Here's a small list of stuff I use every day and could recommend to you, maybe. Or make you mad because my choice may be different from yours. Whatever...
File manager
For file manager, two things matter for me: double-panel layout and, most important, keyboard-only control.
On Windows, I use Total Commander. There is nothing quite like it. I started using it when it was called Windows Commander, on Windows 98. It served as a great replacement for Volkov Commander that served me well in MS-DOS/Win95 times.
On Linux, Double Commander exists, and works pretty well. Works like total crap on Mac tho. Most of the times on linux I use Midnight Commander tho.
On Mac several apps that claim to be a total commander alternative exist. I use Marta, but it lacks features. Looks promising though, and still better than finder. When I need features like SFTP on Mac I use Midnight Commander.
Also, the one called DCommander is a buggy pile of crap, is not free and is not worth your time and money, trust me.
Notes taking
I am a huge fan of Obsidian. First it was Simplenote made by WordPress team. Then it was Dynalist - it is quite like EMACS's orgmode to my taste, but simpler and with web interface. Then I switched to Obsidian from Dynalist's developers - it is pretty much perfect for my needs: for its "valuts" (folders with data essentially) it uses plaintext files (and not some proprietary format) and most files are markdown files. The app (electron app, grr) is good and cross-platform (it even exists on phone).
And syncing the vault is as simple as syncing folder with files. That folder also holds all the settings for specific vault, along with extension settings.
Oh, it is extensible also!
I like it so much that I eventually subscribed for their paid plan. It is totally worth it for sloppy me.
Also, EverNote sucks.
Security
For some naggy services like github I use Tofu Authenticator app on iOS. It is minimalistic and no-nonsense. Oh, and I use a YubiKey also.
I keep my passwords, backup keys and even PGP/SSL keys in a well-encrypted KeePass vault locked with a very long and complicated password.
I know I can use my YubiKey with OtpKeyProv, but nah, too lazy for that. Maybe once I will become fully paranoid and switch to OTP, but not just yet.
To encode files I use VeraCrypt, a successor of long-dead TrueCrypt, with improved security and stuff. Apparently, truecrypt site was broken - and it promotes using of Microsoft's proprietary soft called BitLocker now. That's the main reason I won't ever voluntarily use it, apart from it being proprietary.
There were rumors VeraCrypt is non-secure and there is quite a discussion about whether it is - first audits said it was not, new ones say it is...
Best part about TrueCrypt and VeraCrypt is that their volumes data allegedly looks like gibberish - it is not really possible to say that this very binary blob is a TrueCrypt volume.
The Internet
I use Floorp. It is a pretty decent obscure japanese firefox-based browser. It allows for some degree of UI customization. It is one of not that many modern browsers that do not eat up all your screen real estate with huge nonsensical paddings. I do not use synchronization in browser.
For my everyday work (i'm a web developer) I do need a chromium-based browser. When it is impossible to bear without chromium - I still use Vivaldi.
Floorp uses firefox extension. Vivaldi uses chrome extensions.
Browser extensions
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ublock origin. Nowadays blocking ads can also save you traffic and CPU (and battery life, essentially, and I believe uBlock is the most efficient of them all). Somehow the businesses made people make feel blocking ads is somewhat wrong in recent years, like it is something akin to piracy. There's nothing wrong in that, perfectly legal. For now.
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stylus. It allows to modify styles of websites (It has an option to download pre-made styles as well) to hide some crap from it (or modify stuff to improve usability). Used to use another one, called stylish, but it was too popular and turned into a bloatware.
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JavaScript Toggle On and Off. Everything is JavaScript nowadays, but some websites work without it, and work way faster with it disabled. This extension adds an easy button which disables JS with one click. Helps to make the internet less crappy. And helps me debug things as well.
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Native Eyedropper for Chrome (firefox does not need it, it has a good built-in eyedropper) allows to pick a color from a webpage, with a zoom and keyboard controls for pixel-hunting. Or from an image.
Extensions like this one tend to turn into bloatware too by adding features one asked for, so probably this one will need a replacement too one day. But now I use this one. This is the third one in the recent couple of years:
ColorPick EyeDropper, now asks you for registration and shows some ads. Also requires access to your browser history. The developer says "developing is not free, so I have to monetize it some way". Monetization of such a simple thing, that should be a browser built-in tool, is straightforward stupid.
Color Eye Dropper became too cluttered - it is now more of a color selector thing and color palette thing, have to do too many movements (more than one) to pick a color from the page.
Mailing
Oh boy, most of my life I've been using web UIs of mail providers. Then I switched to The Bat! mail client. Then I switched to Thunderbird. And nowadays I use sylpheed. Some day, perhaps, I will find a better way to do my correspondence, but not just now.
Also I have [neomutt] set up on one of my servers.
PhotoPea
Photopea is a web graphical editor. It pretty much replicates all the basic functionality of PhotoShop, with all the hotkeys and stuff.
The problem is there is no decent graphical editor for basic stuff in Linux. GIMP is a buggy crap, when I was trying to use it I ended up spending much more time fighting it's "unique" and "one-of-a-kind" user interface than actually editing something. Same issue is with Krita actually - it strives to be "unlike anything else" and that results in it being a horrible mess, with some things overcomplicated and some things lacking.
Simplest tasks for a graphical editor: crop and resize an image, on a new layer create some text (and then easily adjust it), erase or scribble a part of an image, maybe blur a part of it and then save to PNG with transparency. Totally doable in both Krita and Gimp, but experience is horrible.
On Win/Mac the PhotoShop is very powerful too, true, but most of the times I just need to crop stuff, blend layers, add text and maybe do basic conversion. I don't need a three-gigabyte (could be worse, I give them that) monster that costs $20 a month (it uses subscription model now!) to do that.
PhotoPea is just perfect for most of my everyday tasks. Also, it is free (at least for now) with some reasonable limitations. There are also handy extensions for chrome and for firefox to remove ads from PhotoPea - so the ad space does not eat half the screen.
Music
On Windows, I still use Winamp (I do that for more than 25 years an it is still good). People tend to say "isn't it dead" and stuff, ignoring it because it's "old" and "unsupported", but that is plain stupid - Winamp works (better than anything else) and has plugins for anything available (some plugins still get updates even, if someone cares). It's not Winamp that has died, but the practice to listen music as mp3's.
I have recently switched to Winamp Modern skin which is 20 years old now ☺.
Btw, recently they have released a new version with bugfixes and improvements and nothing more (well, there IS something more - it allows to play NFC music or some stuff, who cares)
It looks like they're going to turn Winamp into something spotify-like soon, but who cares too, the app will be still available, at least on my HDDs. And, of course, Wacup exists, which allows to assume Winamp will not actually die anytime soon (feels like some elitist bs tho, but that may change one day)
On Mac I use Cog to listen music. It still has a lot to desire, but is way better than pretty much everything I've tried.
On Linux, my preferences are DeaDBeeF to listen music and Clementine to organize music and listen radios.
Video playback
To watch videos on Windows I use Media Player Classic. There is quite nothing like it - most popular players are either bloated (like Potplayer I used to use for some time, it ended up adding adware to it) or have really awful UI and lack basic features (Like VLC). The original MPC-HC got canceled somewhere around 2017, so I use clsid2's fork of it.
Basic essential feature for a video player - on clicking "next" button - play the next file in the directory. Too complicated for VLC.
To watch videos on Mac, I use IINA - yet another mpv wrapper, that actually works, has non-cluttered UI and allows to watch several videos simultaneously (so you can set something long on pause, quickly watch something small without having to re-opening the long thing, for instance). Oh, and also it just closes when you close the last window - a feature you don't see in a lot of Mac apps these days.
On linux it is always mpv. Don't need anything else, really.
On android I'm using MX Player Pro (for ages now, since around 2014). It is paid but is cheap (free version with ads also exists).
Oh, also I watch YouTube sometimes, using an app called FreeTube - there is a whole rant about youtube and why do I use an app to watch it on this website.
Media editing
I use LosslessCut to trim videos. It is a pretty minimalist (in terms of the UI, not in terms of footprint tho - it's an electron app) and free app to do basic audio/video editing. All I need, really. It is also cross-platform. Used to use VirtualDub on Windows previously, but it does not support some formats and its interface is borderline terrible.
To do all the audio recording/editing I use the old good Audacity - it has never failed me.
IDE
I use VSCode (just like everybody else, meh). After some tinkering it can be made into an actually usable IDE for TypeScript and Rust (I don't care too much for anything else)
I used to use WebStorm (and PHPStorm before it) a lot in the past, but it has essentially turned into bloatware. Too many features I do not use (and that can not be disabled). Also it does not support other languages except the front-end ones (Pretty sure it was done on purpose to force people to use their IDEA Ultimate IDE, which has even more stuff I never use and can't switch off). Also, it relies heavily on XML files of their own format in its configuration and everything is configured via UI, that has too many options to reconfigure it every time. But the main reason I don't use it now is because it does not work well with monorepos - infinite indexing drives me nuts. It is a paid tool - and no longer worth it for several reasons, IMO.
WebStorm was quite a journey, tho. Once was the only reasonable options with all the stuff built in.
Switching to VSCode was quite painful, because I got used to WebStorm, and some of its basic features were absent in VSCode (because it is actually more of an advanced text editor than an IDE)
I am very unhappy with VSCode and used VSCodium for some time (after the story with monkeypatch/customizeui extensions)
The key to VSCode productivity for me was disabling the tabs display completely, setting up some hotkeys and making my own color theme. The color theming options are superb, the themes provided on the marketplace are very primitive - say, I really need function variables and regular variables to be highlighted differently. For almost every task there is an extension now.
Also, for some features that was missing but now are implemented there are series of You don't need that extension articles, which might serve as a nice quick list of stuff you can do with VSCode.
I used to use VIM in the past. For VIM vs. EMACS my answer will always be VIM. Nowadays NeoVim it is. Learning to be productive with it is my to-do list for years now, I don't know... I hate LUA.
I use nano when I'm tinkering with something over SSH, too.
Git
For complicated tasks I prefer using a git GUI - saves a lot of hassle.
I got so used to IDEA's built-in Git client. It allows to undo commit by automatically switching to other revision and moving all the changes to staged, very easy to switch branches - even when there are staged files - it does stash/unstash them automatically, easy to modify commits and has a very powerful three-panel merge interface (quite nothing like it, actually, it is made just right)
It's a shame other git clients do not have all this functionality. And it's a shame JetBrains do not consider making a stand-alone GIT client (or probably it is for the best - because they would definitely make it a paid app and strip some of that functionality from its other apps).
I ended up using PyCharm Edu (it's free) as a git client by disabling all the plugins and inspections and adding most files in a repo to excluded list.
Also, tig repository browser is worth mentioning here, it's pretty awesome. Oh, and also GitUp is pretty sweet, too. Also, GitLens for VSCode is bloated junk and I hate it.
Your tool-set sucks!
If you think so - feel free to mail me! Feel free to put "your tools suck" in the subject and recommend me something better. I am always eager to learn and try new things when it makes sense.