Ask HN: Examples of reliable software you enjoy using | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Examples of reliable software you enjoy using

247 pointsgtirloni650 comments

There is so much broken software out there that sometimes it can feel a bit overwhelming and depressing if you have been 'yak shaving' for hours/days/months on end.

It's not rare to forget what you were doing after layers are layers of workarounds and fixes you have to do before actually doing the thing you wanted in the first place.

I'm wondering if people would have examples of good software they enjoy using and trust them to work properly so others can have some hope or feel better about it overall.

A similar question was asked 8 years ago ("What software makes you happy?" -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=128714) but I would like to focus on the reliability aspect of software.

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Python. To a lesser extent, vim and tmux. ssh/scp.

I used to think bash was on that list... it seems relatively responsive and predictable. I use it all the time.

But then I realized how often bash has weird issues -- like completion hanging, or inexplicable inability to complete (this could be due to the distro though). Or it just seems easy to get it in a bad state by hitting the wrong keys, or dumping a binary file to the terminal.

And recently I have been looking through the bash source code, and it's a bit horrifying. The reliability is done by brute force of special cases over decades, not by good design.

I like the semantics of the shell language, in that it lets me get things done fast. But I don't like the syntax or the implementation I happen to use. bash is pretty complete, but not well implemented.

The Python installation called WinPython has worked flawlessly for me, as have the Python environments on both x86 and ARM Linux.

My own programs written in Python... not so lucky. ;-)

Agree with the list and bash. I switched to fish because of this and never looked back.

Although tmux isn't perfect when there's a lot of scrolling output on account of it being a terminal multiplexer, the only decent replacement I've found is terminator, which is a terminal emulator. But I hate the terminator key bindings, and it doesn't have a option for screen/tmux style shortcuts.

What's wrong with tmux scrollbar buffers?

Nothing. However because tmux is a terminal emulator running in a single terminal, the whole thing can freeze with loads of output if you don't rate limit [1]. My understanding (and experience) is that terminator emulates several terminals, so one pane freezing doesn't affect the others. I still prefer tmux, but I do find the different approaches interesting.

[1] https://superuser.com/questions/417556/is-there-any-way-to-p...

zsh?

VLC. There have been so many times I thought "man it would be great if there were this crazy hypothetical feature in my media player" only to find out it's like a stable long-established feature that's a keypress away from activation after a quick google search or glance at a dropdown menu.

Or for folks like me: I just want to play my video files no fuss, no muss. Something other major media players seem to have more trouble with than they should. But not VLC! 100% of the time it works every time!

Doesn't matter what filetype it is...it just runs them all, instantly, like magic. I have never missed Windows Media Player for even a moment.

"Doesn't matter what filetype it is...it just runs them all, instantly, like magic."

Does it play DVD ISO files ?

Can you use the menus, etc. ?

Just curious ... XBMC back in 2004 could do this (navigate and use DVD menus in a DVD ISO) but then that feature actually went away in the following years, never to return ...

> Does it play DVD ISO files ? Can you use the menus, etc. ?

Those are semi-loaded questions. It can and does play .vob files, which is enough if you actually just want to watch the video, which is VLC's primary use case.

It is not a full media manager with additional functionality.

It does play DVD ISO files. Just drag and drop them in, hit play.

antisthenes notwithstanding, VLC does play DVD .iso files and you can use the menus.

Wow - that's fantastic. Thanks.

Yes, with mouse, keyboard, or remote.

The question you should be asking is, "does it properly ignore DVD menus?"

The question you should be asking is "can it find its way around DRM?"

When I play some bought DVDs with VLC the DRM stops the DVD getting to the menu stage (on Linux especially) and I need the menu to change the language for my children who don't always want English[1]. Skipping the menu doesn't let me change the language, and not using the skip-menu option means the DVD won't play. Disney are not alone in this, but are the guilty party that comes to mind.

1. Even better when the nordic regional edition of a film has something crazy like Finnish as the default language, and English isn't there at all, but my children want the voices in Norwegian. So skipping menus goes straight to the film in language that doesn't even make sense to Finns. Thanks DVD producers, there isn't enough frustration in my life but with your help and my money we're reaching levels close to 100%.

I was usually able to switch the language by right-clicking, there's a submenu that lets you select which audio stream (i.e. which language) you want to listen to.

You are right. I found vlc in 2006 and never looked back.

On my low end machine VLC struggles with H265, where KMP doesn't. (But I still strongly prefer VLC for everything else.)

Have you tried MPC-HC? I haven't put it up to the test with KMP, but I do know it beats VLC for H265 playback.

All these players use the same code, you know. Here it is:

https://github.com/FFmpeg/FFmpeg/blob/master/libavcodec/hevc...

I'd be pretty surprised if there was a major difference between them. Maybe some bugs in the rendering path, or one player isn't doing threads properly?

not really. they have some particular demuxers, and renderers.

e.g. you can get better color output and better subtitle features on mpc-hc

They should run the same in theory - but they don't in practice. It is typically more noticeable on older hardware, on my current rig I probably wouldn't be able to tell the difference. Maybe that's changed in more recent versions, but I no longer have my older rig to do comparison tests.

Also what gcb0 said is true as well - but not everyone needs subtitles for their videos. My 'expertise' in media player selection is based on getting the absolute best quality playback for my anime.

My primary reasons for switching from VLC were not due to efficiency - but due to shadow being washed out and the NVidia color issues. Both "fixable" in that you can "improve them" but not quite "remove them entirely". (Both issues are easily Google-able as well)

There are many, many, many image comparisons between VLC and MPC-HC (and sometimes MPV for Linux). The one thing in common is that MPC and MPV both look very similar while VLC always has a washed out look and occasionally faulty colors (by default). Unfortunately, many people are terrible at screenshotting the exact same frame but even from similar frames one can pretty easily spot the differences between VLC and MPC-HC.

Example of the shadow/color differences:

Side-by-side w/ CPU usage difference: http://i.imgur.com/xJnrS2f.jpg

http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/176895 (excuse the distortion, I was 1px off on my cropping)

Some people prefer the washed-out look finding it more aesthetically pleasing. That's fine and I'm cool with that, long as I don't need to watch anything with them. Many people also "don't give a shit" because they'd never know the difference without seeing the side-by-side or comparison of the frame. That's fine too - but not something I personally agree with. :) I prefer better quality even if I have to looking for it.

This definitely falls under "bugs in the rendering path". In this case the question isn't which one looks better, but which one the media author intended.

Your two culprits are that someone's YUV->RGB math forgot that Y needs to be expanded from 16-235 to 0-255 - possible but really surprising! - or that one player implements gamma correction and the other doesn't.

Gamma correction might look nice, but it can't be called correct unless you've profiled your monitor, set the brightness level, not changed your ambient lighting levels, and turned off all the nonsense LCD options like "contrast".

BTW, the only rendering bug I ever expect to see is the difference between Rec.601 and Rec.709 colorspace, which just kind of makes green colors look different. So this is pretty extreme!

>In this case the question isn't which one looks better, but which one the media author intended.

That's typically my argument, but others simply "don't care" how the author intended, they want what looks better to them. Which is fine - as long as I'm not watching it with them. Because I actually do care how the author intended something to be seen.

Another mention for MPC, and I ended up switching to it for everything, after searching alternatives because VLC was stuttering with some h265. It displays everything I've ever thrown at it with no fuss and has some neat features like single keypress to search for subtitles for the current video.

I have the opposite experience. Font rendering in Chinese seldom work, and dragging the slider of a large MP4 or MKV video results in noticeable lag. I have since abandoned it.

Not to mention the color balance is noticeably off for Nvidia graphics cards - and no amount of trying to rebalance them ever quite gets it "right". I also prefer my video player to let me know if a video file is corrupted rather than attempt to play it anyways. I find that to be a bug, not a feature.

What do you use now?

mpv for OS X/Linux PotPlayer for Windows

I love VLC, but I had to switch to MPC-HC. It performs a lot better, it can play full HD MP4 videos on my weak laptop without any issues, whereas VLC struggles, skips frames, and is basically unusable.

I switched to SMPlayer because of the integration with OpenSubtitles.

http://smplayer.sourceforge.net/

In case you didn't know, there's an option in VLC to download subtitles based on the hash of the video.

That sounds amazing, from where are the subs sourced?

https://github.com/exebetche/vlsub downloads subs from opensubtitles.org.

I wanted to install this extension earlier this week, only to discover that it was already installed. This is with VLC 2.2.3 on OS X.

Search by hash has been working well for me so far.

I generally use VLC by default, but I've found that it frequently stutters in decoding files mounted via sshfs, particularly when I use the scrub bar. I'm guessing that's because sshfs introduces some latency on seeks that upsets the decoders, but other video players don't have the same problem.

So, just anecdotally, VLC isn't perfect, but I'd agree that it's generally quite close.

The file access module allows you to modify the buffer - change it to something very large and let it sit for a bit after hitting play.

> There have been so many times I thought "man it would be great if there were this crazy hypothetical feature in my media player" only to find out it's like a stable long-established feature

I just want simultaneous display of multiple subtitle tracks. :(

for somethings mplayer just works out of box, where it doesn't for vlc, e.g. :

curl http://blah/blah/some/hidden/network/stream | mplayer -

which I've seen fails on vlc

I like VLC, but I can't upgrade past version 2.1.5 because the 2.2.x release has broken WMV support (it stutters on many WMV files).

Lol, wmv? There's a name I have not heard in ages.

VLC has the same problem as Chrome vs. Safari for me on OS X: It's not color correct, ignores monitor color profiles and colors look washed out in direct comparison to QuickTime. I'm guessing many people are not aware of that on their Macs.

At least Chromium seems finally to work on this after more than 5 years https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=44872

I wished I do not need to switch to QuickTime or Safari to have correct bright colors for enjoying videos & images :/

Chrome has color problems? I am curious about this. Can you point me to more specifics?

look at the linked chrome bug link. But you can also see it yourself. Open an image you know very well on both Chrome and Safari and compare side by side. I can even see it on opening http://imgur.com in Chrome and Safari and comparing the results. I recognize it the most on skin tones. Chrome is washed out a little and in Safari it looks nice. You can see it even more on videos. Go to the same minute/second and compare Chrome and Safari.

I don't find any difference.

I like having VLC around but as a day-to-day music player I find it uncomfortable. I have been looking for iTunes alternatives for normal mp3 listening and so far I really like the simplicity and purpose-built nature of qmmp and a bunch of playlist files.

Why would you use it as a music player? It can play the files but it's not a meant to be a music player.

I agree, except :s/VLC/mpv/

On the Mac I'm far happier with MPlayerX: http://mplayerx.org/

It's UI is optimised for playing video (example: if your window is not fullscreen, but playing it will stay in front). It has smoother playback than vlc, I can actually skip by seconds with my cursors etc.

How does it compare to mpv?

git is so reliable that I forget that reliability used to be a problem in version control (I've had to reconstruct CVS and Subversion repositories that got corrupted via various bugs and quirks of the system). It's also pretty fast.

SQLite is an automatic, and easy, answer. It almost goes without saying at this point, I guess.

vim is everywhere. I like knowing I can always run it no matter where I am or what server/VM I'm logged into. That knowledge provides comfort.

go. I don't actually love the language, but the solidity of it and it's ecosystem is really nice. Everything around go has a patina of workmanship about it; not in a corporate "professional" sense, but more like a well-made wood plane or something.

Perl. Again, I don't entirely love the language, but the incredible backward compatibility (we have ~20 year old code that still runs unmodified!), the rarity of bugs (especially given how big the surface area of a huge language like Perl is), and the overall culture of testing, leads to a pretty nice experience. I feel like I can count on it, even if I might get grumpy at some of the quirks.

Python, for different reasons from Perl. I can come back to Python after years away and find that it's maybe even a simpler (but not less powerful) Python than I used a decade ago. I just poked at Python 3 for the first time a few weeks ago, and found it immediately readable and intuitive. The language is more reliably "Pythonic" every year.

OpenSSH. Always works. Always trustworthy.

Google Inbox. I want to host my own mail (and do, for my business), but nothing is as good as Inbox.

git is such a great example for OP. It's become so ingrained in my workflow that I forget it's there. It really is a perfect application.

> Perl ... the overall culture of testing

and documentation!

I remember stumbling across cpan years ago and being blown away (this was way before github or even google code IIRC) that there was so much code I obtain and use, freely, just off the internets.

Of course I had no idea how Perl worked, so it looked like someone stuck a bunch of symbols in their nose and mouth then sneezed, but would've been amazing if I had spent a bit of effort.

>Inbox

I've had a heap of issues with not receiving notifications for emails that were miscategorised.. or just never popped up on my phone... I check gmail on my desktop every few days just to see if I missed something.

I have that constant feeling of missing something with google inbox, with sufficient keyboard short cut expertise, on a good day I could handle 300-400 mails in gmail, and feel productive. With Inbox, many of those mails are well hidden, and even if I can safely discard whole bunch of mail at the same time, there were couple of instance that made me go back to gmail.

The Android app is consistently buggy for me. Typing jumps around when my keyboard corrects a word, and I've never been able to attach a photo to an email (no troubles with the Gmail app).

Ugh, I know the feeling. Also, the web app is sometimes slow as hell (collapsing bundles, marking items as done etc) without any particular reason. At least, I presume that having ~5 emails in the inbox wouldn't be so difficult to handle.

Now, y'all have me paranoid that I'm missing mail. I don't think I have been...buy maybe so.

And, now that you mention it, GMail is faster, and I can chew through mail at a much, much faster pace. But, the smarts built into Inbox means I can safely ignore a lot more mail (about half ends up in Promos and Finance and Social categories; all ignorable until I'm looking for something specific or expecting something), which is maybe a worthwhile tradeoff. I don't have to go as fast if I only have half as much mail to think about.

Postgresql. Such a marvel of reliability and good design. All features just logically and consistently work with each other.

It's so oraclish an ingresish in the way it treats the command line monkeys...

There's a reason for that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Stonebraker

This is actually the first time I've seen POSTGRES referred to as named for being post-Ingres. This wiki page is full of quite interesting tidbits of history on DB research, thanks.

Great interview with Stonebraker from 2013: http://www.se-radio.net/2013/12/episode-199-michael-stonebra...

What do you mean?

Agree with this. I will regularly write queries plugging together all sorts of odd features in odd ways and it'll just run, run fast, and give me the results I want. Totally amazing.

Some bad software is fractally bad and you can't explain why it's bad because every part of it, at every level, is bad.

I find that Postgres is fractally good in a similar way.

And the documentation is good too! (And that means that it's good, not like most software with "good documentation" where "good" means that it has reasonable feature coverage.)

I actually find the documentation to be awful. Take the installation guide:

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.5/static/tutorial-install....

https://docs.mongodb.com/manual/installation/

PostgreSQL tells you "If you are installing a pre-packaged distribution, such as an RPM or Debian package, ignore this chapter and read the packager's instructions instead" whereas MongoDB actually lists specific instructions for each platform (including distro).

It's similar all the way through. They tell you "why" something was done but not necessarily "how" to get something done. And the manual format with chapters simply isn't suited for the web. There is fantastic content there. It just needs someone with a UX hat to structure it in a way to make it easier to use.

I find the documentation very structured, accessible and complete.

The chapter format might not be the most modern way of presenting it, but the actual page-layout is good and i'm coming from google most of the time anyway.

I don't know what you mean by that the "how" isn't there?

I don't feel those links serve your point. They illustrate the difference between good and "good", in the sense I meant in my comment, to me.

From the perspective of a GIS professional, I would add the PostGIS extension for PostgreSQL. The depth of spatial analysis options in PostGIS combined with the reliability and performance of PostgreSQL make a great combination. Throw in the cost savings compared to running MS SQL Server/Oracle + ESRI ArcGIS Server and I'm not sure why more GIS shops don't make the switch (Fear of FOSS, the command line, or having to assemble your own solution?).

I'm not sure why more GIS shops don't make the switch

As another GIS professional I've found that the answer to this question in roughly 100% of the cases is that they have some important application (either third party or in house) that doesn't trivially talk with PostGIS and they don't see the cost saving once they've factored in all the migration costs. So vendor lock-in basically.

This is what I was going to put! Agreed!

Windows: "Everything" (that's the name). A lightweight, fast and advanced (if you want it) file search engine.

Linux: Most tools of course, as they are made with the Unix philosophy, but these days I'm most surprised by print drivers for Linux. Where in Windows the printer is always magically offline or slow, from Linux I can print and scan very reliably.

Vim is also worth learning, it makes editing much more... relaxed I guess. No longer have to move your mouse to the arrow keys or even the mouse/touchpad to scroll or select. It also helps that it exists on nearly every Unix system you'll ever connect to.

And finally I recently discovered LaTeX, which could be described as markdown on steroids. A little more difficult to get into, but it's easy to create professional documents and have a plain text source (which works nicely with git and other unix tools). If you have trouble getting started in LaTeX, ask me (comment here or see my profile), I also didn't know how to get started for a while.

Edit: Another Windows tool is Notepad++. I have not seen the likes in Linux when it comes to robustness. It has all the basics you need for handling any sort of file that involves manual editing, binary or plain text. If there is no binary editor available for your file of choice, or if you just want to have a quick peak, Notepad++ will do just fine. Beware of really huge files, although I have seen it handle some big things on low RAM machines too.

If you've any latex pointers I'd appreciate it :)

I used latex to write a paper for the first time last week, and while i thoroughly enjoyed it, i'm fairly confident there were lots of things I could've done better.

I've written two papers in it now, so I'm not a grandmaster yet either. If you managed what you wanted to do and enjoyed it, you probably know as much as me.

I'm not sure there is really a wrong way to use it. If you google every little thing to find a good solution (not manually inserting and formatting references for example), I don't think there is too much to be done better. At least, to my beginner's eyes it doesn't seem like it.

I've recently discovered Quiver. Mac only, but open file format spec (if you are feeling particularly energetic). But it certainly is the nicest thing I've found for doing LaTeX.

I would recommend trying www.writelatex.com.

Use makefiles and git with LaTeX. Use \input{} to structure large documents as a main file that includes smaller ones. Keep all your BibTeX citations in one large .bib file (under git) and symlink it into the current directory for every new document; it makes bibliographies so much easier.

PDFLaTeX makes it incredibly easy to keep all your graphics in PDF files; it makes them so much nicer to deal with. Inkscape is great for making vector graphics for use in LaTex; keep the source code of the graphics in SVG but save as PDF for LaTeX to use (tell Inkscape to export only the drawing to PDF, not the whole page, and you'll never have to crop or resize your graphics ever again).

Finally, use a modern TeX like XeTeX that directly understands Unicode characters and TrueType fonts.

I second git and Make, but I'm not sure I agree with the single .bib file thing. That works if you're writing a lot of documents on the same subject that use many of the same sources, but that's a very specific use case.

Oooh, I like the .bib idea. I might steal it and use it for select things---I decided it'd be a good idea to go back (sorta) and finish my BS, so creating one for each class might be a very good idea.

Import as .pdf not .svg? Got it. It was tricky fiddling with percentages and stuff to get the .svg to fit properly (and look decent).

Thanks! I'll look into XeTex.

IME, the most important key to Latex is setting up your environment so you can have a fast turnaround time between writing some markup and seeing what it looks like (essentially, getting a "Latex REPL"). There are a bunch of different ways to do this, you'll have to pick what's best for you. On Macs I tend to use Sublime Text (substitute with your editor of choice) with a macro to invoke pdfTeX; on Windows I use TeXstudio which has live preview support. There are other ways; do whatever's best for you.

The second most important thing I've found for latex is setting up macros. In TextExpander/AHK I have several dozen Latex macros set up, like

  \tbl3 => \begin{tabular}{ l | c | r }
             a & b & c \\
           \end{tabular}

With a bunch of variants for different styles (full borders, etc.), column numbers, etc. Once your macros have become muscle memory, writing Latex speeds up considerably.

Yeah, that makes sense. I'll make sure to do that. It was kind of time-consuming typing out the couple tables I did add.

I used latexmk which watches file(s) for changes and rebuilds with pdflatex. It was nice, but made my laptop run real hot, and inotify never really works very well.

Which ST plugin do you use?

Not OP, but I've had good experiences with LaTeXTools[1].

[1]: https://packagecontrol.io/packages/LaTeXTools

On Linux, I do the following:

  while inotifywait *.tex; do sleep 0.2 && pdflatex main.tex && killall -HUP mupdf; done

This will, when a .tex file is written, wait a moment until all disk IO is done, then run pdflatex and trigger a reload in my PDF viewer (some also do that automatically when the .pdf file is changed).

The only annoyance is that big .tex files (esp. Beamer presentations) may take long to compile, which interrupts the flow. But in that case, it helps to distribute the sources into multiple files and to comment out the source files that are not needed at the moment.

inotifywait is fantastic, used it lots of times. Good idea to use it for TeX too!

For emacs users I strongly recommend whizzytex + advi (at least if you find advi in your repos; it's somewhat painful to build advi on your own.) Almost as good is emacs + auctex - the first C-c C-c compiles the file, the second brings the document up in a dvi previewer with the page "flipped" to whatever you are working on. Both setups allow inverse search - click somewhere in the dvi viewer and your emacs cursor is moved to the corresponding source location.

The only LaTeX link you'll need: https://tobi.oetiker.ch/lshort/lshort.pdf

I'm pretty weak at LaTeX but if you haven't used macros and rerender-on-write I'd strongly recommend it

The latter is something i achieved with sleep_until_modified.sh and a shell loop. Pretty rudimentary but functionally equivalent to modern webdev reload-on-write behavior. HUGELY beneficial to my learning latex syntax and behavior and formatting nuances

IMHO the best TeX tutorials on the internet are written by some Helpdesk guy on his blog:

http://www.terminally-incoherent.com/blog/2010/02/15/lets-le...

I'm not affiliated in any way with that site but the pedagogy is very approachable. Also it helps to use a site like WriteLatex.com or ShareLatex.com to do the hard setting up part when you're just starting out.

Edit: I see he is no longer a helpdesk guy, and his blog's tagline is (unfortunately) no longer "I will not fix your computer."

That looks great, thank you for sharing!

Use TeXstudio to write your documents. It is an IDE with autocompletion and contextual help and an integrated viewer. Made writing LaTeX so much easier, as it also has wizards to generate repeating boilerplate. I love Latex, especially mathematical notations are a breeze.

Many resources have been suggested, but not the guide written by the creator of TeX and computer science legend Donald Knuth: http://www.ctex.org/documents/shredder/src/texbook.pdf

Adding to the list of editors: LyX is a great cross-platform editor that I've used. https://www.lyx.org/

Vim departs from the reliability camp once you start adding a bunch of plugins. But as a raw editor, yes -- it's solid.

Then you're using the wrong plugins. I have about 12 here and can't recall any stability problems.

Reliability != stability (in this context).

I can reliably ssh into pretty much any server and use default vim. I cannot rely on a given plugin to be installed on the server. The more you customize vim, the less universal your knowledge of vim becomes. It's not a big deal to learn some plugins, but it is worth bringing up if people are talking about the ubiquity of it.

FWIW, I used to use Notepad++ back around 2005 and it was a piece of crap stability-wise. Frequent crashes, and not-infrequent UI glitches like syntax highlighting just stopping working.

This isn't a reflection on its state now, but I'm trying to make the point that good software takes time. They've had 13 years to clean it up now, and evidently it's gotten a lot better. But that's worth remembering when judging the crap software that's come out in the last couple years.

Linux printing also used to absolutely suck, so much that CUPS was generally synonymous with the hassles you (used to) need to go through to do practical work with a Linux system. Ubuntu has been an absolute godsend in terms of getting a stable, productive Linux desktop working.

I use Notepad++ all the time and I've never had any problems at all. Granted, I don't use many of its features, I mostly just edit plain text. Its select by columns feature is useful though.

Seriously, if Ubuntu were a single piece of software, it would top my charts. I don't even use it regularly anymore except on my work Desktop (I run Arch linux on all my personal machines) but the sheer level of "Just Works(tm)" is mind boggling. It quite handily picks up my weird wireless cards and video devices without fuss, and I haven't managed to fully break an Ubuntu installation (mostly dealing with nVidia back in the day, when it was less magical to get working) in a way that I couldn't easily revert.

I realize a lot of that is riding on the Debian team, but Canonical has done some fantastic work just testing the thing out on such a wide variety of configurations. It's the distribution I recommend to any of my friends looking to try Linux out for the first time.

I recommend Debian for similar reasons. It might not be as magical as Ubuntu but it still works out-of-box for a variety of common hardware and is built on a great free as in free philosophy.

I don't enjoy using software that's difficult to learn or use, which most of your examples seem to be. (I haven't used "Everything", so I might be wrong about that one.)

Notepad++ used to cheese me off in a previous job where I was basically forced to use it because it couldn't even draw drop-down menus correctly. Ugh. Terrible UI.

"Everything" really is that simple. Point it at some folders and go.

Folders? It's extremely quick to index whole drives, so I'd just let it do just that.

True. That is what is does by default, and does it well.

Does anyone know how everything work? Does it hook into the NTFS filesystem with special apis? The indexing is insanely fast. I wonder how they make it happen.

It reads the NTFS Master File Table (MFT) which contains records for all files and folders. It only does this the first time it runs (or when you manually tell it to rebuild the index). It also uses the NTFS USN journal [1] in order to update changes to its index so that it doesn't need to read the MFT and rebuild the index every time it runs.

[1] https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa3...

It's actually really ironic that it's so much faster than Windows' own search.

> Edit: Another Windows tool is Notepad++. I have not seen the likes in Linux when it comes to robustness.

It couldn't even open a 1.2 GB text file when I tried it yesterday. On a 32GB system. Seriously?

It's been a while since I last used it, but I thought it could handle files that big. At least on systems with 2GB ram or so, it would open files of hundreds of megabytes just fine. Not sure I ever tried anything over a gigabyte, but I might have.

> Vim is also worth learning, it makes editing much more... relaxed I guess. No longer have to move your mouse to the arrow keys or even the mouse/touchpad to scroll or select. It also helps that it exists on nearly every Unix system you'll ever connect to.

People often talk about the speed of use, but this is (IMO) a result of its efficiency. I liked your use of the word 'relaxed', I'd add: slow down your actions so you have time to think about what you're doing, almost like narrating your actions.

Vim has a grammar that works well when spoken. Learn Vim's way of saying the action you're performing, then learn the relevant keys, adding them to your vocabulary. If a sentence makes sense in your head, try it and it'll probably work as expected. Say you started with:

"delete 3 words" == d3w

"yank to the end of the line" == y$

From this you could assume these valid:

"delete to the end of the line" == d$

"yank 5 words" == y5w

It takes time, but it builds up when you add a word to your vocab here and there, when you have a concrete use for it. (often one you'll remember from the 'wow, that was cool' moment when you first see it in action)

Some more examples:

"delete inside quotes" == di"

"select all of the block" == va{

When I just want a quick peek at a binary file on Linux I use `hexdump -C filename | less`.

For hexdump, I could never remember which switch gives me the format that I want to see. I'm now using xxd, which comes with vim and has nice defaults.

Sure there are hex converters and editors for Linux, but Notepad++ is a text editor that handles binary as if it were just another text file. For example if you try in Vim to edit binary files beyond very simple edits, it'll usually corrupt them. And from `hd file.bin | less` you can't edit them.

Latex does not belong on the list. I have not been using it as long as many, but it does not meet OP's description at all. It's entire premise is to put the focus on writing, but at that it fails miserably.

Left to over 30 years of growth outside of its intended use case, LaTeX proper does nothing you would need it to, and the packages that you use with it are horribly fragmented. Maybe Latex is good at the things it sets out to implement, but those things aren't what I or anyone else uses it for (creating publication-quality documents). So in considering latex we are forced to also consider the environment of libraries it exists in.

LaTeX brings all the problems you had in the Windows 2000 era of programming into document creation. All your favorites like misleading compiler messages, dependency hell, choosing a compiler, knowing whether or not you have run the compiler enough times to produce a final document (!!!), bad compile environments, inconsistent naming, inconsistent syntax for passing parameters to library calls (!!!), GOTOs.

There is no way to write semantic latex for most documents where you would need it. Here's a fun project: find a way to reference the same footnote or endnote multiple times throughout a document in a way consistent with how you reference anything else (that is, using \label and \ref). Some arcane technicality in the way the counter is set up prevents you from doing this. Instead, you have to create your own global counter, write a function to maintain it, then use this function in lieu of LaTeX's implementation of footnotes.

Every time I want to do anything other than add words to my document, I have to think about whether I want to use Latex's meager facilities, facilities that I had to write, or facilities that someone else invented, then worry about all the quirks in them. If I want to add a table to my document, I need to decide whether it should be a `tabular', `tabular* ' `tabularx', `align', `array', `eqnarray', or `matrix'. Someone has told me once that one of these is very bad and should be avoided unless absolutely necessary, although he didn't tell me why, and I don't remember which one. If I want to make a cell span two columns, I have to remember whether that is the `multicols' package, or the `multicolumn' package. If my table gets too big, I now have to hard-code a split myself, or repeat the entire process and convert my table to a `longtable'. I hope I don't have to wrap anything in a `minipage'.

It baffles me that thinking about these things is prerequisite to creating a document.

The attitude that 'LaTeX is easy' is perpetrated loudly by people that haven't had to use LaTeX very much. It is only tentatively saved by the comprehensive (sometimes, if you're lucky, even readable) documentation of all its quirks.

I am not going to stop using Latex, but no one will ever get me to say that it's easy.

I fully understand where you're coming from. Its syntax is weird at times and everything has to be magically done with yet another package, very few things seem to be built in.

On the other hand, I don't know another environment that makes it as easy as LaTeX makes it. Markdown is easier but far from powerful enough; HTML is nowhere near as easy and just not really made for it; and WYSIWYG editors just suck as a whole. LaTeX seemed to me as everything I was looking for, even if the syntax and methods are from the eighties.

Additionally, enough people use it that support is also not an issue. There are almost certainly other languages that do a similar job in a modern way, but the thing is, my girlfriend studies math and she can read/write these documents too. The network effect works in LaTeX' favor here.

Thanks for the tip about "Everything". Tried it for the first time now and, oh boy my life just changed. This is incredible! I'd like to see that quick ASCII search implemented into Windows. The included webserver is also fantastic.

If we're talking windows software, since moving on I really really miss Irfanview, it's ridiculous for how long it's been actively developed by one person. It's featherweight, does its job admirably and has a myriad of advanced options when - and only when you need them.

Alfred (https://www.alfredapp.com)

Alfred is absolutely the most game-changing app I've ever been introduced to. I only use it for finding files, searching, opening a page by direct URL, defining words, calculator, translation (via Google), launching apps, and quickly jumping to apps that are already open. It's probably saved me hundreds of hours in clicking around, etc.

I've never purchased the paid version (been using since 2011), but I support them by searching Amazon (results are via affiliate link) when I buy things.

I've installed Alfred before but just kept using Spotlight. I never saw why it amazes so many people.

What does it do that Spotlight can't?

See my comment above. For me it seems more accurate.

there is a lot of features in Alfred, but my absolute favorite is the workflows [1]

I use Alfred workflow with dash [2], so i can type "go fmt.Println" into alfred, and jump straight to the man-page.

I also use Alfred workflow with SnippetsLab [3], to open my personal notes in a similar fashion.

    1: https://www.alfredapp.com/help/workflows/
    2: https://kapeli.com/dash

Dash is also an absolutely wonderful app, for having all your coding docs on-the-go. Since I am often without internet access, Dash lets me continue working. It even has offline stack exchange if that rocks your boat.

    3: https://www.renfei.org/snippets-lab/

SnippetsLab provides a very much awesome way of organizing all your snippets of code / notes, etc.

This way of navigating means I have to use the trackpad pretty infrequently.

My only complaint about these tools, is that I'm stuck in Windows at work :-(

For another software I use daily and can no longer live without, it would be tmux.

Would you mind sharing your Alfred dash workflow?

Edit: Found it. For those interested, you need the Alfred Powerpack and Dash installed. Go to Dash Preferences -> Integration & click 'Alfred'.

I use the paste manager A LOT. But that might be only in the paid version.

Ditto. Can't function without the clipboard history.

It isn't so annoyingly stupid like Spotlight. For months, I open a single file called TODO.TXT via Spotlight. I enter T..O..D.. and select TODO.TXT from the list. I don't search for anything else with Spotlight that begins with TOD or even TO. But Spotlight for whatever reason decides that for every second or third search attempt, it must show me an entirely different file than the one I opened a thousand times by pressing exactly these letters.

It is hard for me to grasp how in 2016 a piece of software can be so ignorant to such a simple behavior.

But: It took me a few attempts to start using Alfred. I personally only use it to open files and programs and to search in files. The default behavior with pressing space twice is very annoying if you want to open text files. So I tweaked the settings a bit and now it works for me:

Default Results:

    Essentials: - all unchecked but *Applications*.
    Extras: only check: Folders, Text Files, Documents, Images.

Search within files by starting your search with the word in like "in FOOBAR".

That's what works for me and replaced Spotlight.

I prefer using Spotlight from the command line: https://gist.github.com/senderista/1246300

It can be "taught" to do things. If you want to open something with 1-2 letters you can just repeat yourself a few times (2-4?) and it will learn and remember. Spotlight just does not do this.

That is strange, Spotlight seems to do this for me. I rarely have to type more than 1-2 characters. YMMV.

+1 for Alfred. I have Spotlight completely disabled/hidden because Alfred is just faster and more full-featured.

The paid version is totally worth it for how much time it saves me. I also really enjoy the theming and file management features (which are paid only).

I tried Alfred and thought it kind of redundant until one day my sizable collection of PDFs flooded Spotlight's indexer, and I couldn't find any of my apps via Spotlight's search.

Alfred's indexer is superior to Spotlight's, and is much saner in what it prioritizes for viewing over what it doesn't.

By far my favorite Alfred integration is with Dash, the offline documentation viewer: https://kapeli.com/dash

I have an Alfred workflow with a hotkey of COMMAND+OPTION+CTRL+P that searches Dash. I then type whatever it is that I'm searching for and Alfred displays the likely matches sorted by the docset preference order in Dash. It makes me feel psychic and I can't imagine working without it now.

It's the first feature I show people who ask, "Why use Alfred instead of Spotlight?"

Just installed Dash and it's awesome! Thanks

There's a Windows version called Zeal that's great if you're not on OSX.

I currently use Launchbar, does anyone have any good examples of where Alfred might be better?

What are some Alfred workflows that you'd recommend?

see my comment above for alfred workflow tips

About the only Alfred feature I use is multiple item clipboard, and that alone is worth the price of the license for me. I'm going to dig into the other uses that folks have suggested here.

Ah, only runs on Apple OS's, not Windows. bummer.

I activate Alfred with my caps-lock key. That way spotlight is still in the usual place. It take a key-mapping app called Seil to make it work, but it's really great.

Sometimes I think Chromebooks stole my idea. :p

I use CTRL CTRL, and I have my command and control keys switched, so it's really CMD CMD on the left corner of my keyboard, which is very convenient, but caps lock is a great idea also.

I only use Seil/Karabiner for re-mapping caps lock but they have been pretty reliable for me :).

+1 for Alfred. Must have. A few workflows i use:

- FastDiff (quickly diff selected finder files) - Hash - https://github.com/BigLuck/alfred2-hash - Menu Bar Search - https://github.com/ctwise/alfred-workflows/tree/master/menu-... - Recent Items - http://www.alfredforum.com/topic/713-recent-items-42-for-alf... - Strip clipboard text formatting - https://github.com/notDavid/alfred-workflow-stripClipboardFo... - Transmit - https://github.com/ramiroaraujo/alfred-transmit-workflow - Tunnelblick - Synonyms - https://github.com/notDavid/alfred-workflow-synonyms

Just fyi, Shift + Option + Command + V pastes unformatted text.

i don't have that many fingers

use a decent OS. I can do it with middle click.

In what way is a middle click dependent on the OS? And in what way is moving your hand away from the keyboard to click a mouse better than simply hitting a key combo?

The OS does decide what to do upon middle-click. In X11 (which handles input events and actions on most desktop Linuxes), middle-click pastes text selection.

Shift+Insert is the keyboad equivalent of middle-click, BTW. Apple (or the ecosystem) doesn't have a monopoly on keyboard shortcuts; in fact, it has been my experience that Apple UIs focus on touchpad usage too much, to the point of completely ignoring and skipping keyboard shortcut support.

agreed. i bet even Mozart would have difficulties positioning his fingers like this ;-) Of course you could also assign another shortcut to this with BetterTouchTool or something.

Total Commander. I've been using it since the first versions that came out for Windows 3.1 and it provided a smooth Windows transition from Norton Commander for DOS.

The changelog goes back all the way to 2002, but it's been there for waaay longer. ( http://ghisler.com/whatsnew.htm )

I hope he continues to make a healthy income from it. It's litterally the best piece of shareware in the world in my eyes, that i've happily bought a license for.

Super Awesome Footnote: I just found out that you can still get the version 6.5, which is every bit as stable as v8.51a, built for Windows 3.1 : http://www.ghisler.com/wcmd16.htm

I've seen this program come up a few times in the last couple of years - but every time I look at it I can't see a use case that sticks out. I've looked through the FAQ and installed it and I just can't seem to get why I'd use that opposed to Windows Explorer, 7Zip, and WinSCP.

Can you share why you find it useful? Thanks!

I hate the Windows explorer, but WinScp is not bad. Bunch of windows are hard to work with and even slow when moving files.

It has tabs, which is great for development and quickly jumping between directories in the same window.

http://imgur.com/a/4toXv

The two panels allows me to quickly switch also in different contexts. Lots of handy hotkeys are available.

Two __girls__ windows at the same time! What more could you want.

Stuff I use daily: - extremely quick copy pasting and moving between two folders - filter by extension - dir bookmarks - extremely quick compressing - easy and simple enough file diffs - command line from every folder - fast navigation using smart search of file in current dir - pretty good search within folder - viewer for text files(useful when need to read the last couple of lines from 10GB log file)

It is somewhat more/easier configurable than mc or FAR. I know you can get dozens of plugins for all these actions but totalcmd has the right amount of stuff I need and is not bloated. Been using it for almost 15 years.

I guess it only becomes a real power tool if you learn to navigate and harness the power of the 2 side-by-side panels by keyboard.

Long story short, let me sum up some of my favorite features:

    - Tab to switch between panels
    - Navigate with arrow keys through the files list 
      (very handy if you have it on 'brief' view, especially since you can walk 
      through whole directories with left/right arrow until you hit the '..')
    - CTRL + F1/ CTRL+F2 to select drive for the left or right panel
    - Using any type of packer (zip,arj,7z, etc) as a directory by just hitting 
      enter on it to see the files inside, view them, extract, add and remove
    - CTRL + Pagedown to navigate even into some packaged files that aren't 
      normally accessible as folders (like .msi)
    - F-Keys with a clear indicator at the bottom to move and copy files, insert 
      to select and move to the next file
    - F3 for an all you can eat file viewer that can switch to different view modes
      like HEX by pressing 1,2,3,4 and doesn't bork on large files
    - F4 launches your favorite editor
    - Hit space on a directory to compute the full size recursively 
    - ALT+F7 for find-in-files and fast file search
    - The most powerful multi-rename tool you could ever wish for in the file menu
    - Built-In FTP Client (CTRL + F) with a favorite list, queue list 
      and resume from queue list.
    - Download any random file (with resume and queue) using CTRL+N (HTTP/FTP)
    - Plugin support to enhance the thing with stuff like SFTP/FTPS support, 
      which you can open from the 'network' drive
    - Background copy for most operations (in it's own thread, and with pause)
    - Double click the file path at the top of the panel for a popup hotlist where
      you can add favorite jump-to spots
    - CTRL + Arrow key opposite to the current panel opens the folder under the 
      cursor in the opposite panel
    - CTRL + UP arrow on a folder opens it in a new tab (which you can even lock to
      persist them or have handy nav points)
    - Numpad + to select files in a folder according to a wildcard
    - Numpad * inverts currrent selection or selects all
    - Pack some files using CTRL + F5 on a selection

There's just so much goodness that this list could go on and on for way too long. Double Commander comes close on Linux, but there's no thing like TotalCMD for me when i'm on Windows.

Just out of interest, what are your thoughts on Directory Opus?

https://www.gpsoft.com.au/

I've not used Total Commander or Directory Opus much, but I figured DOpus was something you might be interested in.

I have no thoughts on DOpus other than: it looks horrible GUI-wise

Absolutely a must-use software. Been using it since 2006, never went back to Windows Explorer.

I've tried the total commander but never got used to it. I used to run norton commander and norton utilities on dos back in the day, and these days I'm still reaching for midnight commander [1] pretty regular when moving files around on my media server and such.

    apt-get install mc

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnight_Commander

Far is also very good.

http://www.farmanager.com/index.php?l=en

Total Commander is an essential Windows tool.

TC ultima prime is a package with lots of useful Windows apps like Notepad++ included http://tcup.eu

My dual-panel, multi-tabbed file manager of choice has been the free Multi Commander: http://multicommander.com/

Clover is a simple tabbed file explorer that I use daily. It's great for easy access to frequently used folders, and makes it a breeze to move/copy files. Found at http://ejie.me/.

Sublime Text

Files auto save, so a crash, or even accidental close will not cause you to lose anything. Also handles massive files, which is nice. On top of being a nice, very configurable code editor,

I like sublime text too. but the most recent update seems to have an issue. sometimes when opening a file on linux, I won't see any content rendered unless I resize the sublime text window.

I have that issue with some other apps as well. It's particularly noticeable for me with Terminal windows, which will lose their contents if I drag them to another monitor. I'm not entirely sure that's Sublime Text, I think it might be something between the window manager and the GPU drivers.

Same problem here, I had to switch back to the previous version because of it. Using ubuntu Gnome 16.04.

Second vote for this.

This is hands-down the best and most reliable piece of software I've encountered. It's insanely flexible (hello, org mode!), and it is pretty much where I live at work.

Almost never fails me. And if a job changes or a work policy changes and I have to switch from Windows to Mac to Linux or whatever, it makes no difference. I clone a repo with my settings and packages, and I'm pretty much done. Maybe change the path to my repls or node, but for the most part, I can be up and running on a new machine and ready to dev in a few minutes.

Absolutely love this, and never have stability problems.

+1 for Sublime Text. It's one of those things that just works smoothly.

Ancestry.com, both its web app and iPhone app. This is a little different than most other responses in the thread, but I'm absolutely astounded how smoothly it works -- sure, you end up with some weird entries (husband/wife get tagged as the opposite in a marriage record or something), but the more I use Ancestry the more I'm convinced it's the best piece of software I've ever used. I'd break down my amazement into a few categories:

--Discovery. The search function has some weird responses sometimes, but I'm astounded how frequently the "Hints" feature finds documents about relatives that I'd never have found on my own. Ancestry's search has a huge understanding of which names might be mixed up with others -- I once found a census record from the late 19th century that had both a husband AND wife's name incorrectly tagged, but Ancestry found it anyway.

--Intuitive interface. After some initial confusion on the mobile app, it's been smooth sailing. Not only can you pull facts out of documents and attach them to relatives, but Ancestry preserves the "citations" so you can go back and figure out, "hm, how do I know so-and-so's birthday?" or "which facts did I already pull out of this record?" You can also link one record to multiple people in one action.

--An unimaginably broad corpus of documents. This one isn't really the software, I guess, but the amount of data Ancestry has access to is unbelievable. I figured out my great-grandmother had a child as a teenager (with a man who was not my great-grandfather) that nobody in my family ever talked about. I found the full text of a 300-year-old will from my sixth great-grandfather while I was sitting on my toilet.

Anyway, it's good.

Synergy. It's a keyboard and mouse sharing client/server application that runs on every platform I use.

I don't know if better alternatives exist because it has just been rock-solid for the last 12 years that I've been using it. I've used it in multi-monitor and machine desktop setups (e.g. an Apple laptop paired with a Windows desktop and linux desktop for enterprisey cubicle development), as well as to let me drive my gaming and media PC from my couch using an Apple laptop.

I was a bit bummed that the pricing model went from free-as-in-beer to free-as-in-speech, but couldn't be happier to pay $10 for a lifetime license.

I feel it belongs in this thread because even when I've neglected to upgrade various machines, or upgraded OSs on machines with the application installed, it just continues to hum along. I can count on one hand the number of times I've had to deal with any problems in any capacity.

I just purchased this recently (having used it ages ago) to drive a second computer on my desk.

My problem is that once the guest machine goes to sleep, I can't seem to wake it via Synergy. Is this expected behavior? I have WoL enabled, so theoretically I should be able to just move my mouse over to the sleeping monitor to wake it up.

Unless synergy has explicit support for WoL (it didn't last time I used it, but it's been years), it won't just work.

You'd need to patch the synergy server to send a WoL magic packet[1] to wake up the client whenever it sends a message that might hit a client that's asleep. (some systems might support something other than the standard magic packet, but I don't know of anything else that works consistently cross platform.) Might also need to look at making sure the client connection comes back up clean and have some delay to make sure it's ready to receive whatever message started the process, and doesn't timeout while waking up.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake-on-LAN#Magic_packet

Darn, that's what I was worried about.

I wouldn't have anticipated it, but this is an critical feature for me. Without WoL, I need to have a mouse/keyboard attached to the guest machine, which completely defeats the purpose of using Synergy.

If you just need to be able to wake it up manually, use something like etherwake to send the wakeup packet. It's not integrated w/ synergy, but is the WoL equivalent of "wiggle the mouse and wake it up."

Eh, maybe it's gotten better since the last time I used it, but I found it to be pretty unreliable.

Agreed. I started using it recently, after previously using x2x, and I keep hitting https://github.com/symless/synergy/issues/9 :(

Interestingly, I switched from synergy to a self-made ssh+x2x wrapper. Two reasons:

1. Ease of install; and 2. Backwards compatibility (Ubuntu 14.04's synergy just couldn't work with Arch's)

I try Synergy every year or so. Depending on how my home setup is. Sometimes I'm wanting a lot of machines, then I want to consolidate. Then I go back to more, etc.

I've never found it to be reliable in any configuration. I've bought it at least a couple of times on different accounts. Love the idea, and when it works, it is fantastic. But I can't say that it is reliable at all.

IntelliJ Idea is head and shoulders better than many other IDEs, particularly Eclipse in the reliability department.

Care to give some examples how? For me, Eclipse has remained very stable. Maybe we are using them for different languages and/or things.

When I used it for Java, I often would have to use the menu option to restart. Seriously .. a menu option to restart???

The stability wasn't as bad as the slowness. Also, OSGI seems to be a philosophy or cult. Things are just generally complex and bloated.

Android Studio, based closely on IntelliJ, has this menu item on the OSX version:

File | Invalidate Caches / Restart ...

I worked with Eclipse for a few years and found it was a constant source of stress, refusing to stay synchronized with maven, crashing, having to restart it, etc.

TL;DR +1 for IntelliJ

I was hating maven, until I started using IntelliJ. I don't remember ever Eclipse going to zero error count on a maven project whereas the project would just compile if maven was used outside of Eclipse.

IntelliJ just works. FTW it has Eclipse key-mappings as well.

IntelliJ lets you do a lot more from the keyboard. It's suggestions for code completion are very useful. It's amazing to see the code almost writing itself, several times faster than you can type!

It even has a plugin that will tell you the key commands for any feature you use more than 3 times.

Oh! Link please?

i think its called 'key promoter'

"A UI error has occurred trying to display a UI error" or something equally unhelpful.

When eclipse gave me that error message I immediately wrote it off as useful software.

Also it is dog slow compared to intellij

I had some issues when I used eclipse, especially back in 2009 when I was forced to use perforce.

Many of their products are. I'm constantly amazed at how well PyCharm is developed, just yesterday saw how well they support git submodules for projects and synchronous commits.

I was never much of an IDE guy but I've been using and seriously enjoying PHPStorm and RubyMine lately.

it has plenty of warts, it's great but I wouldn't say it's reliable.

I'm not a big fan of IDEs, but IntelliJ is really good. I just hate how heavy it is.

Use eclipse for a while, you won't think intellij is heavy anymore after that.

Ha, I just had this experience recently. It's amazing how quickly I got fed up with Eclipse, and how much it made me appreciate IntelliJ after I switched.

I second you on that. I only started using IntelliJ when I started heavy Java development. IntelliJ and its sister tools are a great help if you don't have the time to get into the nuances of whatever language you're using.

It is nice but I don't think I would call it reliable. There are crashes, it took quite some time for stuff like column editing to stop corrupting the files etc. I think they are even less stable than a recent Visual Studio (ah the good stable days of 2008 are long gone)

I wound up using java for a couple of courses at uni... mainly for the networking library. I used to just compile it via the command line because Netbeans and Eclipse pissed me off too much.

Firefox. And it has been for years, I remember when I downloaded a zip file with the Phoenix browser, you had to manually enable flash, and even with such an early version, it was magic. If I remember correctly, it even had tabs.

Then the add-ons and extensions, which enabled you to do something entirelly different or bring back an old behaviour. I still use oldbar since the «awesome bar» might be too awesome for me. Also, the tabs groups, if you are like me, a hoarder of to-read articles, and leaving things for later, you can have a clean slate without losing those tabs.

And if you want to look behind the scenes, you have about:config in which you can bring behind some of the old features.

And it's everything open source! I know Firefox has suffered a lot because it's seen as slow, but I open Firefox once a day and never have complained about it.

This might sound nuts, but if you're using LabVIEW to control National Instruments hardware, and you don't write bad code, you've got a surprisingly fast and powerful system available at your hands. You can measure, drive, control, whatever verb for whatever piece of equipment you're using, with surprising speed, accuracy, and reliability.

It's a pretty expensive stack for doing some pretty particular weird stuff but I kind of love using it. I would at least say that the prices for the hardware aren't too much higher than the competition, and the software side is way way better than the competition. I have never met a person not employed by NI who liked NI software AND equipment as much as I do. Honestly, I don't think I've ever talked to someone who used it the way I do, though...

Swear I wasn't paid to write this. Figured people might have written this stuff off a long time ago and I wanted to toss some respect its way.

LabVIEW was my first programming gig, back in high school. For the unfamiliar, it's a data-flow programming environment designed to drive data acquisition hardware. The programming interface is almost entirely graphical, in which you draw something between schematics and a block diagram; the usage interface looks not unlike laboratory equipment.

I always loved how it made such difficult things so easy, while other languages' "simple" matters like loops required mental gymnastics. It's a great tool for its job.

My personal experience: yes to the NI hardware, but no to LabView. I used LabView during my graduate work and as someone who came from a traditional programming background, I struggled with it. More recently (almost a decade later) I had the opportunity to migrate a LabView project to Measurement Studio (NI's .NET libraries for interfacing with their H/W) and it was night and day. The NI stack works as it should and it is so much more manageable with C#.

Goodness gracious, I love LabVIEW. It's so gratifying to be able to watch the data flow from VI to VI, checking what arguments are passed. I used it for FIRST Robotics, and writing code with LabVIEW was a dream compared to its hobbled Java-1.3-like counterpart.

Interfaces are great, in terms of putting together "75% tools" (ones that aren't perfect or polished, but get the job done). Being able to pull all sorts of data from an active robot and relay it to the users in an easy-to-design interface was awesome.

I still wish there were a good open-source version of some parts of LabVIEW.

(I also was not paid to write this. I just loved the dev environment. I never looked at data quite the same way again.)

Beyond Compare. An amazing/cheap file comparison tool. - http://www.scootersoftware.com

What's particularly great about this comparison tool is how fast and efficient is can asynchronously compare and synchronize large sets of remote files whether it be SMB, FTP, SSH/SFTP. You can also compare archives to folders and the custom viewers for comparing things like images are a nice bonus.

I had forgotten about this tool, and having worked mostly on Apple hardware for the last 5 years didn't realize they had a macOS version. But when I used it on Windows, it was phenomenal.

It's SFTP support in the late 90's was perfect. I had to add this to wine so I can continue to use it on Linux and OS X.

There's a Native Linux version!

It's a very good tool.

Meld is the equivalent under Linux.

Meld is not even close to BeyondCompare. I would also say kdiff3 is better when looking at all my Python merge conflicts in the past. Nevertheless BeyondCompare is on another level when looking at extensibility.

Meld has an osx app now too. It's solid.

That's one piece of software that has almost everything right.

Came here to say this. It's an amazing tool. Set it as your git difftool and it will change your life. I switched to Mac about 8 years ago and ran it in Wine for a long long time until they finally released a Mac version. Their diff algorithm is so damn perfect no other diff tool compares, and I've tried SOO MANY. It lives up to its name. It's an amazing tool that's crossed platforms with me, and I'd rather give up my left hand.

Interesting tool... I personally use Kaleidoscope (Mac only) and I really like it: http://www.kaleidoscopeapp.com

The Linux kernel! It runs just about everywhere from dishwasher to modem to thermostat to PC to mainframe. One size fits all? Well, not if you want to optimize to the last bit, but within a very wide spectrum it actually does.

Apache server. I know it is not a hip choice, but I've used it for more than 15 years to serve static and dynamic websites. I've changed tech stacks from perl to php to python used different data bases and Apache always just worked.

Same and I've used it for a similar period, I look at alternatives but since apache has never let me down, is ridiculously stable and I know it well I've simply never seen a reason to leave.

I was in this camp for a long time until I tried to get mod_deflate and mod_socache_memcache to play nice together and the wheels came off. Moved to Varnish (fronted by HAproxy) and could not be happier!

As a MS stack dev:

Chocolatey (https://chocolatey.org/)

VsVim for Visual Studio (https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/59ca71b3-a4a3...)

Everything (https://www.voidtools.com/)

Wox (http://www.getwox.com/)

and of course PowerShell

Mhhh, VsVim is probably the worst implementation of Vim in an IDE in my opinion.

Vrapper for Eclipse, does the job, the Vim plugin in Intellij sucks as well but still better than VsVim.

The Xcode version is ok.

Few versions ago, there was that nasty bug in VsVim where it would throw an exception if you save an unedited file ...

Hands-down winner for me is Radio Tray. Simple, works as advertised, and it's running pretty much 100% of the time my computer is on. It has never crashed. Very lightweight too, and the config file is simple enough that a quick glance at it in a text editor is all you need to make customizations faster than using the GUI preferences.

A very close second is the ext4 filesystem, but I don't know if this qualifies as software. I've done all kind of stupid things when formatting or unplugging drives and have never lost data. Full-disk encryption on everything and never a problem. SO reliable. I was doing a full backup to two separate drives at once, one external and one SATA internal. The power went out and I wasn't using a UPS. When the power came back on, everything was still fine but I was worried about data corruption so I plugged in yet another, my last good external drive with a known good copy of everything to compare against. Then the power went out again! I didn't even shout or curse, that's how mad I was. No data loss though, everything resumed from mid-backup and happily continued.

RabbitMQ. It just works. We're operating with in the normal use case for it. We turn it on, transfer 50k or so messages a day, then forget about. The memory is fairly low, CPU is low and constant. The connections for month or year long clients stay open.

We had to use a message queueing system for school, they recommended some Oracle thing. Other systems were allowed though, and most of the people chose RabbitMQ.

Can confirm, it's extremely easy to make Python, Java and PHP talk to each other. I haven't found anything it can't do yet, and it's not hogging resources either.

I'm actually a fan of rabbitMQ generally, but I'm not sure I'd put it in the category of notoriously reliable software. It can throw away acknowledged writes (afaik https://aphyr.com/posts/315-jepsen-rabbitmq has still not been fully fixed).

50k messages/day is pretty low throughout and under that load it should plod through just fine.

Under much higher loads than that (10's - 100's millions of messages day) I've seen it die in a pretty ungraceful manner. At that scale, Kafka is a good candidate.

Under those high loads I've seen every single MQ fall over like a house of cards. At lighter loads you can get the job done with other tools that scale but with a little bit more pain. Leaves me super skeptical about them on the whole.

We push on the order of ~a billion messages / day into one of our Kafka clusters without having too much scaling difficulty.

Indeed. We have completely replaced all queues with Kafka. In fact, I'm not sure what it would take for us to even try anything else at this point.

We process at least 30 million messages a day with sidekiq and had to start sharding message queues for different purposes. At some point it's not worth trying to optimize the messaging.

In my experience, RabbitMQ is close to the opposite of reliable.

When I think of reliability, I think of Postgres: it works well, and it's hard to make it not work reliably. With RabbitMQ, it's hard to make it work reliably.

We poked RabbitMQ, Gearman, SQS, a few others, and never got the reliability we demanded. To be fair, we're handling in the order of 50 million messages a day.

Ended up just writing a simple file system based queue in Golang and it's working spectacularly. Just let the SSD do the work. Couple hundred loc all told. We rarely crack 10-15% cpu and memory use sits statically at around 30mb.

I've gone through a few things too, eventually settled on Redis.

Would be interested in seeing your queue, if it were public?

I'd love to make it public, might be a while with company politics being what they are. We have a bad habit of not even sharing with other parts of the company.

50K is nothing to talk about, really. Over a workday, that's like 2 a second. Even at 5x that much, it's enough for many uncached random hard disk IOs per message.

1Password on Mac - phenomenal UX, all around joy to use

Not as pleased with the Windows version, but it's serviceable

It's unfortunate that their browser extensions were an infrequently-upgraded, bloated mess (or at least they were before I stopped using it)

Their browser extensions are my favorite part of it! If you haven't used it in a while, you have missed a _lot_ of updates.

Well, that and I am no longer on Mac. Still running the Windows version, though... maybe I'll try them again

Starting from the top, I think you're the first person to mention user experience.

Man, this topic has done nothing but remind me how far I am outside the "software development mainstream". Vim? Git? Are there seriously that many developers who enjoy using such unusable software?

Good UX for power-user tools is different from good UX for casual-user tools.

Vim is highly usable as a power-user tool. Its logical and has a few primitives that can easily be chained and built-up into larger features.

I never got my head around using Vim rather than an IDE, but I can say I genuinely enjoy git. It's very easy to get a lot of value out of it without needing to learn the esoteric details by just keeping to a simple workflow planned out by someone who understands it better. Of course, it was the first version tracking system I'd worked with, so I have nothing to compare it to. It just made me incredibly happy after working on a very large system with no version tracking beyond a boatload of comments referencing a date and ticket/project.

I guess different strokes.

For me, Git is the worst software I've been compelled to use since Lotus Notes. I think it's terrible. I would never use it if I didn't absolutely have to as a condition of employment.

Interesting. I wonder if it's a usage difference. A hammer can be a terrible tool if you try to put in screws with it. It works best when the workflow is designed around it and the user only needs to remember a handful of commands to do specific tasks.

Yep. vim, git, and spacemacs are among some of the major tools I use and generally enjoy using them.

The difference between vim and, say, Notepad++ as "programmer's editors" is that one is easy to start with, but you soon reach a limiting level of competence, beyond which your tools cannot take you. With vim, this does not happen, at least not for a very long time. Such tools are indeed hard to learn, but, properly used, they amplify your skills far beyond what you can do with "consumer-grade" software.

A child with a keyboard that has prerecorded music on it has much more fun with it than they would with a grand piano. And that's perfectly fine! However, if you're a professional pianist, you're going to want to go the Steinway route, even though it takes decades of practice to really make sense on one.

(Perhaps violins would make more sense as an example?)

> Git?

It's relative to other VCS systems in this case.

> Vim?

As a primary editor, I get the dislike and confusion from non-power users, but for a command line editor, it's just so much better than anything else.

I generally like 1pw but haven't forgiven them for not yet fixing the opvault security hole on android. Must be about a year now. Raised it with support when a big Android update came along a few months back. "Subscribe to 1pw for families" was their suggestion.

I'm actively looking at alternatives now.

I want to like 1Password, I really do. But it just fails to auto-recognize too many login pages for sites I visit frequently. And having to manually click the Chrome extension and pick the login credentials is pretty annoying.

Absolutely. I used LastPass for a long time when it first came out. Then I tried Dashlane to see if it sucked less (it does in some ways, but still sucks). 1Password is a joy to use compared to those two.

Reaper DAW. Tiny executable, rock-solid reliability, low RAM and CPU usage, effortlessly configurable. It's closed source so it's just a gut feel but it gives the impression of being 'well made' under the hood.

I call it my 'Vim of audio'. It was written by the creator of Winamp.

Yes, recently discovered Reaper after using Audacity for a while. Works so much nicer and no surprises.

Haven't tried Reaper, but Ardour is pretty solid for me these days.

I try to use Ardour every couple of years (and I think I still have a monthly donation setup for Ardour). So far, I've always gone back to Reaper. Partly that's because audio on Linux still kinda sucks, and often requires a lot of kernel fiddling and other crap, but partly it's because Ardour is bigger, slower, and generally less capable than REAPER. But, it's been a couple of years, so I'm due for another stab at using Ardour for my primary DAW.

What OS do you run REAPER on?

Windows. It is the only thing I reboot for, now that Steam has so many Linux games.

Not sure if you're playing music or just recording, but have you ever tried http://www.cockos.com/ninjam/ ? Also made by the same people and a lot of fun!

Reaper was written by the Winamp people? No wonder!

I love Reaper too, it's a bitch to figure out how to use for ITB production though

It is pretty focused on multitrack recording, rather than on being a sequencer. So, ITB production is probably better served by other tools (I use Renoise and Fruity Loops, mostly, both of which suck for multitrack recording; lots of folks like Ableton Live). Reaper has a sequencer, but if what you want is to compose ITB or the remix with loops, there are better tools.

But, if you're recording live instruments and mixing and mastering the resulting multitrack recording, Reaper really is among the best in its class, and comparable to tools costing many times more.

Agreed. I've used nearly everything, in professional and home environments, and REAPER is a compelling alternative to all of them. ProTools might be better for some special use cases...like audio for film and video, and post-production. But, for general purpose multi-track recording, REAPER is a practically perfect implementation of the traditional DAW model. It's so fast, so lightweight, and so powerful, and priced fairly.

Reaper is amazing, as well as a lot of Cockos' software. People will probably recognize Licecap which is also them.

Their WDL library is also great. It can be a great "batteries included" start for realtime audio apps (and other purposes I'm sure), or you can just grab individual classes if you need a Mersenne Twister, or fast sine waves, or image format conversion, or...

http://www.cockos.com/index.php

OMG, +100 on this. Even on their "pre-releases", I've never had any stability/reliability problems. It's super-efficient and the community that's grown up around it is just awesome.

Trying not to pick fan favorites/well knowns -

SecureCRT - SSH and more client (win)

Quicksilver - OSX launcher

Pathfinder - OSX finder replacement

Notepad++ - Win text editor

Gawor's LDAP Browser - still my favorite (Java)

Cog - OSX Music player (ala winamp)

GCalTookit - Doing Google Calendar Magic (Java)

Plex + ShowRSS + Catch - Netflix but better

Synology - Their NAS platform is pretty amazing. You can do just about anything with it.

Workflowy - Bulleted List Magic (web)

Xee - Simple and effective image browser (osx)

YNAB Classic - If you don't budget, you should. If you do, you should check out YNAB!

NFSManager - OSX NFS Manager

All of these apps do what they do well and I've never had any issues with them.

I love that you suggested YNAB here but I have one significant problem with it that doesn't have a consistently good workaround.

Reimbursements.

When I m out with friends and the restaurant doesn't split the bill I'll often cover it then get paid back with cash or PayPal. YNAB doesn't seem to handle this very well.

Then wirh longer term reimbursements it gets worse. Either you forget that you are owed or you float the debt.

I still recommend YNAB. but that specific problem means it's not on my "reliable" list.

Split the transaction in YNAB, send your part to the correct category "Dining", and itemize owed amounts per person into another category "Loaned Money". It's easy to track if "Loaned Money" has a positive balance, and you don't screw up the budget for your Dining category.

YNAB looks very close to the Dave Ramsey approach to finances.

I'm also using Path Finder because I prefer it's visual appearance much over Finder and Total Commander. However, it does have it's fair share of issues so I wouldn't recommend it to anyone anymore at this point. It is often giving me spinning ball cursor (lack of proper threading?), and there's this several year old bug that comes and goes, where the Places list disappears, which resurfaced for me just last week, and still haunts me :-/

YNAB compared to Mint, anyone?

I've found Mint better at tracking what I spent money on in previous months (which isn't really budgeting). It's much better at big picture--did I spend more money than I made this month? Wow, I spent more than I expected on my fuel this month--or is that possibly fraudulent and I should follow up on it?

YNAB is similar to the envelope method; take your income and put it into buckets. As you incur expenses you deduct from those buckets.

Here's a big example where Mint falls short but YNAB works well; my utilities are bi-monthly. With YNAB, I'd stash away half of the amount every month and it would get subtracted when I get billed.

That being said, I never got into the habit of using YNAB long-term (tested out YNAB4 and the new web offering), but I wish I would.

I second Plex. The moment I installed PMS on my server is the moment I canceled my Netflix subscription. Only ever so often I find myself hating the Chromecast app (re-buffering everything as soon as you switch subtitles, etc) but apart from that It Just Works™.

In the vein of not "shaving yaks", my list is software that, when something goes wrong, it's almost always my fault. I don't care that it works well, but that it works consistently and predictably. Sadly, that's a rare trait based on some of the tools I have to work with daily. On to the list:

vim - going on, what, thirty years of use and it rarely surprises me.

bash - same thing. The only surprise is my own ignorance of it after so many years.

SQLite - so small, so useful, and so reliable for what it is.

I guess that ended up being the list a lot of others posted. Which ought to say something for the products mentioned.

I really wish there was a Json oriented db like sqlite. I really like making underscore like queries. db('x').table('y').getAll(prop:true).sortBy('propB').limit(100)

Or may be there is and I don't know.

Shouldn't be too hard to translate that syntax into SQL. I actually did something similar in my last team, a simple query language to expose to admins etc. as an API. For example:

  VirtualMachines.with(os == "linux" and alerts > 0)

Vagrant, Ansible. I'm slowly reducing our scattered flock of precious little snowflake servers to nice, boring, version controlled configs. Being able to sleep for 8 hours every night is glorious; I will never take that for granted, for the rest of my life.

First I SSH into local VMs to prototype a minimal cluster. Then once I'm done making mistakes, I write out the playbook. Spin up some EC2s, add them to the inventory, and deploy.

Reading through a Git history of playbook changes beats the hell out of searching for an email thread from a sysadmin who no longer works with us. I guess Git is the real hero here, I keep forgetting that there was a time before git. Those were dark times.

CircleCI (https://circleci.com/)

I add this to every new project. Best cloud-based continuous integration platform I've used so far. Sane intelligent defaults, many projects start building out of the box. You can easily link it to Slack (another piece of reliable software) and start getting continuous feedback that your project is working correctly / is getting deployed - as it is being built.

I've become a big fan of Drone CI. Open source, Docker powered, written in Go. Been using it for a couple years. The current .4.x branch has some kinks but it's technically still beta.

Omnigraffle is the software that originally convinced me to switch from windows to mac. I love it so much. Great features, simple UI that doesn't fiddle too much version to version and it basically never crashes on me.

I bought Omnigraffle a few versions back but when it was time to upgrade I just couldn't afford it. I would upgrade every year for 25$ if they had it at that price point.

Omniplan is indispensable for me as a project manager. I just wish there was something online as easy/fast to use with support for multiple project managers/projects.

Nice to see somebody else that uses it. I use it for all of my personal organization.

Smartsheet. Or MS Portfolio Manager has a SaaS version as well.

For those Window people, Omnigraffle is basically why there is no Visio for Mac.

Omnigraffle annoyance: it can't load from and save to graphviz dot notation (or even a subset of it). All of the functionality is in the software, but not exposed to the user, and I assume it's a conscious decision by them to lock you into their file format. I evaluate each few years, find the same thing, and then move on. (Would love to be corrected)

awk, grep, sed, and these days I add jq to my standard tool belt. I also really enjoy fish as my shell language of choice. Languages, runtimes, etc come and go but these programs remain as useful as they were 19 years ago when I first learned about them.

In our R&D Slack instance, it's amazing to see a program with great UX (Slack) enable engineers to post awk, grep, sed, jq, etc. one-liners to solve other engineers' questions. IRC has the same benefits, I'm sure, but Slack is the first command-line-style chat application to gain enough non-engineer mindshare to make it ubiquitous at any company I've worked for.

I used sed today to complete a "large story" in a single command. Felt like a badass.

The email to the product owner was more work than the "coding".

> I used sed today to complete a "large story" in a single command.

Great, I sometimes do that, too. Downside is that your patience level for "enterprise architecture" goes way down.

jq sounds like something I was looking for a while ago. Just installed it (apt install jq), let's see if a situation presents itself to try it out soon.

doing something with jq always makes me feel like i have super powers.

it takes a while to learn how to tame it, but it's crazy powerful.

Oh I can't remember the time before `jq`. It should be part of the standard linux toolset.

gawk & awk are often underrated, I use them frequently especially in contrast to my colleagues who insist upon using "cut" to split command-output.

Of course for larger jobs there is perl, but using gawk/awk in a one-liner always feels nice.

Nobody has mentioned screen. This is unacceptable! screen is extremely reliable and useful.

I'd like to say emacs, but it's not really that "reliable" in that it often goes crazy and eats up a CPU, and I must maintain separate .emacs files for slightly different computers and vintages of emacs. It does work very well though.

Someone said tmux above.

Byobu too is a great tool (that builds on top of screen and tmux)

Private Internet Access. I've been a paying customer for years and use this VPN service to watch sports and tv programming that simply aren't available where I live.

It was during the Olympics a while back that I thought "there must be a place where I can watch every contest, on demand" and it turned out that place was a website in another country.

Nethack. It was one of my first games on Linux (circa 1999) and I've been replaying it since then. Infinite replayability, lots of fun, still haven't found the Amulet.

OneNote. Works for me so much better than Evernote. Excellent cross-platform sync

I don't normally recommend MS stuff but I really like OneNote.

The Chrome plugin is a little dodgy (Clip to OneNote) at times, but it's hard to blame it, with Google pushing updates every other day.

On that note -- emacs-org mode is a great FOSS note and organization tool.

OneNote on Mac is pretty slow, I find the editing features somewhat lacking.

what do you use instead?

Still OneNote, it's the one that sucks least. I'm contemplating moving to iCloud Notes though, the new formatting features are neat.

OS X Notes are good enough for me and better than Evernote. Evernote insecurity and quirks were just one straw too many.

OneNote is nice. I'm always bugged though by the fact I can't double click a word and drag the cursor to highlight more words. Such a small thing, but it annoys me endlessly.

Ableton Live, a music creation program. Its data recovery has never once failed me. Those moments when I needed to use data recovery were caused by unreliable plugins, not Live itself.

I love how accurate the proposals for missing samples is.

1. Go and its toolchain and standard library. Just an awesome piece (or collection of pieces) of thoughtful and stable engineering.

2. Redis. Nuff said.

3. Gnome. Yes yes, don't laugh. Gnome 3's latest versions are very stable and work very well.

/bin/true

Without fail, it has always done exactly what I wanted it to do. Simple. Solid. Reliable.

The Seven Signs are clear: We will be struck by deadly plagues, famines and earthquakes; The sky will turn dark and oceans will turn to blood; And the antichrist will emerge to fight the final battle between good and evil.

Oh, and /bin/true is false.

Also /bin/false. Its manpage describes too many of my weekends:

  false - do nothing, unsuccessfully

sounds like when i try to meditate sometimes

I have a shell-script in my sysadmin-tools repository called `maybe` which sometimes is /bin/true, and sometimes is /bin/false.

Keeps me on my toes ;)

From the desktop, most of my development toolkit: bash, vim, git, etc.

On the server side of things: nginx, haproxy, redis, memcached, cron, logrotate, Linux

And controversially (probably since I've learned their quirks): MySQL, Nagios.

They all just... work. I use these tools to set up a server, and after configured, the VM usually goes down before they do.

On the flip side of things, tools I have to use and highly resent their lack of reliability: collectd, Docker, Safari/IE/Firefox/Chrome, OSX.

I'd say give MariaDB a try. It does everything MySQL does, fully compatibly without the guilt of supporting Oracle.

Using MySQL does not support Oracle, unless you buy their support packages. If anything, it's a cost center to them.

That said, I do prefer the PerconaDB packages myself, but that's because they are a pure superset of the core MySQL, and improvements to MySQL are improvements to PerconaDB.

Trello. Occasionally, on spotty cellular connections, the sync messes up, but that's rare. Overall, it's a great-looking app, super simple to grok and use, and saves me tons of cognitive load every day.

This morning on my way to work, when I needed to merge with traffic quickly, I got the revs on my 350Z up to about 5,000 RPM then dropped the clutch and hung on for the ride.

My engine management firmware has never failed me.

MOC. Music on Console. I've been using it forever with no issues of any kind. It's immediate, it's lightweight, it never fails, it works with my files in my hierarchies, it has all the important functions mapped to individual keys. It's brilliant. My wife calls it "nerd mode," which obviously makes it even more appealing.

I also of course love all the other usual suspects in the thread: coreutils, git, emacs, sqlite.

I've been using cmus for a while, which I've been pretty happy with. Anything I'm missing with moc?

Looks comparable. Moc's interface may be simpler. Moc starts in server mode so you can quit the interface and keep listening, though frankly I don't think that's as big a deal as it used to be.

This looks similar to mpd, which I like more since it exposes a network API. With the right app, I can control music playback from my phone if my PC is off (with mpd running on the homeserver).

Glad to see you folks coming up with many examples. For me it's more like a journey of constant sorrow, i'm hardly put coming up even with one example, but maybe:

- übertime on iOS = i hate time tracking, this rock solid app makes it bearable.

- Brief (under DOSBox) just to remind myself that good, reliable, general-purpose text editors did exist at some point...

Wow, Brief. I used it, years ago. Very fast [1] and good text editor [2]. A few years back, in Boston, I was introduced to the person who wrote it.

[1] It had all kinds of shortcuts for speed. I think I remember one where, if you pressed an arrow key for a short while, it would move the cursor (up/down/left/right) at some speed. If you held the key down for longer, it would guess that you wanted to move longer distances in the file, and move the cursor faster. May have used low-level assembly language techniques and code for speed.

[2] A free version of it was available recently. I have it on my PC and use it sometimes these days.

So cool you've met him! I believe he also authored SuperDuper on the Mac, another excellent piece of software I've used in the past.

And yes, the speed and the quality of Brief. Especially the fact it didn't try to malloc the whole size of the file, rare nowadays. Opening a 40MB file on my Win98 PC with 8MB of RAM was, essentially, an instantaneous op. Fast forward to last week and one of the IDE's praised elsewhere in this thread, running on my corporate Lenovo with 12GB of RAM, warned me against trying to open an 8MB XML file. Well, at least it warned me, rather than just crashing...

Ha, good points ...

I was a Brief (by Underware) user and back in 93 when I started using Windows for Workgroups I found Slickedit which has a Brief emulation mode. I'm still using it and still using all the brief key bindings

(can't say it's totally stable though)

Thanks, will definitely look into Slickedit. Back in the day, I was really impressed by Codewright's Brief emulation. I'd been trying to convince my boss to buy a team license when Borland bought the product and did it the same thing they did to Brief...

haproxy and redis are the two that come to mind. Not necessarily because they make me happy, but they never seem to make me angry or sad. Which with most infrastructure software is rare.

Terraform is surprisingly painless for new-ish software.

I've had several occasions it took action in production that weren't in the plan when we applied. Terraform has not made it to my warm and fuzzy list yet.

> Not necessarily because they make me happy, but they never seem to make me angry or sad.

I suppose those are the criteria to look for in a thread asking for "reliable software". Couldn't have worded it any better though!

There have been lots of Windows and Mac OS replies to this thread, so here's a few Linux ones for a change:

i3wm. I've experimented with many tiling window managers over the years but none of them got me to switch. i3, however, is something else. It's extremely simple, intuitive and easy to configure, and it might give you a small productivity boost depending on your workflow. For me this is tiling WMs done right.

Sublime Text 2 and 3. It's rare to find multi-platform desktop software that works reliably on Linux, and ST does it exceedingly well.

Valgrind. It's a game changer for certain kinds of development.

Ruby. I rarely write scripts, because most of the time I can just run irb and do everything with an one-liner.

The apt package management tools, or just Linux package management in general. Whenever I'm forced to use Windows or Mac I realize how fortunate it is that in Linux we're able to apt-get pretty much anything.

SQuirrel (agnostic SQL client). It's not very well known but it's a solid client for anything that has a JDBC driver.

Transmission. I find it has the perfect balance of features and simplicity for a Bittorrent application. It does what it needs to do reliably and doesn't get in your way.

mplayer/mpv. This has been my media player of choice for what, 15 years? Back when my PC wasn't fast enough to play some video formats reliably, mplayer could do it if I killed everything else and used the vesa driver. No other software could do this.

Comix. This is probably the best software I've ever used for browsing images sequentially in a folder (not just comic books). The interface is so simple but has all the features one would need (automatically uncompressing files, fast thumbnail generation, fit-to-width zooming, etc).

youtube-dl. Give it an URL, it will download media from it, no questions asked. It's hard to find software that does the right thing as often as youtube-dl does.

curl. For the same reason as above.

ffmpeg. It can get quite advanced with the command line options but with just `ffmpeg -i format_in.<ext1> format_out.<ext2>` you can do any video conversion you can imagine.

And of course, the favorites that have been mentioned here and I couldn't live without (git, ssh, bash, vim, python, sqlite, postgres, nginx, redis).

"youtube-dl. Give it an URL, it will download media from it, no questions asked. It's hard to find software that does the right thing as often as youtube-dl does."

I will second that. youtube-dl is like magic. It's too good to be true.

I'd like an easy-to-use plugin for FF to call youtube-dl.

I feel that sometimes bad is synonymous to "hard to use". A lot of software is hard to use with a bunch of unfriendly settings. But the more time I spend trying to figure out, the better I get.

One example is Git. I used to use SVN with a GUI and it was a breeze. When work required me to use git, I hated it. But after a while of using it, I stopped doing the 'how do I do svn feature X with git' now I understand it, and even recommend it to people.

I'm mostly familiar with git on the command line and when work required me to use it on a gui with visual studio, I first started by complaining about how complicated it makes it. But after a while, I got used to it.

Approaching a new software is always hard and frustrating in the beginning. But the more time you spend on it, the more you will tolerate or appreciate it's short comings and complexity.

As someone who's young enough to have never used anything but git, I get the impression that knowing how a different VCS works makes it hard to learn. Git was super intuitive when I learned it, I think just because I was never taught any other way of doing things.

vim as a text editor has worked consistently for me since 1996.

ssh has worked for me for about the same period of time.

the linux kernel has worked for me for pretty much the same time period.

the software running in my TI-85 calculator has been working for me since 1994.

OpenBSD, tmux, coreutils, QNX, postgres, Jasc Paint Shop Pro 6 (Yeah, the 16 year old one)

Seconding OpenBSD!

Great thread. Important to keep perspective.

So far the responses seem desktop-centric, but I'm going to throw out a few web apps that I have a lot of respect for:

- Instapaper

- Trello

- Google Inbox

And, on the desktop side I have to give credit to Garageband and Logic, which I honestly can't recall having crashed or let me down in recent memory. YMMV.

Agreed on all three recommendations. My use of Trello grows and shrinks over time as project management influence shrinks and grows, but it's a great product. Instapaper and Inbox are just amazing.

Inbox lags quite a bit on my desktop. It still needs some work...

What is Logic? I'm having trouble performing a websearch on that one...

Logic is music production software.

Logic is professional music production software from Apple: https://www.apple.com/logic-pro/

These are software I love to use. I don't assume they're the best, and if you have any similar suggestions I'd love to hear them. There's a heavy Windows OS slant to this list.

SunVox - Sequencer and tracker. The user interface is a big evolution from more traditional trackers because of how visual it is. This reduces the barrier to getting started, but it also make using the program simply more enjoyable. http://www.warmplace.ru/soft/sunvox/

VirtualDub - Video processing. This is my go-to tool for simple video editing. It remains the quickest and easiest way I know of to make animated GIFs from video. http://www.virtualdub.org/

HxD - Hex editor. Handles GB scale files very well. https://mh-nexus.de/en/hxd/

Foxit Reader - PDF reader. There's some conflict in the past with bundling adware installers with the software, I hope that practice is long gone. This is the most full feature Adobe Reader alternative I know of. https://www.foxitsoftware.com/

Daemon Tools Lite - Virtual disc drive manager. Unfortunately limits to 4 drives. https://www.daemon-tools.cc/products/dtLite

Space Sniffer - Disc space visualization. The clean look and intuitive visual interface is why I prefer this over WinDirStat. http://www.uderzo.it/main_products/space_sniffer/index.html

Other software I use, but which I expect is already well known: 7-Zip, Audacity, Blender, GIMP, ImgBurn, Inkscape, IntelliJ IDEA, Kodi, Libre Office, Notepad++, PuTTY, Unreal Engine 4, VLC

I'd recommend Sumatra PDF and WinCDEmu over Foxit and Daemon Tools.

I tried out both of these today and I agree.

Sumatra feels snappier than Foxit. It doesn't have as many buttons to interface with, but there are common keyboard shortcuts for the things I use. I dislike that the Advanced Options do not have a GUI interface, they're edited by modifying a text file. WinCDEmu is exactly what I wanted. I also appreciate that both programs are portable.

Scrivener (http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php). It's a fantastic tool that gets out of your way while writing but still gives you the ability to operate on larger units from paragraphs to chapters, plus keep track of all of your research materials.

- LaTeX

- OS X & iOS

- (GNU) coreutils (sed, cat, grep etc)

- GNUplot

- Mathematica

Primary usecase for listed software is studying chemistry. I enjoy using DALTON (quantum chemistry software) and Dwarf Fortress, but neither is really that reliable (yet).

Dwarf Fortress is extremely reliable! You can always rely on it to make you say "...what?"

Dev: Ruby (chruby/ruby-install), node, postgres, redis, elasticsearch, Dash, MacVim

Console: zsh, iTerm, tmux

Mac apps: Bartender, Hands Off!, Breakaway (a 10.10+ fork), coconutbattery, iStat Menus, flux, Forecast Bar, TotalFinder, Daisy Disk, VLC (+ trakt-for-vlc)

Ah, i also find flux impossible to live without! But now and then it drops back to cold blue/white colors in the middle of the night. Like when exiting a full-screen game or similar. I seem to recall there was talk about such feature would be integrated into MacOS eventually. I really do hope so! (I am already using the iPhone Night Shift feature).

So if any Apple dev read this. Please bring this feature to tvOS, too!!! The cold light of my TV hurts my eyes more than ever these days, thanks to flux and night shift

On Windows:

- Notepad++ https://notepad-plus-plus.org is a superb text editor with support for almost every language and a great number of advanced and useful features.

- Everything http://voidtools.com is a great local drive search tool and is blindingly fast.

- Syncdocs http://syncdocs.com is a better Google Drive client that supports multiple users and a host of other advanced features.

Notepad++ is a must-have! I have been using Eclipse, Sublime, Atom, Nano and Visual Studio, but when I just need to edit a file in a hurry, none of them is as convenient as Notepad++.

Spectacle (https://www.spectacleapp.com/) Github: https://github.com/eczarny/spectacle

Easily resize and arrange windows on a mac - move windows between monitors, make them full size, or half size, anchor them left / right, etc.

It's open source, it just works, and you'll wish every new Mac you interact with had it installed by default.

Heh. So many times I cmd+alt+left on someone elses mac and it doesn't work and I just :(

Let's see... stuff I have been using for around 20 years and still use today:

* Emacs

* Postgres

* GCC

* Apache web server

* Linux - although it's big enough in scope that it does have its issues from time to time.

+1 for Emacs. eshell is my main command line and interactive shell, and since GNU Emacs 24 I have not touched a terminal emulator other than ansi-term.

I tinker and putter with my emacs setup all the time. It's like a hobby motorcycle that way...but at any moment, it will still be ready to drive across the badlands like some old Land Rover.

I definitely don't agree when it comes to GCC. While it does its job well and, importantly, has helpful error messages, its command line arguments are a mess. -Wall enables all warnings right? Yep, except for the ones that you need -Wextra. But don't forget there are more that aren't covered here. And let's not even get into the appropriately-named -pedantic.

Like I said, GCC gets its job done well, and once I've got what I need spelled out in my Makefile I'm good. But it's a headache to work with when you go off the beaten path.

I suspect many are already familiar with this:

Sketch (https://www.sketchapp.com/)

It's hard to imagine what life was like before Sketch. You'd work with a UX designer, who would pass you PNGs and PSDs. There would be designs, and then there would be a whole 'nother set of files for specifying dimensions, colors, typefaces, sizing, kerning, and a whole slew of other stuff.

You'd also have to get asset packs from your designer - for mobile devs you'd get a large set of assets of different resolutions and sizes specced for different device types.

Need a design change? Be prepared for another mega-sized download from Dropbox, not to mention the labor intensive task of the designer re-exporting all of these bits.

Then comes Sketch - good for anything from wireframing to pixel-perfect designs. All measurements can be taken directly from the app, so you send the working project file to the engineer and the engineer can take all the measurements they need. Automatically accounts for dp/px translation. Automatically exports all relevant sizes/resolutions for assets into their expected native formats. Color palettes embedded, type parameters embedded.

It's saved us mobile devs so much time.

Is there anything as good for Windows or Linux out there?

All that 'yak shaving' makes me feel like Windows and OS X are poised to become legacy desktop operating systems. Every other popular consumer operating system today avoids that stuff somewhat successfully and none of us wish devops would disappear so we can manually do that stuff again. Security around traditional desktop operating systems is getting unfunny very fast too.

Some of the software we like is so wasteful too. I think we have a duty at this point to not be environmentally callous when we write software - manual updates are a good example, a minute wasted here and there might go unnoticed but something like Alfred nominated elsewhere in this submission probably adds up to millions of minutes of computers on and the operators devoted to watching a few megabytes download for a minute or two every time they update, probably actual tons of coal frivolously consumed.

I nominate Chrome OS. It has a lot of warts but it removes all of that stuff and dev mode = Ubuntu alongside Chrome OS. Once the Play Store is integrated Android apps will fill in some more of the functionality holes.

I bark to people all the time about how environmentally unconscious it is to do something on a million client machines which could have been done once on the server and cached. Namely client side JavaScript based document composition. If everyone is going to do the exact same thing, it's just a huge waste of cycles.

I'm going to agree, but sometimes it's a tough question what action is more environmentally conscious. While you could cache some value on a server to reduce the energy consumption of compute, requests to the server for the cached data will drive up the energy consumption of the network.

Being environmentally unconscious does not increase the average tech company's bottom-line. But reducing load on their servers does. So from that angle it makes sense. Interesting perspective though - I've never considered servers deferring compute tasks to clients to be undesirable. When I first came across the idea it seemed pretty revolutionary and sensible to me (maybe JS hype contributed to my viewpoint).

Adobe Illustrator.

Which is probably a teetering pile of kludges on top of hacks on top of "quick fixes". But I've been using it to draw for about fifteen years now, I have a sixth sense that tells me I'm about to do something that may cause a crash and makes me hit "save".

Earlier this month I was playing with running it on a Surface, and ultimately stopped because there is some interaction between Illustrator and the drivers for the stylus MS used in that device that drops the first half-second of every pen stroke I make. And I draw fast.

So one of the things beneath it that's so reliable I never even consider it could be a problem is the tablet drivers I'm used to using with a Wacom tablet on my Mac.

(There was a lot of other yak-shaving in those weeks, in which I tried to turn a Windows system into something that wouldn't drive my Mac-using self crazy, and into a super-portable art tool. Keyboard remappers, Dropbox, tons of Windows settings... the only part that wasn't pretty unpleasant and tedious to wrangle was Dropbox.)

For me, probably dwm. I almost forget that I'm using it, but in a good way. It has merged with my muscle-memory and never, ever fails.

I recently tried some tiling window managers, but the problem with those was that none of them provided basic default configuration and you have to configure them from scratch. For example you have to add a plugin for small things such as a battery indicator. The custom themes were too much bloated for me. I ended up installing shellshape for gnome. Do you know any tiling window manager which solves this?

I'm fairly certain that i3 comes with a percentage battery indicator by default. The default config is pretty good (except it uses `jkl;` instead of `hjkl`, but that's a simple fix).

For some reasons i3 was showing wrong value for battery. It also had issues with the graphic drivers, showing black screen on logging in. So I didn't consider it as a viable option for me.

I think that's part of a different package, i3-status or something, which is not strictly required but recommended in docs etc. Possibly it's also installed by default if you just choose 'i3', depending on your package manager.

You're right, turns out Arch's i3 package is a group of packagse: i3-wm, i3-status, and i3lock (screen locker).

I was also surprised by the lack of battery indiciator in awesome-wm. But it took <10 lines of Lua to add. It was a pain at first but now I really like how extensible awesome-wm is.

This might not work for you, but the way I get battery indicator is to incorporate it into my tmux console. I always run a tmux on the first workspace, and can go there for time and battery. Each device is different, but here's battery code that works on my T460s (http://songseed.org/exhibit/20160629/thinkpad.battery.script)

A benefit of this is that it doesn't matter what window manager you use.

ZFS.

I created a raid-Z zpool in 2010 on FreeBSD and those same bits, with two different drives, are still floating around intact 6 years later, across multiple different operating systems.

Hype Machine, somehow free and ad free. The music aligns with my tastes and one of the few things that hasn't changed radically since I started using it back in 2008.

Reliable: vim, Microsoft Word/Excel, SQLite, tmux, GNU coreutils, svn

I think most would agree with most of the items, although svn warrants an explanation. I prefer the paradigm of git, but svn always impresses me with its ability to handle large repositories and large files out of the box without falling over.

Word has destroyed lots of work for my ex-colleagues.

Also it was such a major pain when I had work with two other students on my final project that I ended up doing the last major changes in Open Office writer before reopening in Word to finish off the last details. Admittedly I guess this had a lot to do with how some people don't want to learn how to use styles but Word didn't help either.

Word was fine for my PhD. My supervisor from those times - now 80 and still collaborating with scientists from around the world - has written hundreds of papers with it. I think I can speak for him when I say that over the last 30 years he has found it a far more reliable option than the typewriter and carbon paper he used to write his own PhD in the 1960s.

I frequently use Excel for calculations. Just the simplest way to check I have entered the correct numbers.

Word and Excel are not that reliable at all. I can't say LibreOffice is much better, but all graphical office software has let me down more often than I'd like to recount.

Excel has trouble opening any kind of CSV files, let alone if they're a bit too big. Word recently got stuck in a "save loop", making you painstakingly click the "don't save" option on your work because trying to save does nothing anymore. Both examples are from the past two months.

From the systems/operations side of things..

Ganeti: rock solid clustered virtualization suite.

OpenBSD: no fuzz server/router distro.

Ceph: clustered network storage without tears.

Varnish: covers any HTTP needs. Add haproxy or nginx for HTTPS.

Corosync/Pacemaker: Designed for reliability. Leave VRRP where it belongs (I'm looking at you keepalived).

xCAT: Little-known but widely used datacenter lifecycle management suite. Comes with cluster-aware shell, native remote consoles, BMC provisioning, unattended installs, DNS and much more.

Guix: The package manager for the future.

Things that make me want to tear my eyes out:

Openstack: keeps breaking inexplicably, nightmare to configure and maintain. Terrible documentation.

Vyatta: Don't even want to talk about it.

RHEL: Upgrades systemd 207->219 in minor release. Backports unstable kernel patches. Requires EPEL for lots of standard software. RabbitMQ logging has been broken more than two months (BZ 1324922).

> Corosync/Pacemaker: Designed for reliability. Leave VRRP where it belongs (I'm looking at you keepalived).

I just set up a floating IP address for the first time today and went with keepalived. Why would you recommend Corosync/Pacemaker over keepalived?

If you need just the floating IP address, keepalived is fine.

I'm mostly bitter from spending days tracking down a race condition stemming from its notification scripts, which wasn't really keepaliveds fault per se. But if you need to start/move/constraint/notify anything along with the IP, or require sub-second failover, Corosync/Pacemaker is a far better choice.

However due to their complexity, for just a floating IP address, keepalived is unfortunately the best option for Linux (I usually have OpenBSD in that spot).

Thanks for the explanation. Out of sheer curiosity (and because I run BSD-based pfSense and FreeNAS at home), how do you handle floating IPs and that sort of thing on OpenBSD?

OpenBSD invented a similar protocol to VRRP called CARP back when VRRP was patent-encumbered[0].

Configuring it is deceptively simple: just create an interface with ifconfig called "carpN", specifying VID, password and IP address[1].

You can also make it load-balance traffic between your carp hosts if desired[2].

Give it a go for your next firewall/server build :)

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Address_Redundancy_Prot...

1: https://www.openbsd.org/faq/pf/carp.html

2: http://man.openbsd.org/OpenBSD-current/man4/carp.4

PuTTY

Saved my ass a lot of times when I wasn't around a linux machine.

Putty has some pretty strange design choices. They coupled the terminal emulator and the SSH client, and (at least used to have) really bad default configuration (blue color was unreadable, windows codepage instead of utf-8, etc. etc.).

Now that Mintty exists, I prefer to use it + openssh on Windows.

And the config ux is really ...weird.

Yeah, the way you load/save sessions in preferences is very strange. I'm familiar with it now, but I still need to think too much when trying to set up a session.

Yes, I completely hate some of their decisions on UX/UI

But even with it's flaws, it was always reliably there when I needed it. Had to administer some linux servers with windows machines back on my internship days, and man... that was horrible.

Moom window manager. Vimium chrome extension. Sublime Text is more reliable than Atom, but I do prefer Atom these days. 1Password also always just works.

Seconding Moom.

ngrok

I mean, there are so many pain points when it comes to developing hybrid apps and integrating APIs and all the rest.. and ngrok was a true lifesaver. It's also always, always, always worked 100% of the time. Every time I fire it up, I swear I think I'm cheating somehow.

The original popcorntime.io client was incredible. I've never seen design like that. It worked so unbelievably well, it made me want to watch things just to use it.

It has since degraded since other developers took over with various forks.

Notepad++

My first thought was, hey how come you didn't pick Sublime?

And my next thought was, you know what, you're right.

I want to say I've been using this for over 15 years now? With all the text editors out there this one is my favorite use out of the box.

I'm a big sublime text fan but notepad++ just works in a way that makes me never hesitate to recommend it to people of all skill levels. It is like nano for the gui.

Qubes OS¹, the only reliable OS of our time.

See also "The Linux Security Circus: On GUI Isolation (2011)" by Joanna Rutkowska².

¹ https://www.qubes-os.org/

² https://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.de/2011/04/linux-securit..., via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11229517

I prefer OpenBSD to Qubes.

Over the past couple years, my approach has changed from blacklisting what’s broken, to whitelisting what’s safe. NoScript in the browser, and I’m working on installing OpenBSD on my Libreboot laptop (tricky because UEFI support is so new).

OpenBSD has my favorite approach. Continual auditing of the codebase, and they’re always implementing new 'seatbelts', such as ASLR, W^X, and now pledge(2). These seatbelts are used liberally – even in programs that you theoretically shouldn’t need protection from, such as the system-provided implementation of cat. They aggressively delete dead code, and probably have the smallest codebase of all modern nix systems. The best code is no code. :)

Theo has some great comments on magical “silver-bullet” thinking about security. In this case, specifically about the security of VMs (2007, so pretty dated now):

    x86 virtualization is about basically placing another nearly full kernel, full
    of new bugs, on top of a nasty x86 architecture which barely has correct page
    protection. Then running your operating system on the other side of this brand
    new pile of shit.

    You are absolutely deluded, if not stupid, if you think that a worldwide
    collection of software engineers who can’t write operating systems or
    applications without security holes, can then turn around and suddenly write
    virtualization layers without security holes.

Harsh, but not inaccurate. And it’s part of the reason I’d rather use OpenBSD than QubesOS.

Eight years after that comment, a critical vulnerability in Xen affected the security of QubesOS, and the developers were shocked, shocked!

    It is really shocking that such a bug has been lurking in the core of the
    hypervisor for so many years. In our opinion the Xen project should rethink
    their coding guidelines and try to come up with practices and perhaps
    additional mechanisms that would not let similar flaws to plague the hypervisor
    ever again (assert-like mechanisms perhaps?). Otherwise the whole project makes
    no sense, at least to those who would like to use Xen for security-sensitive
    work.

http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/10/xen-patches-7-year-o...

Thank you for a comprehensive answer. I do not think that one vulnerability in 8+ years proofs insecurity of QubesOS (by the way, it was found by their developers). OpenBSD is not free from kernel vulnerabilities on such a long time scale. Security through correctness never works, because people are not ideal. (Xen developers are also trying to decrease the code base and make sure the code is as correct as possible.) The only "silver bullet" is defense in depth [0], i.e., trying everything you can.

I heard [1] that OpenBSD is concentrated on the security of the kernel too much, ignoring the isolation of applications. However, most frequently, attacks come through applications. And this is exactly the point of QubesOS: to isolate the applications as much as possible.

You might also be interested in a comparison between different approaches to security [2].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_in_depth_(computing)

[1] https://allthatiswrong.wordpress.com/2010/01/20/the-insecuri...

[2] https://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.de/2008/09/three-approac...

Great links, thanks!

Defense in depth is a good strategy, and it's definitely good to see QubesOS doing their thing. I'm glad to see activity in the secure computing space regardless of which OS is the most secure.

Since the focus of the thread is reliability, I'd like to point out one common criticism of OpenBSD (such as in your link [1]), which is that they aren't actually focused on security as they are on writing correct, quality code.

...Is that actually a downside? I like correct, quality code. And if that approach happened to get them 90% of the way to a secure system, that's just a cherry on top. What I like most about OpenBSD is how starkly simple it is. Yes, technologies lag behind somewhat - they just got support for EFI and 802.11n - but in OpenBSD something either works or it doesn't. Nothing in the base system is obviously busted.

A native OpenBSD hypervisor[0] is finally in the works, so in the future it might be possible to build a Qubes-like thing on top.

[0] "OpenBSD vmm/vmd Update" http://bhyvecon.org/bhyvecon2016-Mike.pdf

Tcl. Everything about it is reference-grade.

Can you say more about this? Is there any particular problem space you like it for?

Yeah; mainly for:

1) Testing embedded things over comms links. 2) Modelling/simulation, particularly discrete-time simulation. 3) Anything where the ability to generate permutations is important. 3a) At times, generating big tables in other languages like 'C' based on permutations, lists or other data. 4) Operating Excel/Word through OLE.

The thing that Python does not have is 1) packaging ( at least not as well ) and 2) sockets and other comms objects are first-class objects in Tcl.

It's a bit old (it has a 1990s aroma ) for web-based things, although there are web servers in Tcl, most famously AOL's.

It's a fantastic duct-tape language.

"ag" that thing is blazingly fast

Never grep -R again! I'm also a fan of this software.

Link because the name makes it hard to search for: http://geoff.greer.fm/ag/ https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher

Accidentally misclicked the down vote button.

Sorry for that!

Surprised no one has mentioned this yet - venmo. Does exactly what I want and nothing more. And it's free.

venmo is good and I appreciate, but at least on my android it's not what I'd call reliable. It suffers some random crashes and failures (although it's never done anything too terrible like double charge me)

I haven't experienced crashes but I've had trouble finding certain people. Not sure if that's an android specific issue.

ninite.com

Your one stop shop to get a Windows PC back on its feet after a wipe. Ninite always works great for me. The application packages are a single click to install, and it really helps minimise the clammy, sticky feeling of using IE Explorer while you go download Chrome / Firefox / Opera.

The JDK, including the toolchain. Just works.

(Yep, not my only posting but I figured they should go in separate comments.)

Ableton Live 9 on OSX is excellent. As well as anything by Native Instruments. I only use NI's Guitar Rig when rehearsing or performing even though I have better sounding amp simulations, because I have never had it crash once on me.

One time during a gig, running (pirated at the time) Ableton Live 8 on Windows 7, Ableton crashed. Thankfully Guitar Rig somehow kept running throughout the whole set! Even though the only thing onscreen was the "Ableton has encountered and error... and will now exit. <OK>" prompt. (For anyone who doesn't know these programs, Ableton runs as a host, in which Guitar Rig can be loaded as a plugin).

There are a few other plugins I trust, but not many. I've learned the hard way that "Well it's only crashed once this month, what's the worst that can happen?" means "It will crash 3 times during a 45 minute performance with a few hundred people staring at you." I'm only a hobbyist musician, but I'd still like for that to never happen again.

Edit: I think Reaper, another audio host program, is even more stable than Ableton. Ability to isolate plugins so if it crashes, the whole system doesn't die. Great crash handling/restore. Faulty plugin crashing every time you load your project so you can't even undo adding it? Try it 3 times, and on the 3rd, Reaper will deactivate the plugin and alert you.

Reaper is more "studio" software though, so it's less important. Worst-case scenario in the studio is you admit you've lost the take, apologize, and tell the drummer to go get a cup of coffee while the system reloads, and we'll try again.

As others have said before me, Linux, vim, git, postgresql, Apache, and XeLaTeX are worthy of becoming part of the infrastructure of your life. I'd like to add mutt, which makes wrangling thousands of email messages a breeze, and dovecot/imap, which is a very solid imap server - I can access my mail from several devices simultaneously and it never falters. Also, the amazing ImageMagick.

Bazel has increased reliability, stability, and speed for all of builds/tests at Asana. We no longer need to clean because of incorrect caches.

rsync+ssh: Still more reliable than other sync software or exotic filesystems.

Inkscape: When you have to do graphics and diagrams for slides and posters, you don't have all that much choice on Linux, so I'm happy a quality vector graphics program exists. It might be a bit more cumbersome than commercial software dedicated to schemas and technical drawings, but at least you can rely on it to get the job done, with only your creativity as the limit.

Cog/Cogx, XMMS and Winamp: I don't have Windows or Mac OSX, but I have good memories of using these simple (in a positive sense) music players on occasions I had to use those operating systems, and I still miss a basic player such as XMMS these days when everything looks like it's trying to out-iTune iTunes.

Then there's mostly server-side software such as Nginx; Sqlite and Postgresql (and other database software); and typical mail server software like Postfix and Dovecot that I guess most people would agree to be vastly reliable, but that shouldn't be a surprise given the nature of server-side software.

"rsync+ssh: Still more reliable than other sync software or exotic filesystems."

Remember that rsync.net has a "HN Readers" discount. Just email us.

It's been a while (and therefore several versions since) I've done audio recording/editing but I was always impressed with Propellerhead's audio software. I remember using Reason alongside Adobe Audition or ProTools or whatever-else and Propellerhead's Reason would be running all these synths in parallel and never hiccup or crash. This was on machines from 2005.

I recall Windows semi-crashing (and Audition or ProTools with it), explorer.exe completely gone and just a desktop background screen and our midi keyboard still controlling a multi-layer synth set-up and playing from the speakers with perfect responsiveness.

(for those who might say that Reason crashed the rest of it and hogged all the resources I'll say this: It never happened when we only had Reason running. It only happened when we had other editing software open as well... and we always had plenty of memory available).

I don't know if their stuff is still the same or has started to rot but there was a point where it was a real engine that blew my mind.

Under windows:

mencoder which I prefer over ffmpeg that some users have mentioned. It uses the same libraries and has -at least for me- a simpler command line interface (mencoder file.in -o file.out -ovc select_video_codec -ovc select_audio_codec -of select_output_format -- try mencoder a -o o -ovc help -oac help -of help to see all options).

Also its sister program mplayer is great for playing everything under windows - I also prefer it over VLC that has been mentioned here. It has a much simpler interface (only uses the keyboard - left right up down page up page down f o + - etc) than VLC and can be run through the command line (run mplayer test.avi and the video will immediatelly start). Finally, it can easily be integrated with windows explorer: Just add a "Send To..." mplayer shortcut and you'll be ready to play everything under windows!

I'm using these tools for around 7-8 years for all my audio/video (transcoding and playing) needs, they munched everything I had thrown at them!

#1 - Nginx #2 - Redis #3 - Postgres

Visio before Microsoft[1]

It was super simple and something OmniGraffle never really got right. In fact, it was so easy and nice (particularly boolean shape operations and object properties), it made using OmniGraffle painful. Of all the Microsoft software, that was the one I wished had been ported to the Mac.

1) to be fair, haven't used it after the buyout since I went full time OS X

Look at yed or this thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/2x5f3a/what_are_you_...

Looks nice but doesn't seem to have any boolean operations on shapes.

This is actually a topic that I think about often because I LOVE several of the software tools I use daily, and the majority of my favorites are made by either individuals or smaller companies (except a few).

I've purchased licenses of the following and have used them all for years. These are all wonderfully simple in my opinion, and the most reliable pieces of software I have ever used and I have been very happy with my purchases:

EditPlus

Probably the best money I've ever spent. I use it for almost all of my coding. No other code editor seems to be arranged the same way with Folders and Files on the left with a tab to quickly switch to a function view, and simple color coded syntax highlighting. It's SO fast too.

ScanWiz 2

Converts scans to PDFs. For me, it has been flawless and perfect in every way. I once had to email because my computer crashed and I needed my license key again. I was literally lost without it. I've never used anything so beautifully simple for the single function it performs for me.

XnView and IrfanView

I purchased a license for each at one point. XnView for batch processing and IrfanView for almost all other simple image functions. I know I can batch in IrfanView, but I like how I can select filters and such in XnView.

Adobe Fireworks

I cannot believe this one is supposedly being shut down. I have never used such a simple vector based editing tool in my life. I literally do everything in it, and when I try to use something else, I can't stand it. I pray they leave it available through my Cloud subscription for forever.

Bvckup

I actually only got Bvckup about a year ago, but it has already saved me - and allows me to run my backups super fast and more regularly. Again, it's all about the simplicity.

What do you think of XD in comparison to Fireworks?

Someone should thtow in some non-UNIX software. So, OS/400: the OS of AS/400's. I know they can crash but I've never seen it or met someone face-to-face who has. Those jokers just seems to always work for years. OpenVMS was a competitor that also ran years at at time under load with cluster record being 17 years. These are still sold.

FreeBSD.

StumpWM: despite being Emacs-inspired, you can get going with very few keystrokes (just like in ratpoison) and despite I would like to switch to i3 (many friends have super cool setups) I cannot manage to stop using StumpWM.

It just like vim: you learn those 4 things and you can do 90% of the things you usually do. For the remaining 10%.... there is the manual.

I maintain 2 command-line utilities for my own needs:

to google: googler - https://github.com/jarun/googler for bookmarks: buku - https://github.com/jarun/Buku

SQLite is probably a contender, but think a pretty good case can be made that the JVM is the best software ever written.

Netbeans IDE. Cannot remember one serious crash. Have emptied the cache twice that I can think of over the years I have used it. (And most importantly: I have less problems than my colleague who uses IntelliJ.)

Also as others have mentioned I've had major stability problems with eclipse, mostly in connection with the perforce plugin.

Man times must have changed... Had to use Netbeans on college and it was literally the worst IDE I've ever used.

Crashed so often I just gave up. Decided to work with Gedit for a good period before I was introduced to vim.

Have never even tried to use other IDEs unless I'm kind of forced to (like android development) and made sure to stay away from Netbeans.

As I have pointed out elsewhere sometimes some piece of software isn't a good match for someone.

Me personally I don't like Mac OS X or Ubuntu Unity. I don't say they are bad but I will make an effort to avoid having to use them. (And I can tell you why.)

I can clearly see how some people might have similar issues with my favourite software.

That said: if last time was a few years ago and you youch upon Java code again you could give it another try; maybe it works better on a modern machine?

It might be Netbeans, or it might be Java EE as a language, but that's the opposite of reliable. Stuff breaks when you breathe on it and is often fixed by something like deleting your Netbeans cache folder or just restarting Netbeans (after you've been hunting a Java bug for 2 hours). The most common phrase in class as people try to use this for a semester-long fourth-year programming project: "I didn't change anything, this worked yesterday when I went home!"

I'm using PHPStorm and wanted to give Netbeans a try since my coworker liked it alot and I wanted to try it out anyways. Well opened it and tried to open a project folder (on windows), while navigating through the directories I accidentally clicked on network and it instantly frooze. Waited for like at least 10 seconds nothing happened. Closed it, never opened again...

I don't use it anymore because it's Windows only, but Foobar2000 was damn near perfect for a music player.

You could run it under Wine

Yeah, I tried it under wine. It suffered from graphical and audio glitches. I'm sure if I fiddled with it I could have gotten it to work quite well, but I didn't have the patience for it.

Go, super stable, reliable and fast. I also love the ideology.

I'll give you the first 2 at least. On another note, having an impoverished type system isn't much of an ideology..

Or it's proof of the strength of their convictions that they can have an impoverished type system despite all the pressure to have an enriched one.

Convictions won't solve the problems that generics could...

VMWare Player. I needed to run Linux in a VM with nested virtualization and hardware-accelerated 3D graphics. VirtualBox doesn't support the former and I couldn't get 3D acceleration to work even after installing the guest additions. Everything worked in VMWare Player right out of the gate.

Player is pretty nice no doubt. I also really like Vagrant + Virtualbox. Just works. And I can't believe Virtualbox is from the loins of Oracle.

VirtualBox came to Oracle from the Sun acquisition who acquired InnoTek. I really have always preferred VirtualBox over VMWare player, if you are playing the game of many VM's open VMWare player just is not so fun (I usually am running 2+ virtualbox all the time on my main system, not counting secondary systems). It really is the software I am turning to constantly, ever since I was looking for something easier to use than qemu around the time VT extensions hit the Pentium D.

We should convince the VirtualBox devs to do an AMA or a conference tech talk. Not only is it deep tech, I get the feeling it is a small number of really strong devs running the show (and possibly being ignored by the beast). Their networking options are also fairly awesome IMHO. I guess I'm a VirtualBox fanboy :)

I found VirtualBox to be super wonky at times.

Trying to run an OS X VM on an OS X host on it was "fun". Clang doesn't work out of the box and you had to set some weird and nonintuitive flags to get anything to compile on it.

I pretty much will try to use anything else besides VirtualBox when I need a VM.

Inkscape - May not be AI but it does a great job for what it is - recent improvements have set it in a class of its own.

Eclipse - slow probably, reliable yes.

Thunderbird - Just works

A Good Text Editor - (choose your flavor) When word processors or other text tools just get in the way - you can clear up a lot of frustration with a decent text editor.

Meld - Great file & directory comparator/text editor

MacOS/OSX - compared to other OSs Mac "just works" (though over the decades it doesn't "just work" always as well as it had - but still "just works" better than most for those not OS savvy.)

Linux - may be a bit of a struggle to get up to speed initially but it doesn't let you down

Ubuntu - Some years are good some are bad but even on the bad years the community support will get you up and running and once you are there you're good for a few years.

1. Operating Systems: it's easy to take them for granted, but nowadays they just work, for both Windows and macOS and even Ubuntu are fine. Linux kernel is particularly impressive - I have a server with 1800 days uptime. Mobile OSes are dumbed and locked down so I am not a big fan, but again, they just work. 2. Browsers: Edge, Chrome, Firefox, Safari - they just work. 3. Text editors: Sublime, Notepad++, VSCode etc 4. Virtual Machines: VirtualBox, VMWare - again the core software has not crashed on me once, even when using dual virtual NICs etc 5.Steam, Source Engine or Frostbite Engine or id games. Generally with some sad exceptions (Batman) you can just launch a game and enjoy it. 6. Plex - I've had it running 24/7 for years, streaming movies.

Anything from djb. Juxtaposed against the usual autoconf/Makefile insanity, his more recent make-free build system is a work of art. Part of the reliability equation to me is highly portable, quick, easy compiling. I've not come across anyone who does it better.

BBEdit - it truly doesn't suck. Supremely scriptable and stable.

Pinboard - amazingly good bookmarking.

Pathfinder - the Finder is better than it used to be, but still no match.

Soulver - the notepad calculator.

Fiddler proxy - I use Charles on the Mac, but miss Fiddler.

Omni Outliner - superb outliner.

Arq - awesome backup software.

jq - never work with json without it.

iTerm2 - so good

httpie - does what I mean.

Audio Hijack - record anything.

I'm absolutely amazed I haven't seen Photoshop on the list yet.

Incredibly powerful, very reliable, thoroughly worth the pricetag - and I don't love subscription software.

It's generally a joy to use. And I can't think of another piece of powerful visual creation software that is.

Photoshop is incredibly glitchy, at least its Windows version is. It manages to crash even while initializing.

Which version? I've been using CS3 for years and it's rock solid.

I'm on Windows and I honestly can't recall the last time I saw a PS crash - and I've used it more or less daily for the last half-decade or so.

CS5 never crashes for me...

That said, The price tag is obscene. Large price tags for specialty business software is fine when the publisher is an indy developer with a small demographic. Photoshop does not qualify.

I understand they will charge whatever the market will pay, but that doesn't make it right or "not evil". It's 2016 and I think we should really grow up as a species. Competing so ferociously with your fellow man that you make all the money and they end up dead should not really be socially tolerable.

Corel PaintShop Pro is a professional quality program that's almost as almost as full featured for a fraction of the price. I create content for virtual worlds and once I moved past the beginner's stage of using free programs (of which I believe Paint.Net is the best) I bought PSP and found it has everything I need.

Premiere Pro and Photoshop has improved a lot over the last few years. But it's let down by the crappy Creative Cloud app which does weird stuff such as suggesting updates that have already been applied. But it's hard to find a better alternative for some of their apps.

SQLite

I've gotten to the point that sqlite is my immediate answer to any Ask HN about useful tools or good source code. I'm to the point of slight obsession...

A month ago, I would've put Winamp on this list. Unfortunately, the lack of updates to it has made it impossible to read on my new 4K laptop.

Huge pity, otherwise, as I still love the thing. I wish they'd just open source it so someone can future-proof it for Hi-DPI displays.

I remember it had a 2x option, to double the size. Did you try it? Still small?

Foobar works for me, it has a small memory footprint and it's very customisable

I noticed a scaling option in the Window preferences and tried setting it to 200%. It's not perfect, but I think I might be able to resize it and disable some elements until it works. Thanks for the tip!

Good question.

Python is one software (among others) that is somewhat reliable, both based on personal experience over several years, as well as according to the Coverity study (some years ago, IIRC).

Interesting that at least some replies have some items in common. I also have to say the same, at least about vim and vi before it - hardly ever (or never) crashed on me, IIRC.

Linux of course, does crash once in a while, but again, very rarely, much less than Windows, IME. Same for Unixes I used before Linux - okay, not all the same. Some of the PC Unixes used to crash more than once in a blue moon. HP-UX - very reliable software, when I used it in production for some years. Even their patch management system was very good, and helped with the reliability.

For music production, I use Ableton Live. It has a non-linear workflow that increased my creativity by an order of magnitude, and is a joy to work with.

In my experience, its been rock solid reliable (generally give them 6 months before upgrading to most recent versions).

emacs

I'm a huge fan of emacs, but even though I use it constantly, I do not consider it exceptionally reliable. A modern experience really does rely on a huge number of powerful and excellent but sometimes glitchy packages. (helm, org, haskell-mode/python-mode/etc.) I also find it crash prone on Windows, which is not totally surprising given Emacs' ownership, but disappointing.

I've had emacs go out to lunch on rare occasions, but I find it to be far more stable than Firefox or Chrome. I have had emacsserver sessions run for months without issue, and I do all my email as well as coding and org-mode task tracking in Emacs.

I use Spacemacs on Windows so I'm pushing Emacs a bit past its limits. ;)

Actually I was going to compare Emacs stability to Chrome stability. Though for me Emacs gets terminal segfaults more often, Chrome has more random failures that require restarting.

Git, Linux, Python, Sublime Text, Redis, Postgresql, VLC.

Also Ubuntu, I remember how I always felt having a half broken setup when I started using it in 2007 but for the past 2-3 years it just worked, really stable, no more release upgrade mess ups, really enjoy it.

Belive you about Ubuntu but it is weird:

I loved Ubuntu but now don't bother to even try after having tried Unity a few times (no, it's not about stability, it's about breaking alt-tab for me).

LINQPad.

Don't know how I'd get by without this for ad hoc / exploratory .NET work. Love it.

trello.com for 1st. place! They survived katrina, or whatever that was for just couple hours of downtime and that was years ago.

And must say Sublime text (currently still v2) This thing has saved me million of times and hours. You can do so much with it.

I was using them on a project at the time and reading their blog. They were carrying gas upstairs to run the generators for their servers :)

handbrake (the video transcoder). It just works. given the mass of containers and video formats this is a little surprising!

Django. Makes me way more productive, and the guys who wrote it know a lot more about web dev than me. It has taught me a lot and made me a better coder as well as improving my productivity. Docs are good as well.

For OS X (or should i say macOS...), this is a nice list of apps: https://github.com/iCHAIT/awesome-osx

Debian, Vim, Python, Nginx, NTPd, sshd.

On Windows:

Everything - simple and quick file search tool

Ditto - clipboard history

Nokia PC Suite - I still use Nokia 808 PW as my primary device, and the PC Suite is one of the reasons

Puush - quick screenshot/file sharing tool

KVIrc - IRC client

Pidgin - multi-protocol IM client

Opera 12 - living with this thing is becoming increasingly difficult, but I don't want to imagine living without it

WinDirStat - storage space allocation visualisation

...

Then there's a ton of regular stuff: VLC, Photoshop, GetDataBack, Winamp, Telegram, Astroburn, CrystalDiskInfo, NetLimiter, LibreOffice, OpenVPN, Filezilla, 7Zip, Deluge, VirtualBox, TeamViewer.....

Can you integrate Pidgin with Google Hangouts?

As far as I know you can, but some features may be limited/nonexistent.

Discord has been rock solid so far for VOIP, and actually has great UX.

A refreshing change after years of using mumble/teamspeak and maintaining my own servers on flaky cheap VPS providers.

Ridiculous how well this actually works. The target market is gamers but I use it for business.

I just use it to talk to friends and drop links. Much nicer than Skype or Google Hangouts (after Google took out all the functionality).

Thunderbird mail client. Just works.

Yes, until it takes an attached image and replaces it with an image from a previous email....

TinyPNG and JPG. https://tinypng.com/ Very reliable and makes me happy - thanks Panda.

Wunderlist. Lightning fast sync across devices, a webapp that is indistinguishable from the local app, a free version is more than I could ask for, 4-5 features that are neatly organized/appropriately available, and even the sound it makes when I check off a task gives me joy.

There's more that I can't recall at the moment. For a simple little list application, it reminds me every time I use it that other software could be this good, too.

Knuth's TeX and Texstudio, in conjunction with gnuplot.

Notepad++

Most definitely. My favorite feature in the auto save feature for unsaved files. So even if you close down notepad++ or it crashes (never actually happens) all you stuff is where you left it.

it crashed once for me and the auto save didn't work, however there was a cached version in another folder so I was able to recover my work.

Qalculate!. This is easily my favorite calculator app. It's fast, it has many useful features (I especially like how you can specify units for all your values and get an answer with a unit), and it lets you type in expressions instead of wasting space on skeuomorphic calculator buttons. I configured the dedicated calculator button on my keyboard to run it, and I typically use it multiple times a day.

I note that "good software they enjoy using" includes software that people have been using happily for many years, but less experienced users might still find a bit of a nightmare.

As a Windows user, the tools I've used for a long time include Search Everything, Process Explorer, FreeFileSync, Paint.net and David De Groot's PIXresizer, along with the usual suspects: Gmail, Word and Excel.

Below are the things for me that "just work" day in, day out: IM - Telegram(all),WhatsApp(all) PhoneOS - BB10 Hub Web - Safari(mac) Find Files - AgentRansack(Win), powershell(Win), Alfred(mac),Win-S(Win8/10),'find'(*nix) VPN - ExpressVPN(mac,iOS) OS - Linux Mint H/W - Mac,iPAd,iPhone RF - XBee, NXP, Nordic WiFi- Realtek chips IDE - PyCharm, Lazarus

Navicat Premium. I bought this years ago when I needed a solid OSX database tool that I could use with all of the various databases I dealt with, which at that time was MySQL, SQL Server and Oracle. Now I work mostly with PostgreSQL, MySQL and SQL Server but it has been kicking along make my life easier the entire time.

It's almost an extension of my professional self at this point.

CFEngine for configuration management. CFEngine is a promise engine -- you can see what promises about the system state have been verified, which have been repaired and which couldn't be repaired. I like the insight into infrastructure that it provides. It's been around since 1993 and is quite mature.

Working with CFEngine, I got into git. I trust git too. :-)

Checkvist, a checklist, task management and planning tool. I mainly use it for brainstorming and planning and its great. Been using it for many years now. Just wish the mobile experience was better (its too easy to accidentally move items on mobile), but they have a decent API, so maybe one day I'll hack one together that works how I want.

Emacs. Does what I need, is versatile and fast.

zsh, vim, git, tmux, ssh, curl, less, rsync, mosh, ag

VLC player deserves extra credit because it's a big, messy, cross-platform GUI app.

VLC is a great example I forgot about. If anything mainstream has been reliable over the years, cross-platform, it's VLC.

Sublime Text 2, Plex, AudioStreamer2.1, LibreOffice, and Unoconv. I'd also like to mention that for archives I prefer Rar & Unrar instead of 7zip. I'd also like to add that I find 7z to be somewhat unreliable. Does anyone else agree or have another alternative?

JVM

SQLite

Winamp 5.

Microsoft Word, Excel, OneNote, Outlook.

Total commander, far manager.

IrfanView.

Emacs, git, GIMP, postgres, SBCL, Winamp, uTorrent (old version), PuTTY, Dropbox, 7zip, IrfanView

Notational Velocity. The project has been abandoned for years on github, because NV is perfect. Syncs with simplenote if you want. NV is just a simple, fast, notes app, full of useful hotkeys. I've used NV daily for the past 6 years with zero issues.

I recently discovered a new game recording software called "Loilo Game Recorder". It skimps on features, but it records games with really good quality and, so far, without any noticeable performance loss. Does exactly what it sets out to do.

VSCode - Not too light, not too heavy. JS development and debugging is a breeze.

VLC. Related Popcorn time. Great interface.

RethinkDB - RQL is a great query interface. I wish there was an embedded version like sqlite.

Chrome-dev-tools: As a JS Dev, love what they've done.

Whatsapp - Their focus on simplicity and doing one thing very well.

PowerShell

Bash

Charles Proxy

I mention Geogebra, https://www.geogebra.org/, because I believe more people interested in exploring mathematics should be using it. Me, I cannot get enough of it.

psql, vim, git, bash --- all the old Linux command-line tools for that matter.

For something with a GUI: Gmail.

Don't know if this will help or not: http://gettingreal.37signals.com/

Ktorrent is the best torrent client I've ever used.

KeyPassX is my favorite password client... generates passwords well and saves them. Very easy to use.

And Seamonkey is a pretty righteous browser. It has email built-in and it runs leaner than Firefox on my machines.

RubyMine. Went through TextMate, Sublime, vim, you name it. For Ruby development this IDE is superb and a joy to use everyday. Only downside is getting used to it when sometimes it isn't available (vim comes to the rescue usually).

Far Manager http://www.farmanager.com/index.php?l=en - works perfectly, still have this Norton Commander feeling from 80-x.

Royal TS v3, Solarwinds, SQL Server Management Studio 2014,Python, Cisco Jabber, (Mobile) Secure Apps Manager, Mobile Iron, Powershell, Paessler Data Extractor, PRTG, Vsphere, Sourcefire/Firepower... The list goes on.

Been using the Ramda lib for functional programming.

It's been a great intro lib to the aspects of func. programming, and while the learning curve is steep, the result is cleaner code with less chance of making a mistake.

FileSearchEX, a file search tool for Windows 10 that is so beautiful in its simplicity, astonishingly quick, and priced like ya stole it. You'll be driven to madness when you don't have it with you.

Not heard of it before (I'll go and get it) but have you compared it with Search Everything? https://www.voidtools.com/

Maybe the names should be the other way round because Search Everything just finds filenames while FileSearchEX searches file contents too.

MobaXTerm, it has all the features I could want in a console/FTP client.

Paw is a HTTP client for macs and a joy to use. Its maintained very well. I am more comfortable using curl on the command line but Paw is the one I end up recommending to newer programmers these days.

I live out of evernote most days. It could be better but it works for me.

Speaking of which, it looks like Evernote's free tier won't be supporting syncing for an arbitrary amount of devices for much longer.

Dropbox

TrueCrypt, or one of the various forks now that the original developers are gone.

Software with utter class. They released full-disk encryption and it was basically flawless from the first release, just works.

whats is the good fork?

PopClip on Mac. A tiny menu-bar app that does so much, so easily. All cliches apply, including the one where Apple should buy them. This should be part of MacOS. Extensible architecture too.

Git, Filezilla, VLC Player they just work have been using for years!

VLC Player! I didn't even think to include it on this list because I rarely think about it, which is a great sign. I always install it on new OSs and make it the default media player. But it plays all the things I've thrown at it well and even changes its icon over the Christmas holiday to have a little santa hat!

Vlc: bugs me every time because cant pause movie by clicking it (the movie screen) like in EVERY other video player!

Goodreader on iOS. I still keep my iPad 1 around for this software.

http://git.suckless.org/surf/log/?h=surf-webkit2

moc - Music On Console, use mocp to spwan it and you can also detach again. Never used another music player afterwards.

youtube-dl

ack instead of grep, most instead of less

tor

GNOME stuff just works, from gnome-builder to gnome-disks to gscan2pdf

I've dj'ed several weddings with moc, including my own. I wouldn't even think of using anything else in a high-stakes situation like that.

Propellerhead Reason, Sublime text, Total commander, GIT, ConEmu

weechat (IRC client), because of sane defaults, nice UI, active development and simple source code. Oh, and it's basically bug-free from a user's perspective.

mbsync [0]. It is a great example of blue-collar software. Unshowy, unfeatureful, it Just Works. Combine with mu and mu4e [1] and my mail situation is pretty much just fixed.

[0] http://isync.sourceforge.net/mbsync.html [1] http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu

On OS X - Emacs, Alfred, VLC, Postgres.app, Spectacle, iTerm

xmonad

Such great software. If you are a programmer and have a big monitor, this is a MUST

Thumbs up. 10 years ago, it was the only window manager properly supporting many monitors.

SMS Backup (Android app) - literally "just works"

Snip. It's a screenshot tool that just works. I mapped to CMD+CTRL+A and it saves the image to the clipboard. It just does exactly what I need it to do.

How's this different from OS X's built-in screenshot tool (Cmd-Shift-3/4)?

1Password for Mac - For Windows not so much, unfortunately

Forklift on (OS X) or even better: Total Commander (only program I miss from Windows).

rsync if you copy a lot (it can be overwhelming with all options but I trust it).

neovim + neoterm is now my default terminal emulator.

Emacs with Org-mode

Notational Velocity

Don't see it anywhere, but ack has been such a big improvement on grep for me, particularly once I aliased a few ack --with-flags

git

Reliable? ZNC (irc bouncer), I've had it running on my raspberry pi for so long now I sometimes forget that it's there.

Trello Tweetbot Buffer Overcast Pocket Spotify

+1 for major databases, IDEs and web servers...I think there is a lot of good software, one or two bugs is close to nothing

Visual Studio. I can't get much of anything done unless I have Intellisense and GUI debugging/monitoring tools.

Out of those not mentioned here for me it's beets and cmus. My go to for music for years without a single issue.

vim. been using it for decades now and i still stop every so often to marvel how much pleasanter it makes my workday.

git, mercurial, linux, emacs, vim, intellij, java, zsh

productivity: chrome, google docs (slow but works), dropbox, tiddlywiki, gmail.

ffmpeg and libav

I just started playing around with ffmpeg for a side project of mine. I'm sad because it's C++ (and I didn't write enough C++ in my life to be any good in it) and I was looking around for a good C# wrapper exposing a media player that I can simply use in a desktop app, but everything I found was extremely buggy and laggy.

I'm currently trying to make an exact copy of ffplay.exe (since the source code is available) in C# using an tiny SDL2-C# wrapper and a tiny ffmpeg-C# wrapper, instead of finding a library that does everything. I'm glad to hear that ffmpeg is reliable and solid, I hope I can make it work in C#! (I'll probably put everything up on github if it works)

Absolutely ffmpeg. I guess it's not "stable" in the sense that the fast pace of development sometimes leads to changes in best practices, but damn is it excellent to use.

Disagree on ffmpeg. It certainly gives you a great degree of control, which is great if you know a lot about video formats and codecs and such, but as a casual user my first step for ffmpeg is always googling "ffmpeg convert X to Y" and copy and pasting from Stack Overflow.

Google Docs/Spreadsheets are amazing.

The Public Domain Korn Shell version 5.2.14.

A rock solid shell that hasn't been (or needed to be) updated in nearly 20 years.

TurboTax. The fact that I actually look forward to doing my taxes is just....hard to believe.

ls - this program has never failed me

winamp. sublime text. anki. libre office. audacity. quicktime. eclipse. komodo. english dictionary (part of mac os). TextEdit. codeblocks. virtualbox. join.me, vcl

broken software I hate: all web browsers, thunderbird, gimp, microCommander, calibre, itunes, iphoto, cyberduck, skype,

pocket. It just works and saves lots of time from distraction without loosing what I want to read.

I use Pocket a lot because it has integration with my Kobo ereader. That said, I find it often fails to parse an article that Instapaper or Readability handle no problems. That is my only complaint with it.

TexMaker. Does its thing very well.

nvALT, which is a fork of the Notational Velocity note-taking app on OSX.

Rock solid and very fast!

nv is already simple and very fast. I found nvAlt rather buggy

Just curious, but what bugs have you encountered in nvAlt? I switched over for the Collapse Note List function.

Spotify. Very rarely do I run into performance issues or bugs on any platform.

Spotify has been nearly unusable for me ever since Spotify moved to Chromium Embedded.

Something is wrong when I have to wait several seconds so scroll further down a list of song names.

I once random lost my complete library. Above that, there was no way to get it back. Spotify people however did recover my playlist. I do use Linux client though, which is not officially supported.

I got so sick of Spotify randomly taking up 100% of a core that I switched to Apple Music. Yes, I actually found iTunes to be more stable…

I often hear my friends talking shit about the spotify desktop app and web app not working properly. I don't use spotify but it seems like something's not working at least every month or two.

I have to quit the Mac app a few times a week, when it just decides it isn't going to play songs.

SQLite

nano

Late to the party but ... Google Maps. So buttery, extremely reliable, and so many form factors where the experience is the same: superb. I'm afraid it has become such a daily utility that perhaps people don't appreciate just how amazing Google Maps is.

I'm also amazed by it and use it all the time, but the Android version of Maps has been getting progressively slower and less responsive with every new version. [1] Performance should be a feature!

[1] https://blog.codinghorror.com/performance-is-a-feature/

The PHP5+ interpreter. Has served the world reliably for over a decade.

vi, python 2.7, virtualenv/pip unless I need to install MySql.

* mint, * git + gitlab ce, * webstorm + nodejs, * chromium

"Everything" NTFS search engine at www.voidtools.com

I like pgAdmin3, a great tool to manage your postgres DB.

Emacs with org mode, iTerm 2, Sublime Text 3 and Winamp.

CMD+F for Xcode; not a single mention. Well, until now.

git, SQLite and vim immediately comes into my mind.

And maybe Redis too.

jEdit. It just works. Its been stable for 10+ years

OSX: TextWrangler for multi-file GUI text editing.

Emacs, thunderbird

Alfred for mac. App launcher and so much more.

Vim and Chrome :)

Skitch - Simple, reliable, and to the point.

IntelliJ IDEA, WhatsApp, VLC, HotSpot JVM.

iTerm on mac. You'll appreciate it more if you've used a linux (Ubuntu etc) OS for a long time before.

sed, chattr, dtach, screen, ssh, bash, etc. are all nice tools that can help you get shit done and mad reliable.

vmware workstation/fusion, sqlite3, nginx, redis, chrome browser, mac os x, vi, ubuntu server, postgresql

EmEditor for large text files

Can’t live without: 1Password - First install on any system I use. I only know 2 passwords by heart: my login password and my 1Password vault pw. Also supports TOTP 2 factor authentication.

Dropbox - It’s a folder, it syncs, and does this very well. Syncs my 1Password vault as well.

GrandPerspective - Visualise where your disk space is going. Every time I fire this up I find stuff I’ve forgotten about that takes up a lot of space, or something that is using disk space it shouldn’t. (Once a WiFi log hadn’t rolled over and was using 8GB of space.) - http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net/

Synology - It took some investment, but now I finally have a place where all my data is, safer than on one or two external drives. But that’s not all, Synology also is a fantastic home/office server with an “app store” where I can run applications, run a VPN endpoint, run Docker containers, ...

Crashplan - Not the fantastic lightweight native Mac & Linux tool I’d want, but rather a somewhat heavy Java tool. But the business model for me is great. Free replication between endpoints, ie. all my family and my NAS and unlimited replication to their datacenters for my own devices for $5/month (Crashplan Family) - http://www.crashplan.com

Plex - For me it’s always been super reliable. Server runs flawlessly on my Synology. - http://www.plex.tv

Pinboard.in - Proudly non-free, stable and boring. The author’s presentations and twitter feeds are insightful and hilarious, I’m glad to support his work.

Superduper - I use it less often than before, since I now have a proper NAS and backup solution (see above), but Superduper has helped me so much in the past it deserves a mention. Always provides a safety net when I do a migration between hdd and sdd, between systems, ... I even bought two licenses as I lost my previous one, spending another $28 on it was a no brainer. http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription...

Coda - Still my html/css/php/… editor of choice. - http://www.panic.com/coda/

Waze on my phone: best navigation I’ve ever used

youtube-dl

wget & curl - they have slightly other use cases, and I love them both. I use both of them at least weekly, mostly daily

VMware Fusion & vSphere/ESXi: still rock solid after all those years. (Disclaimer: I work there)

Other software I particularly love: Sketch (mentioned elsewhere in the thread) and Affinity Designer. I like Illustrator, but as a non-professional it’s way too expensive for me.

My list will echo others out there:

* Linux

* vim

* tmux

* git

* ssh

* redis

* docker

* Sublime Text 3

Reliability? TCP-IP ;)

Homebrew.

Rsync.

SSH.

Gmail

Microsoft Excel

Scrivener

i enjoy LightTable as my text editor. And it has amazing global search

Glasgow Haskell Compiler

Arch Build System

Nginx, Haproxy, Redis

Everyone should knoe about alternativeto.net for finding better software.

Atom, Slack, Steam.

FME (www.safe.com)

PHPStorm SQLyog

firefox + tiddlywiki

ffmpeg

vlc

virtualbox

vi / awk / grep / more / sed

[windows only]

notepad++ (I sorely miss this in linux T_T)

SysTrayPlay mp3

Ableton Live.

Live is pretty damn reliable, I'll vouch for this. I've used it daily for years and often had it open for a whole day at a time. Only crashes I've had have been caused by 3rd party VST plugins.

TextWrangler

WinDirStat

Varnish

HAproxy

Ansible

Ubuntu Server

Redis

Postfix

Ruby: Sequel, Sinatra, Sidekiq, Puma

nginx, htop

xmonad

TextMate, now TextMate2. Works for me many years. Nice tool. Chrome DevTools. Before Chrome DevTools was a big fan of Opera Dragonfly (still useful because of this http://www.opera.com/dragonfly/documentation/remote/ )

Probably the most off the wall choice in this thread, but I say HP Scan and Capture: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/apps/hp-scan-and-captu...

It's a Metro app for Windows 8.1 and up to scan with HP scanners. I love it because it just works, which has never been my experience with scanning[0]. You press a button, it scans whatever's on the tray. You can tweak resolution if you want. And at the end you save it as a PDF. Simplicity is something that I think tends to be forgotten when it comes to GUI software.

[0] Except for a commercial scanner I used once where you put in your email address at the beginning and for every scanned page it sent you an email with an attached PDF. Although that has its own issues.

I use HP officejet printer and pretty much never use any software to scan documents. I scan via their document feeder and it automatically transfers the PDF to a folder on my Mac. I digitise everything so this workflow is especially time-saving.

I'll contribute:

Bitvise SSH Client for Windows. It has SFTP, terminal, and simple profile management. It's a great free SSH app, however I recommend sending the developers some money cause it's really worth $10-$15 if you spend a lot of time using SSH.

GNU/Linux.

Virtualbox - means I can run Linux on the same computer very easily. Easy to use and reasonably fast.

Keepass - been using that password manager for years. Nice search feature that always saves my *.

Vim - nice way to code on a laptop. Makes super efficient use of space and rarely requires me to use the track pad.

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive

I would go mad if I don't get to blow someones head off :D

pip

Yup. Maybe I need to learn how to use npm better, but I constantly find myself wishing it were more like pip.

Gretl.

nginx, SQLite, Reaper, Audacity, VLC, ffmpeg and ffplay.

WinAmp 2

FB's messenger - everyone should be using this instead of SMS

I liked having my phone battery last more than an hour on a full charge, so I will never install that POS again.

I have the Facebook messenger app on my iPhone and it works pretty well. I still get a full day out of the battery.

It's closed. I will never vouch for a messaging app that is not open.

Long live IRC.

Look at slack... it's IRC with some design in the front, and suddenly everyone loves it! Somehow it's even worth billions!

Irony aside... I miss the good old days of IRC chatting with bots, privileges (please mod me!) and even file sharing :D

IRC client is one of the first foreground programs that start up as soon as the OS boots. There's no shortage for people using IRC :P

At least you didn't say iMessage?

LOL.

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