I assume by desktop you mean either Windows or Mac or any Linux distro. I mostly work on Windows as an engineer, there are some great products from small or one-man company: Emeditor: a text editor | UltraEdit/UltraStudio: a text editor/project IDE | Beyond Compare: a compare utility --> they have Linux version | Source Insight: a source tree oriented code editor and browser |

Those are all paid software and I bet the authors are making good lives from their software