The "What is the best software for..." thread

I'm just going to post different kind of paid/free software we are susceptible to use the most with my choice in most categories. I'll list only the things I've used while giving some favoritism for satisfying free software. I'm not going to detail each of my choice and compare them with others otherwise I'll be there until tomorrow. Maybe this will be done later, though the comparison wiki articles on each categories gives you already a good overview of each software.

Feel free to give your choice in some categories, point out flaws in my choices or comment my choices as well as adding new categories. This is not a rom hacking specific tools discussion though it could become one if you want to do some research, right now it's rather a general post concerning video, audio, image, programming and other software comparisons.

1) Emulators (list)

NES: Higan, FCEUX
SNES: Higan
GBA: Higan, VBA
DS: DeSmuME
PS: ePSXe
Others (multi-system): Bizhawk, OpenEmu

Please don't turn this thread into a emulator battle

2) Hex Editors (list)

My choices: HxD (free), Windhex (free, ROM hacking specific)
Worth of mention: Hex Workshop (paid), XVI32 (free)


3) Text Editors (list)

My choice: Notepad++ (free)
Worth of mention: Programmer's Notepad (free)


4) File comparison tools (list)

My choices: WinMerge (free), DiffMerge (free, not the same as the one in wiki list)


5) Graphic Editors (list)

My choice: Gimp (free)
Worth of mention: Adobe Photoshop (paid)


6) Vector Graphics Editors (list)

I've never used any :/


7) Video Editing Software (list)

My choices: Adobe Premier Pro (paid), Sony Vega Pro (paid)
Worth of mention (free): ?

Converter: FFmpeg (awesome for audio too)


8) Screen Recorders (list)

My choices: Open Broadcast Software (free), FFsplit (free)


8) Video Players (list)

My choice: VLC (free)


9) Audio Editors (list)

My choices: Cubase (paid), FL Studio (paid)


10) Misc Audio (free) (list)

Recording and minor editing: Audacity
Converter: FFmpeg (awesome for video too)
Player: Winamp

9) Programming IDE (free) (list)

Visual Studio Community: C#, C++, C
Eclipse: Java
NetBeans: Html, Javascript, PHP

For free videos editors, I use Windows Movie Maker Classic (for lighter edits) and VSDC (for heavier edits).

For emulators I use the following

Snes - Snes9x 1.53
N64 - PJ64 2.0.0.2
PSX - ePSXe 2.0 (released the other day)
PS2 - PCSX2 1.4.0
GBA - mGBA 0.4 (extremely fast and very very accurate)

For video editing, I use VirtualDub as it's free and has some decent features
For audio, I use Audacity since that too is free, I don't like having to pay
For video capturing, I use nVidia Shadowplay since it has minimal impact on performance, which FRAPS is infamous for

Video player, I use VLC as it supports many formats that Windows Media Player doesn't
These are my choices