aToad #18: HexChat and FileASSASSIN

Respectively, open source (FLOSS) IRC client and tool to delete sticky files on Windows

Again a “Toad” with 2 tools, because there isn’t much to say about them. I installed HexChat today because I needed to join an IRC channel on Freenode and the web-based IRC client I used to use was down. I’ve never been a big fan of IRC because I find it kind of messy so I’ve always stuck to web clients, but I find HexChat easy enough to use and frankly *a lot* faster than a web-based client lagging in the browser.
A few cool features: can be configured as a portable installation (saves settings in program folder instead of the system folders’ mess), can pin servers and channels to auto-connect to them on startup (kind of obvious I suppose, but it’s the kind of thing I didn’t have in the web client…).
HexChat is a desktop client with a GUI, if you’d rather have a console client or something, you might find what you want on this Top 4 open source IRC clients post where I read about it.

The second tool is FileASSASSIN by Malwarebyte, and unfortunately it’s just freeware. It’s a nice little tool to help you delete tough files.
I’ve been doing some Android development lately, and at some point I hit one of those horrible Windows bug where some poorly conceived piece software generates a file that’s impossible to delete and chokes on it itself (and when you try to delete it manually from Windows Explorer, Windows tells you you don’t have permission to do this, even when you try to run the command as Administrator). In this case, it lead to an Android Studio/IntelliJ error looking like “Cannot save file: Cannot delete temporary file ___jb_old___“. That seems to be a long-running joke (the bug was reported over 4 years ago and is actually marked as fixed because now “there is a UI option (File | Settings | Use “safe write”)”), but that’s the kind of joke where I usually waste 10 minutes to reboot the computer into Linux, delete the file from there, and then boot back into Windows.
FileASSASSIN tries a few tricks to unlock the file and tries to delete it. In my case it failed to delete the file directly, but it also offers to mark the file for deletion at reboot, which worked fine. So I still had to reboot, but skipped the boot into Linux part (also convenient if you don’t want to have a dual boot just to handled such annoyances…).
If it doesn’t work out for you, maybe try one of the many other file deletion tools listed in this post.