. No idea yet what's going on here. But I started developing/using SlaloM when I was at 400 games, am now at 2100+. The extent of this problem is far from obnoxious. (Plus the properties editor allows to override SlaloM's findings.) Due to this problem, I decided to not have SlaloM mark a game as not owned again (E.g. because you refunded it), because that could too easily end up making the problem worse. Also, any missing "owned" flags can easily be set by making SlaloM automatically download the list of your owned games on every start (which is recommended e.g. because this also obtains the duration played as reported by Steam). The download is inferior to SlaloM's local file reading because the local files have way more information, e.g. it has DLC, too, and it informs whether an item is a game, DLC, application, etc. or what DLC is available for a game (which SlaloM shows).
• The "alt gr" key does not work, so typing a backslash on a German keyboard (for example) is not possible - except if you press CTRL in addition (doesn't matter which alt(gr) and CTRL pair you use). Good thing you never need this, cause there's dialogs and drag&drop instead. This is not a Java bug but something somewhere in SlaloM, as some testing showed, but I don't know yet what causes it.
• Changing a tag group name (which is done by changing the group name of all tags in that group, which is easy due to multi-select) does not carry through to the saved view/filter presets which remember the collapsed groups.

FAQ  ▲

• "Can I turn off those help texts that pop up all over the place?"

  Just press F1 to turn them off/on at any time, or click the button at the top that has the blinking border while help is turned on, which it will be automatically on first start. Help is very useful: It tells you about keyboard shortcuts, "hidden" features, sometimes (Very rarely.) displays additional data of an item (e.g. in the properties editor), and it explains the concepts you should know about SlaloM. So, make sure you turn it on every once in a while to learn new stuff that makes your PC gamer life easier.

• "So, does this change Steam data?"

  No! Neither Steam, any other client, or your system is changed in any way by SlaloM. You only see the renamed games and altered Steam play time inside this program. If you delete its folder, then that's the end of it: No trace remains, uninstall completed. Well, there might still be a folder called "(screenshots)" in some of your game installations, if you took screenshots with SlaloM.

• "I have to use this INSTEAD of Steam?"

  Yes and no. You're not binding yourself, but for the sake of data consistency, you'd want to use other clients directly for playing as little as possible. It doesn't matter much in the case of Steam, because SlaloM can be made to auto-import all data (when last played and for how long overall), but game time of other clients or manually installed games would be lost. Also, starting v36, SlaloM remembers not just the total time played of a game and when you last played it, but it remembers every single play session of a game (start time and duration) which will probably lead to interesting features eventually. Currently, there's only the optional column for the amount of sessions and the one for the longest session, but later there might be graphs and such. E.g. I once made a Minecraft launcher that had a unique feature that I've never seen anywhere (Does it surprise you still at this point?), namely a screenshot timeline. You would see a zoomable/pannable view of the time domain and would see your screenshot files in the respective place. The reason for taking a screenshot is a situation, and the time when you took it is an indicator for that situation, and all screenshots taken close to that time would basically have the same connotation. That's untapped data! I might do such a thing in SlaloM, too, possibly in a universal way so you could decide the kind of data first (screenshot dates, game sessions, purchase dates, ...).

• "Why swap one library browser for another? And what's YOUR gain?"

  My gain is simple: I developed SlaloM for myself and then increasingly considered other potential users, too. You may not like the idea that instead of the Steam library, you'd have to use a different program. But not only is the Steam library screen horribly underdeveloped, you're forgetting something: You're not replacing the library browser you're accustomed to with a different one - you're replacing all your various libraries (incl. your manually installed games) with one central access point that has game library management power you didn't even dream of. This allows you to decide what you want to play BASED ON THE GAMES, not based on which library this entails. Who cares if the game is on Uplay or outside any game client. Just care about the game itself! Free yourself from Steam's subconscious grip! Let GOG have a little of your cash, too! :D

• "Why was it created, what's the goal?"

  I wanted to manage my Steam games with tags instead of the crappy Steam Library screen that didn't even have multi-select back then. While I was at it, I realized how much a screenshot display of the selected game was missing. Ultimately, I thought that I could actually effect a change: If people would pick up on SlaloM and manage their games with tags (The way God intended.) and freely rename them as they see fit, the growing SlaloM community could make Valve's head turn, and they would finally wake up and give us a proper game manager. Over time, I realized that the idea is stupid: 1) For Valve to move, it takes ... A LOT. 2) People do their best to ignore the existence of SlaloM. They're really good at that. There are currently (2017-01-24) like 2 downloads per day :( Anyway - SlaloM exists and keeps evolving. Because *I* want to manage my huge game library like a pro.
  
  I also have the idiotic idea to eventually kick off a long-term community project to create a game manager to rule all game clients: A powerful library system that, via plugins, can be extended to support any game client under the sun. People would use this one manager instead of dealing with their multiple installed game clients. This would also remove the "fanboy" effect (For lack of a proper term.) that keeps people mentally locked in e.g. the Steam universe instead of opening up to e.g. GOG and others. This even sounds a little as if it would be in the interest of those companies - making me wonder why THEY (At least the less prominent ones.) don't collaborate to do this. Let the store front, not the walled garden, be the source of your revenue! Anyway: Yes, you CAN add non-Steam games etc. to Steam, but it's tedious (NO DRAG AND DROP WHAT THE FUCK!?), they feel like a foreign element within Steam, and most of all, why would anyone want EVEN MORE entries in a list that lacks all management comfort? Why don't we, the millions of gamers, whose wallets keep the BILLION dollar game industry afloat, create OUR OWN home in which we manage all our games, where the big names' game clients are not the masters but the servants? ... In before I wake up again. Anyway, SlaloM is the small one-man effort version of this.

• "Why was it published after 2.5 years of use?"

  TL;DR: Cause it's fixed now, and before this it probably wouldn't have worked for 90% of the users (which I didn't know, and there was no feedback). - Back then, I made forum posts right away and every once in a while, but there was almost no feedback (as in ~2 guys tried it). Anyway, recently I got some fresh feedback that suggested that the program wasn't working for others, but I didn't know why. Now I happened to make a fresh OS install and put Steam in its default folder on drive C instead of my arbitrary folder on D, plus I used more than one library tree, and I got the same problems that had been described to me. Turned out that for some wicked reason, Steam had built the binary database on my other computers with different upper/lower case for certain keywords than on my new one, and since I'm searching for key locations binarily and also tried to keep it as fast as possible, I originally chose not to ignore case. SlaloM now looks for both case variants. It also now supports multiple library trees.

• "How does it keep track of game time?"

  If you set SlaloM to download your Steam game info on each start, which requires your Steam Web API key (Check the box, enter "mum" or whatever you want in the "Domain Name" box, click "Register". Easy as pie.), the total duration played for each Steam game will be up to date whenever you start SlaloM, and if some of your games were missing from SlaloM's list, now they will definitely be there. For other games, you have to make do with the launch screen that SlaloM shows for every game: Once you click it, SlaloM assumes that play time's over and will show you a dialog with the measured time, where you can edit it if required (But there are ample edit features in the properties dialog, too, even for Steam games.) and then confirm, updating the database, or cancel, which is useful if you're just surfing games to gather some screenshots for SlaloM's awesome screenshot display.

• "Will there be a SlaloM 2?"

  Probably not, even though development had already begun, focusing on a highly customizable GUI (e.g. multiple modes, each "freely" definable, so you could switch from fullscreen mode to three-windows-and-a-small-list-mode, etc.) ... but then for some reason SlaloM 1 development massively took off again, probably due to keygiveaway.com which allowed me to tackle SlaloM's main problem a little (NOBODY KNOWS ABOUT IT! WAAAAAAAH!) by getting the user group from ~6 people to almost 300 in about 2 months. (If my server logs are any indication, they basically all came and stayed for the keys :P) My vision for SlaloM has quite changed in these months, meaning that I should definitely abstain from kicking off a new project if apparently I didn't even really know yet what I want. And I also have other projects in the pipeline that I would rather want to deal with, e.g. an image viewer ("ANOTHER ONE!?") that has features that I miss in all image viewers that I have tried so far. Something outside-the-box. Like Aceistant, File Rename Editor, and SlaloM. With blackjack and hookers!

• "Will SlaloM get me banned?"

  It hasn't gotten me banned in over 3 years of almost daily use, hence I'd say no. SlaloM also just uses normal file access (and only reads, it doesn't write), it doesn't use some RAM reading hacks or anything. E.g. it also works when Steam is not running, except it of course needs Steam for launching games and other such stuff (for which it uses the official protocols). Again, I'm reading some Steam files. Why should they care?

• "Why did you choose this name?"

  Initially I thought "Steam library organizer and launcher", which gave me "Sloal". After a few development steps, I realized that "SlaloM" sounds way better - the only thing missing was an "M". So I added "Messiah" because 1) that's what it was to me in regards to Steam, 2) that's what I originally (Not so much now.) expected it to possibly become for the Steam audience once enough people use it, because Valve could have adopted the tag system, and 3) for personal reasons.

• "So, in early 2017, you actually paid for SlaloM ads on Google for a while? Why?"

  This stopped in March after ~180€ because even though the download numbers were helped a lot, the amount of actual users does not seem to have increased. The money seems entirely wasted.

  The reasons for this in the first place can only be explained to SlaloM users, because others are unlikely to understand what we have here, and how wrong it is that PC gamers do not know about it. Valve's Steam is evolving at a pace that is unfathomably ridiculously slow, especially for a billion dollar company that conquered the central market place. It's a crime, almost. So, I invested n-thousand hours to develop SlaloM, giving me and its few users the ability to rename Steam games, to filter by arbitrary tags, to see screenshots immediately when selecting a game, sort by purchase date, etc. - This exists now! But nobody knows it. The Steam user base alone (SlaloM works with other game clients and manually installed games, too.) of supposedly active accounts is far above 100,000,000 strong! You bet your ass that at least a hundred thousand of those would want to use SlaloM instead of Steam's library screen - if they'd only know about it. It's a phenomenon in the PC gaming world waiting to happen. Let's make it happen!

  Because of the Google ads, I had to put a wee bit of JavaScript on this page, even though I tried to keep it out completely. It's from Google Adservices and enables me to check if an ad-caused visit lead to a click on one of the two main download links of SlaloM. I have to gauge if the ads are reaching the right people so I don't waste money.

Spread the word  ▲

A game library manager that easily unites all PC games under one roof (not just games it has some kind of crowd-sourced online database entry for)?

And it shows a big screenshot whenever you select a game instead of some stylized advertisement logo type thing?

For Windows and Linux? And you can sort and filter your library like a madman, incl. purchase date and price paid etc.? And you can rename Steam games and adjust their reported game time?

How is that not worth to be known to PC gamers? There are far over 100,000,000 active Steam accounts and who knows how many GOG Galaxy, Uplay, Origin, itch, etc. users. They have no idea of the freedom they could easily enjoy. This plus the incredible effort I'm investing in the project lets me ask: Could you please contribute a little?

I'm not talking about money but about something far more valuable: Word-of-mouth recommendation. If you believe that SlaloM is good and should be known, then please tell someone about it. There's something like a critical mass. An example: When I discovered that Wednesday and Thursday are the least useful days for my SlaloM Google ads, I turned off those days entirely. And immediately, the only downloads I got on those days were caused by a fresh Reddit comment I made, just the situation I had before starting with Google ads (beginning of February).

SlaloM has by far not yet reached the critical mass that somehow, out of nowhere, someone would come here and take a look at it. I'm still turning the starter of the engine, it's not yet running. We need to get to the point where SlaloM is at least a real existing thing (however small) on the Net, not just an illusion that we actively have to conjure.

That's why I ask you to please tell someone about it. That would be an invaluable service.

download v[19, 2020-09-26 12!00 UTC] (~330 KB Java 8 program)

How exactly you use Aceistant is your choice, of course, but the original intention was to keep the program open all the time and to switch to it whenever you need to update your to-do notes, have to write down relevant events that took place (e.g. times when your Internet is down), want to toss a new idea into the respective section (Oh, you didn't have a section for that? Well, 5 seconds later with no dialog-fighting involved, you do. Based on experience: The easy section concept is a true creativity booster.), or quickly create an alert that will notify you a minute before the News are on - something that you would normally not do because it's too much of an "official" / complicated task, but in Aceistant is only a text note that doesn't take you 10 seconds. The location doesn't matter, you can't accidentally "lose" an alert. It's so easy, you'll create reminders you would normally never consider, it can literally be a little life-changing.

About the v19 release after almost 4 years - very few changes, but some are significant: When Alerts dialog opens and auto-selects the newest active alert, that line will be scrolled to the center so you see preceding active alerts instead of being deceived. [ESC] no longer closes Writer Mode. Much less CPU use while progam is not minimized (Minimized always used ~0%, anyway). Warning dialog if new text for editor will exceed 1 MB, because Oracle or Microsoft broke something years ago making the Java editor component SUPER SLOW for large texts. This also remedies the (still existing) stupid bug when you reboot Windows while Aceistant is open: For some reason, that resets the remembered last selected section, so you'd see ALL text on next start, and in my case, that's 40 MB! I always had to fix my prefs.txt file in that case. Now you can just NOT show the text and select a different one. In case you're stuck regardless because of this: The value "listselectionparagraphindex = " in prefs.txt has to be changed to point to the head of a small section.

Btw., I am writing an all-new Aceistant from scratch - already 3 months and 130 KB 7z-compressed source: Multiple users (TCP/IP, but still local file access required; one user editing a document at a time). Extensive search (e.g. tags). Multiple files instead of just simulating those. Multiple file trees (= multiple locations on your servers). Multiple document windows. Spellcheck. Thesaurus. And a sophisticated reminder system, not the crappy one of the current version. You will also hate me, because "Aceistant 2" will use UTF-32BE (no BOM), which not even Notepad++ supports (🌐 wxMEdit does).

Features

• Text-folding on steroids, but navigation/unfolding is just a click.
• Sections are separate from each other as if in separate files.
• Date/time alerts with topic and end date (and sound)
• Zoomable graphical overview of all alerts
• Time span calculation
• Writer Mode - black screen with vertical paper and serif font
• Hyperlinks for Internet addresses and files/folders/shortcuts etc.
• FAQ tool for pasting text snippets you need very often
• Decision tool for counting your pro/contra reasons score
• Everything is done in text, no dialog is needed to set it up.

The Java 8 program Aceistant offers a very simple and very powerful way to help organizing your life/work. We all take notes every once in a while, often on paper, because to write notes that we want to keep on a computer, we would have to create a file. That file would have to have a name, and it would have to be in a place (directory) which itself also needs to be in the right place etc. The mental hurdle between you and actually writing down things on your computer is much too high. How many creative ideas did you have that you didn't write down because it would have brought just too much overhead? (Or because you got lost in all those font and style possibilities.) AND: How often did you have an additional thought that you would want to add to those notes, but finding the right file would just have been too tedious, so it ultimately doesn't happen?

With Aceistant, all you need to do is to jump to the right text section by clicking in the always visible hierarchical section list - or just create a new section - and start writing. A section is defined in the simplest possible fashion by a special text syntax, there's no dialog window involved. Sections can be arbitrarily hierarchical, so you can make a "Don't forget!" section and, inside of it, "shopping", "pending mails", etc. In the background, it's all one file, and this UTF-8 text file will look exactly the same in any other editor as it does in Aceistant (minus the comfort) - there is no hidden control-information, it's all just your text. So, apart from the fact that you'll probably become pretty addicted to what Aceistant has to offer, you are not binding yourself at all. Also, you can move sections around at any time with copy/cut/paste, and the outcome will be exactly as expected. You could even do this in another application, or you could easily create a program that creates a hierarchical text for Aceistant.

Whenever you're in a text section (except the always existing section "all"), the editor will only show that section (and sections that are contained within it). So, if you would for example press CTRL+a to select all text, delete it, and then press CTRL+s to save the text (which Aceistant forces you to do all the time), you will only have deleted those sections. The rest of the text is entirely untouchable while you're editing a section. It's as if you're in a text file of its own.

Aceistant has been very intensely used in practice with an important 40 MB file which has over 1.5 million lines and many independent topics. (Default Java memory settings.) None of the published versions have ever caused any data problems. But even though Aceistant uses "safe saves" where data is first written into a temporary file before the current proper file gets replaced, just to be safe it also keeps a rotation of 100 backups. The first backup has to be 15 minutes old for the whole queue to shift by one, though, so you will always have plenty of older versions of your text in case anything went wrong. In case you find this weird or overkill, you possibly aren't a user who creates a backup or two while still working on one document. Let a user with decades of professional experience tell you that you do want to have backups at least until your document has a reliably final state. Anything else is a gamble that you will lose from time to time.

Since the difference between all those backups will overall be small, they compress very well if you use a proper archiver like 7z that supports solid archives (meaning that the compression will regard all files at once instead of individually). By the way: You can not but also do not have to choose the editor text file: Just start the program (In a folder of its own, please.) so it'll create its "Aceistant_data" folder, and that's where the program's preferences and your "notes.txt" with all its backups will be. In the very unlikely case that you need to work with more than one file, you plain simply need to have a second Aceistant on your computer. Since Aceistant itself is less than 1 MB, that shouldn't be a problem, especially since there is no setup involved: Aceistant runs right away out of the box, no installation required. Other than Java 8, of course.

Defining/changing hierarchical text sections works like this: Just type a "#" (or several for different hierarchy level) at the beginning of a line, write a headline that speaks to you (Doesn't have to be unique.) right after it, and save the text. The list now shows this section in the respective vertical (Text structure.) and horizontal (Hierarchy level.) position.

To define an alert, just type a "!" at the beginning of a line directly before a date stamp (e.g. before "2016-01-01"), and you'll have an alert that you'll be reminded of and can easily browse to via the alerts dialog and timeline dialog. Typing date stamps in the right format is easy, because you can just hit F5, F6, F7, F8 to insert a date-with-time, just a date, just time, or finally date-with-time, weekday, week-of-year, and quarter-of-year. (For dates other than the current moment, you'll have to edit the inserted date.) Creating an alert that only has the time information effects a daily alert, useful e.g. to remind you to punch out for noon break. Just like the sections, the alerts are purely text. There is no hidden database file in the background, and you'll not have to use a dialog window. Proper alerts will be highlighted in the text, so you'll see if you broke the format.

Alerts are not just a great reminder feature. Thanks to the timeline dialog (which can be opened via the alerts dialog), you could easily create a graphical overview of your own and your colleagues' planned vacations, which could yield additional insights, e.g. that they kind of overlap too much. Since the timeline dialog allows to zoom from seconds-level to 10-million-years-level, you could even do history studies with Aceistant. The timeline dialog also has a simple image export feature.

Supports partial dates: For example, the alert "!2016-xx-01 14:00" will fire on the 1st day of every month in 2016 at 14:00. The alert "!xx:00" will fire every full hour. "!2016-10-xx 14:xx" fires in October 2016 on every day at every minute of hour 14. This feature comes in handy, for example, when you need to do something during the day but you don't want to define exactly when. An hourly reminder will keep you on track.

Extended date handling beyond Java's standard: You can use dates in the trillions of years ranges. E.g. it's no problem to create dates anywhere between now and the beginning of the Universe (~13.8 billion years ago).

The hyperlink feature allows you to quickly create links to Internet addresses or to local files and folders etc., the syntax is as follows: <<www.google.com>> Hovering with the mouse highlights the text, clicking with the middle mouse button invokes the link. Hyperlinks directly (Whitespace ignored.) following (the colon of) an alert are invoked automatically when the alert is due, so this has to be handled with a little care.

The FAQ tool allows you to quickly assemble texts with a few button clicks, in case you often need to answer the same questions or have to explain the same things. Defining an FAQ button text is as easy as everything else in Aceistant: Just enter (at the beginning of a paragraph) "[[my button label]]", and all text that follows in the same paragraph will be put into a temporary text editor once you click the button in the FAQ tool dialog. The whole text you assemble via the tool will be copied automatically when you close it.

The decision tool simply counts + and - reasons you wrote down regarding an either/or decision you're trying to make and gives you the resulting score. While that's not the ideal way to make decisions (and the decision tool itself is indeed not to be taken seriously), it's a good way to achieve greater clarity just like when you toss a coin when undecided and then still don't accept the outcome: It helps to build awareness and therefore helps you to ultimately make the decision yourself. Building awareness regarding your will is the best way of purifying it and the main obstacle in any decision making process. But in case all else fails: The decision tool also shows you the outcome of a coin toss :)

Aceistant has built-in optional tooltip help. The tooltips show up without delay and don't vanish in the middle of reading, which for some reason most other programs fail at. I keep wondering why other applications don't employ this optimal way of giving the user explanations: The user points at a thing they are interested in and receive an explanation. It's just like doing a Web search for information: The moment you do the searching, you are the most ready to receive the information.

You really need to try this thing out to see how its simplicity and versatility can revolutionize the way you organize. If you think that you don't owe this to yourself, in all seriousness, the actual truth might be that you're just not worthy.

System Requirements

PC, Java 8. Aceistant was developed on Windows 7/8/10 but should work without problems on other systems as well. In case you don't have Java 8 (aka the Java Runtime Environment (JRE)), it's recommended that you install the Java Development Kit (JDK) which also has a JRE. Why? Because Sun/Oracle have stupidly and ignorantly been bundling the official JRE-installer with third-party crap that almost nobody wants, thereby effectively advertising against Java and the efforts of its millions of developers and shoveling unwanted software onto millions of PCs. The JDK installer's JRE doesn't have this problem. It's somewhat larger, but hey: You can develop Java programs with it, and you should, because Java is great and belongs on the desktop, not just on the server. Don't listen to the haters. So, if you're leaning that way, download IntelliJ IDEA and get going! The Community Edition is free and can be used without legal limitations for development of commercial software.

SCOPHE - Steam COpy Paste History Exporter

download v[7, 2020-05-12 07!00 UTC] (~80 KB Java 8 program)

Note: Some of SCOPHE's abilities are performed a lot better now by SlaloM, because it can actually download your individual Steam game transactions via browser automation.

SCOPHE is for users of the gaming platform Steam. As opposed to most other available means (e.g. SteamDB's calculator), this program calculates the amount of money you have actually spent on Steam. (Writing this, I just discovered Steam Receipt which sounds like the real deal, though it's currently broken due to Steam page redesigns.)

But its main use is this: It exports your "Purchase History" and "Licenses and product key activations" pages content into CSV files, so that you are finally free to do with your account data what you want to do, e.g. use it in LibreOffice's Calc, create fancy graphs, or feed your banking software with it. Maybe you can even somehow "make" money with this by saving some taxes, though probably not.

How does the program get the information out of Steam? It doesn't. You need to press CTRL+a, CTRL+c when viewing the respective page in the game client, and press CTRL+v in SCOPHE.

The image gives you a rough overview of what data you'll get out of this. Notice the "CSV DEMO" tab which will show what the data would (roughly) look like in a spreadsheet software.

I tried something new with this one: If SCOPHE detects that it is not running in a folder of its own, it creates a new folder in the same location and moves itself there. A lot of checks are in place to make sure that nothing goes wrong, and so far this hasn't failed me once. I might eventually put this into my other applications, too, but so far SCOPHE is the only one that has this.
 

System Requirements

PC, Java 8, Steam

download v[(3), 2016-06-14 05!00 UTC] (~20 KB Java 8 program)

Hey, umm ... DON'T use this crappy program. Instead, install the unbeatably supreme Everything search software on any Windows PC you can find, against the will of their owners if need be. They have no clue. YOU - have NO CLUE. ... And press F2 to rename multiple files super comfortably.

FileRenameEditor allows to edit the names of files/directories as if the directory containing them were a document in a text editor. Has block select, copy&paste, editing of multiple consecutive lines at the same time. Commit individual changes or all of them. Clipboard can be trimmed: Remove all white-space or additionally the file extensions.

Here's an ideal use case I happened to stumble upon recently:

It would mean a good bit of tedium to change it to this with Windows' built-in rename feature:

Here's a series of screenshots demonstrating how to use it.

In short: At program start, select folder. Edit. Press Shift F2 to commit all changes. Press F12 to quit the program. See screenshot for more.

You probably do not need this program. Except in those few situations when you do, and then it saves you a metric fuckton of work. Also, you can just use it to get a folder's content as text without worrying about character encoding.

By pure coincidence, I recently found this Windows shortcut: While renaming something in a Windows file explorer window, press CTRL and Tab to apply the new name and directly go to renaming the next file.

System Requirements

PC, Java 8

Windows usability tips

If you don't know these, you're only moving at 90% the speed you could have.

• Select a file or folder (Multiple work, too.) in a Windows file explorer window (those standard windows that open when you double-click a folder). Then press Shift and right-click on it. You will see an additional menu entry: "Copy as path"
• You can paste this for example as the file name in a file dialog box (like "Save as") and press Enter. If it was a folder, you'll now have browsed there and can see the respective files. This should save you a ton of time. If it was a file, then the dialog will be confirmed accordingly.
• Press Windows-key and "r" to open the run-box. Here, too, you can paste those texts. Or just type "c:" and press Enter to go there, then maybe Backspace to go to the "parent folder", which is your computer overview with all the drives. But Windows-key and "e" gets you there directly. Btw., mind that the copied text (described above) is wrapped in quotation marks which might sometimes get in the way depending on what you're doing.
• Again, go to a Windows file explorer window. Click on the background so that nothing is selected. While still on the background, press Shift and right-click. You will see an additional menu entry: "Open command window here"
• Right-click on the task bar for the menu, and in the submenu "Toolbars", select "New toolbar...", and choose a folder that contains important things, e.g. the root folder for all your files. This creates a cascading menu allowing you to browse files much quicker without opening any windows. Read more about this further down under ▼ File organization tips, you will probably find some ideas you didn't have yet.
• Right-click-drag a file or folder to get a context menu upon drop. E.g. you can use this to unpack archives and decide whether a subfolder should be created in the process. Or you can create a shortcut like this without having to press any key in addition.
• Create a folder called "Godmode.{ED7BA470-8E54-465E-825C-99712043E01C}" (e.g. in your C:\ folder, and you don't have to call it "Godmode", any other text would do, too) and open it to see every Windows setting ever, as far as I understand. Personally, I've not used it yet (though I keep it around), but it's certainly a nice-to-have.
• Here's an interesting folder: "C:\Users\YOU\AppData\Local\VirtualStore" which can e.g. have "Program Files (x86)" and such, automatically created by Windows on demand (and manual creation will quite surely not help). It's for older applications that write data into their own folder and have not yet been brought to speed regarding access rights, so they just get a mirrored directory tree for those files here.
• And another one: "C:\Users\YOU\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Network Shortcuts"! Any shortcut you put here will be visible in your computer overview (the "parent folder" of "C:\")! But there's a trick to this: If you create a shortcut on your desktop and then drop it in there, you're fine, and I believe the same applies if you create the shortcut in that folder via the context menu (New->Shortcut). But if you e.g right-click-drag a folder into this place, or drag the icon next to the address bar of an open folder window in here, things are different: If you open the resulting shortcut, the path you'll see in the address bar won't be the full path, so you didn't teleport there. Instead, it will be "Your PC" and then right away the name of the place you chose.
• Right mouse button on the Windows logo (aka start button) gives you some very useful shortcuts. The same is achieved by pressing Windows-key and "x".
• Windows-key and "t" cycles through the "buttons" in your task bar. Windows-key and "1" or "2" etc. directly selects the respective "button". Using Shift in addition opens another instance of that app, e.g. if it was the calculator, without Shift you only get the existing window, but with Shift you get a new calculator. You do use the Windows calculator, right? It has evolved incredibly. Using CTRL instead of Shift switches to one of the instances (e.g. browser windows).
• Windows-key and Tab lets you conveniently switch through all open programs (You can let go of the keys.) of the current desktop and allows you to create additional desktops or to switch to them (which otherwise Windows-key and arrow left or right does just fine).
• Windows-key and "+" (and afterwards also "-") magnifies your screen content temporarily, Windows-key and Esc closes the magnifier again.
• Windows-key and "l" (lower case L) is mandatory whenever you leave your PC at the workplace - it locks the computer, requiring the password to be entered.
• Windows-key and "d" minimizes all windows, showing your desktop. Windows-key and "," only lets you take a peek.
• In a standard message dialog like e.g. when you changed a file's extension, press CTRL and "c" to copy the whole text. What, you don't have file extensions switched to visible? Do that right now. Microsoft should be made liable for the worldwide damage this idiotic default has caused that they have not removed in 20 years.

Just in case you're currently a bit hooked on reading about shortcuts, this page has a nice list.

Despite better shortcuts, I keep hitting Windows-key and "r", type "calc", and hit Enter. Would help if Microsoft would display the correct digit on those taskbar "buttons", e.g. while the Windows-key is pressed. But Microsoft has a gigaton of pending homework, seriously. Why can't I drag&drop a file/folder/shortcut directly into a save/open dialog's input box? Why don't save dialogs show a warning indicator right away when you entered a name that already exists instead of letting you run into the usual "Whoops, that's already taken. Wanna replace?" dialog you can't even dismiss with Esc? I could go on and on.

File organization tips  ▲

Regarding Windows taskbar toolbars: Personally, for years I've been having two of those, pointing to the folders "!" and "_" which I created, thereby causing minimal waste of screen space.

"!" contains shortcuts to all programs I regularly use, spread around one level of topical subfolders, which is why I had no problems whatsoever when Windows 8 (No start menu.) came along. I had started with this practice a long time before this, so I just didn't feel the loss. These shortcuts are also great when you move to a new PC: Take the folder tree with you, instantly have (most of) the shortcuts, plus you have a to-do list of programs you still need to install.

"_" is the root folder for all my data that I create on every PC I install for myself (I don't make use of the Documents folder and such): This makes me independent of any root-folder clutter that certainly is there on drive C while simultaneously adding minimal path depth overhead. (Seriously, WHY is path depth still an issue! Goddamned. This can even lead to data loss when you somehow created an even deeper directory structure and then archive the tree. Don't delete it, you'll probably lose files because the archiver didn't get everything.), and I still do this on drive D for consistency, plus sometimes you just need an unused playground, and this leaves you that room without risking that you poison your precious file organization.

Regarding subfolders in "_", I have the following (see below). You probably wonder about the parentheses. These are, again, meant to minimize the path depth - and to incredibly help master the important task of organizing one's files. These folders are categories (or "classes") while folders without parentheses would be instances. E.g. in one of my "(dtp)" sub-category folders, there are a few folders without parentheses that are individual desktop publishing works - not categories. What's more, while you're still trying to find the right organization scheme for your files, the parentheses approach allows you to just throw stuff you're not sure about yet into the most fitting category folder without further ordering. And then, after some time, you look at that stuff and realize where it needs to go or what categories you need, and those items did not mix with the category folders because the alphabetical sorting kept them separate! Simple trick to make you the master instead of forcing you to give up under the load of all these computer tasks that are waiting to be done.

You do use the "details" view, right? The one with the columns. But you're quite surely doing it wrong. What you need to do is this: In the details view, drag the file size column to the very left, the date column next to it so that it's a nice visual separator (for being always the same width, kinda just looks like a gray wall) between the file sizes and the file names. Why? Because: Those columns are useless if they are too small or if you have to scroll first to find them, and you do have to scroll because the file name column is often quite wide while in most cases you only need to see the first part of the name to cope - but if you need to see more, you can make it as wide as you want without losing sight of the other two significant pieces of information. Having the size and date on the left is a life-changer. Btw., you can close the file type column, since you have the file extensions visible, right? Right?

So, (some of) the folders in my "_" root:

• (audio) - Contains music, audio plays, playlists, or links to Web radio stations, and like many of the other main category folders below, it has a subfolder called "((setup))". What, two parentheses? Yes, because again you save a whole folder level and a lot of unnecessary clicking. The setup folder has setup files - the things used to install applications. This is the best place to keep them, which I can say after thoroughly exploring all the alternatives I've come up with over the years. By the way, when I download a setup from the Web, I make sure that the local filename contains: 1) The "v4.1.3" or whatever format it uses. 2) The release date of that version, if I know it. 3) The download date in the form of "[DL2017-02-27]". This, especially the latter, is information that can be incredibly helpful in the short and long term.
• (DTP) - Contains "(print)", "(screen)", of course "((setup))", some other, and then "((resources))" which e.g. has "(fonts)".
• (Internet) - Has for example "(email)" to where I moved my Thunderbird profiles, and I do keep all my emails local (POP, not IMAP), probably the reason that I can easily keep all my emails back to ~2003 in the same list. I like to be independent of outside services and other people's fuck-ups (of which the world is chock-full) as far as possible. Well, and there's of course "(file exchange)" with subfolders for the various BitTorrent etc. clients that came along over the years. Got some bandwidth left? Help share Space Engine and such!
• (PDA) - That's where I keep my KeePass database, bank transaction CSV downloads, and of course my Aceistant notes (40 MB so far, daily notes back to ~2003).
• (SD) - Short for "software development", and again, I do hate the fact that the max. path depth is so damn low, it is not reflecting the reality of current data / categorization demands. I would have used the full name, but especially in SD, the path depth demands are high.
• (storage) - This one's interesting. Besides the obligatory "((setup))" folder, which e.g. has the 7z archiver setup, it e.g. has "(archive permanently)" where I collect what needs to be burned to CD/DVD, not that I do that much these days (too unreliable). And "(archive temporarily)" where I e.g. would backup my gigabytes of emails as a 7z archive. Some of the files here are copied regularly to USB sticks, because they are just too damn important to not be kind of ubiquitous. "(probably garbage)" is my long-term trashcan that I don't accidentally clean out. "(sort this stuff)" still needs to find its way into the organization or needs to be deleted. For a while I also had "(transport)" for files I need to take with me at some point, but that has kinda died down due to email and Google Drive (which is nice, but I am somewhat critical of this product - seriously, no option to entirely prevent local file deletion?).
• (system) - Has e.g. "(shortcuts)" where I keep said "!" folder and whatever stuff of this sort might accumulate. And then there's "(setup)" where I put setups that didn't find a better place, notes about setting up the network, possibly a whole Windows setup (though I rather keep those somewhere in the main category "(computer systems)" for emulators and virtual machines). In the age up until Windows 2000, I kept numerically ordered folders here with every installation step and then, numerically intermixed, backup images, to be able to roll back to any point. Wow what a relief that starting Windows 7 (or even XP), this shit isn't necessary any more.
• (video) - E.g. for "(VLC video snapshots)", "((setup))", "(current projects)" etc.

One last word: Do backup your stuff. Else you need to accept that if it's lost, that's mostly your own fault. Over the years, I've used different solutions like e.g. Symantec/Norton Ghost, but these years I'm on Acronis True Image which, while not perfect, is a great workhorse. I didn't experience slowdowns while gaming (apart from loading times), and I backup a lot, so I can recommend this.

🌐 Everything is a freeware search engine (Donations welcome.) for the Windows 32/64 bit desktop. You may have seen a few of these, but not like this! One click and you see all files of your local computer instantly. Type something in the search box, and you will see the respective search results - again instantly. Such a feature belongs built-in to every operating system! It should tell you something that this revelation of a software is the first hit on Google when you search for "everything". The initial scan is incredibly fast, and all subsequent changes are tracked, so it's just as fire-and-forget as it should be - and as you've probably never experienced such a thing, hence you may already have given up on finding a proper desktop search engine. Well, give it one last try. Thank me later.

🌐 Acronis True Image is a great backup tool. Over the years I have used different ones, e.g. Symantec/Norton Ghost, but these years I'm on Acronis True Image which, while not perfect, is a great workhorse. I didn't experience slowdowns while gaming (apart from significantly longer loading times) even when using maximum backup performance settings, and the validation pass (which I always activate) never reported inconsistencies. So, 3.3 TB of data (compressed about 1 TB less) and almost 12 hours later, the complete machine is saved, ready to be copied to a new one without having to install anything first (ignoring the necessity for different drivers). (To be clear: The system was running and being used while it was being backed up, yet restoring the backup would yield a fully functional running system.) Reminds me that a few years ago my 120 GB SSD system drive grew to small, so I got a 240 GB SSD for €110, used Acronis' boot medium to copy the drive over, and sum total 15 minutes later I was using my PC like always, except with a bigger system drive (partition resized on the fly, didn't have to configure a thing, experienced no repercussions).

🌐 7z is a compression tool&format (available for many systems) that should by now have replaced ZIP but sadly hasn't.

🌐 KeePass is the password manager in whose local database I keep all my (usually 64 character 0-9A-Za-z) passwords. Even if some idiot would implement a local or Web service that allows unlimited login attempts, nobody can guess these passwords. And you can define how many times the database will be encrypted, so that opening it will take e.g. a few seconds. This makes it impossible to brute-force decrypt the database. This program is widely recommended, so in case you didn't know about this yet, take a look around. You do need a different password for every service, and they should be properly complex, so you need a manager. Btw., in case you're a developer about to implement passwords in an application or in a client/server environment, do read this.

🌐 Notepad++ is an extremely capable text editor which can't even be compared with Windows' built-in editor "Notepad", they are in different classes regarding abilities and quality. Block select and a high amount of other useful features make it the Swiss army knife of choice when it comes to editing text. Many people even use it as the IDE for developing their software, but seriously: Use a proper IDE, don't be an idiot. You don't ride a bicycle with no air just because you can.

🌐 HxD is a hex editor and disk editor, free even for commercial use, last updated 2009 but still the tool I'd recommend. Sometimes you don't need more, you just need it done well.

🌐 IntelliJ IDEA is a great programmer IDE, and the Community Edition (which does Java, Kotlin, Groovy, Scala, Android, Maven, Gradle, SBT, Git, SVN, Mercurial, CVS) is free even for commercial use! Its code-awareness and suggestions are likely to teach you something new about your language from time to time.

🌐 launch4j for when you need to make an executable from your Java ".jar" programs (Win, LX, Mac). Doesn't secretly unpack the .jar but runs it straight from the ".exe", you can bring your own JRE which doesn't need to be installed then, optional splash screen, lots of options, and first-timers can get this show on the road in like half an hour with a little reading and configuring.

🌐 AutoHotkey is a powerful keyboard/mouse/etc. input tool that can react to but also create input events. It has a scripting language, you can even check the window title of the target window etc., it has evolved a lot. I have a script with like three lines that allows me to hit one of the media keys on my keyboard that I don't need, which opens the Steam game key input dialog and even does the initial two Enter-presses which gets me straight to the key field. So, when I buy a bundle: Copy, hit key, paste, hit Enter. Copy, hit key, paste, hit Enter. etc. - But you could also just download my game library manager SlaloM which has a hotkey that does the same.

🌐 Open Broadcaster Software - Yesterday, I recorded over 20 minutes of video (explaining SlaloM's features) at 4K (3840x2160 pixel) resolution and 60 frames per second with high quality settings and 192 Kbit/s sound. It worked without a hitch, and the resulting file was less than half a GB. But OBS' primary purpose is to broadcast live to Twitch or to any other such service. This freeware is radically good.

🌐 TeamViewer is remote desktop (and then some) done right. Free for personal use, doesn't need installation, finds its own way through your proxy/router maze, fast, reliable. We use it at the office, but recently when I got my mum a new PC, I installed it there so whenever she has questions or observes something out of the ordinary, all it takes is two clicks on my desktop turning my computer into hers, allowing me to check it out or to make a quick Acronis backup. In case you underestimate how sophisticated this product is: I can reboot her PC and then type the password into the login screen from my home.

🌐 DKA's list of Steam tools

🌐 PCGamingWiki has well-structured pages about "every" PC game with the same topics always in the same locations, e.g. how to torture the game's idiotic FieldOfView into obedience, how to skip startup movies, where to find the savegames, how to circumvent some known bugs, whether it supports wide-screen or what to do so that it does, etc.