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Miscellaneous

Windows PowerToys

If you're weird like me, you might like to swap your CTRL key with your Caps Lock key. PowerToys makes it easy to change key mappings and it also looks like it has a lot of other nice advanced tools.

OBS

The Open Broadcast Software (OBS) makes it possible to record autio and video from your laptop for free!

Download OBS here

Chocolatey

Downloading, installing, and keeping software updated on Windows can be challenging. Chocolatey is software to help you manage software.

Other operating systems such as Linux, have their own package managers. Chocolatey is a package manager for Windows

Install Chocolatey

Maven

When you write java code, you can use javac to compile it and then run it with the java command. This works great for simple programs that fit into a single text file. You can even package your code into a Java Archive, aka jar file, and run it that way.

However, it quickly becomes tedious to manually call javac to compile multiple java and jar files. This is where maven can help.

Here's the maven installation guide

You can use chocolatey to install maven on Windows by Running Powershell as Administrator and run: choco install maven

note

Gradle is another popular java build tool that was inspired by Maven. If you are starting a new java project you can use either Maven or Gradle to build and manage your project. Maven uses xml to know how to compile and manage java projects. Gradle uses the groovy programming language. The groovy programming language is another language that can run on the Java virtual machine (JVM). WPLib uses Gradle to build and deploy Robot code written in Java

WPLib Maven Repository

As of November 2025, the WPLib maven artifacts are available here:

https://frcmaven.wpi.edu/ui/native/release/