Ask HN: What are you favorite tiny tools? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are you favorite tiny tools?

40 pointsseanlinehan45 comments

Everybody I know has a set of little software tools that they use that make their work either slightly easier or slightly more pleasant.

What are the tiny tools that you use for your work?

Some of mine:

Skitch -- Little Mac app that makes it easy to take screenshots and draw/write on them

Be Focused -- A simple Pomodoro timer for Mac

"Remove Stickies" -- A URL bookmarklet I wrote that removes all floating elements from a page

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bash, AWK, sips. A couple of bash commands I use daily:

cdf - change directory to the folder open in (Mac) Finder

  cdf () {
    currFolderPath=$( /usr/bin/osascript <<EOT
      tell application "Finder"
        try
          set currFolder to (folder of the front window as alias)
        on error
          set currFolder to (path to desktop folder as alias)
        end try
        POSIX path of currFolder
      end tell
    EOT )
    echo "cd to \"$currFolderPath\""
    cd "$currFolderPath"
  }

  #dlm - "dlm filename" downloads filename.mp4 from URL in clipboard until its finished, resuming if interrupted
  fname=$(pbpaste)
  echo "Download $fname as $1.mp4 : "
  until curl -C - -kLo $1.mp4 "$fname"
  do
    sleep 5
  done

Where do you put this bash script?

~/.bash_profile is the macOS equivalent of a .bashrc

It's also possible that the author is source-ing it (spelled that way intentionally :\) ) from another file in their .bash_profile

Note also that the author of the comment above was fast and loose with their description of dlm, and if you copypaste it as-written, it'll bomb. (Perhaps obvious, but you did ask where to put it!)

Ah thank u, yes, sorry. I have dlm saved as a shell script file. I didn't paste here the first-line bash shebang, which would have made that clearer.

Maybe I use most:

  alias ..='cd ../'

Then ".." moves up to the parent directory.

I don't use finder that much. My workflow usually involves finding stuff in the terminal and then using `open .` to open it in finder if needed.

But that snipped was neet! So I'm adding it to my dotfiles.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Alfred App https://www.alfredapp.com/

I cannot give it enough upvotes!

You could have added a description, though, so that uninterested people don't have to click the link. Here it goes:

"Alfred 3 for Mac

Alfred is an award-winning app for Mac OS X which boosts your efficiency with hotkeys, keywords, text expansion and more. Search your Mac and the web, and be more productive with custom actions to control your Mac."

Sounds like autohotkey.

The ‘z’ directory switching bash script is usually the first thing I miss when away from my own environment: https://github.com/rupa/z

Colour picker: https://sipapp.io/

Download videos from YouTube and other sources: https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/ (was the only way I could get a video from the BBC site recently)

Chrome extension for taking a screenshot of a full web page: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/full-page-screen-c...

Shameless plugs:

Script for renaming multiple files at the same time: https://github.com/ivanmaeder/vimv

Button in macOS Finder for creating a file in the current folder: https://github.com/ivanmaeder/finder-touch

That last one written in AppleScript which is craaazy.

Avid fan of https://htmlcolorcodes.com/

However, since a while ago if you search "HTML color picker" google brings up a built-in color picker as the first result.

Caffeine - http://lightheadsw.com/caffeine/

Caffeine is a tiny program that puts an icon in the right side of your menu bar. Click it to prevent your Mac from automatically going to sleep, dimming the screen or starting screen savers. Click it again to go back. Right-click (or ⌘-click) the icon to show the menu.

Not precisely a tool, but YouTube channels actually have RSS feeds associated with them:

    https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=<channel-id>

From your subscriptions page, you can even download an OPML with feeds for each channel. Most RSS will let you import this just fine.

As I love the cli, my preferred reader is newsboat[0].

[0]: https://newsboat.org/

A little alias that rewrites

    clone foo/bar

into

    git clone --recursive https://github.com/foo/bar

is one of my favorites.

I like this one, here it is for Fish shell: https://gist.github.com/upvalue/4f34df2397786535732a77676a72...

Httpie - basically a nicer cUrl. Adding json and headers is super simple. https://httpie.org

Puppeteer Recorder - tooting my own horn, but is a Chrome extension that records Puppeteer scripts. https://github.com/checkly/puppeteer-recorder

HTTPie is a great tool for testing API and stuff. I love it, I've also started using an Electron GUI app similar to HTTPie that works pretty well as well.

- https://insomnia.rest/

Video speed controller chrome extension. It lets you speed up videos on any site. I usually watch videos at 4x to 6x speed now (in addition to saving time I feel that I don't get distracted / daydream as much).

Sadly it's like an addiction and now I even watch Netflix at 1.5X speed too (which makes it impossible to watch with family)

I have this extension too, I usually watch videos at 2x (a way to be "productive" while watching youtube videos ). But I wonder how can one watch at 4x/6x...

I think it's a matter of habit and the more you do it the easier it gets (like training a muscle). 4x is very useful when watching video tutorials (lynda, udemy, etc) and generally I'm able to understand everything including the audio.

6x is when I just want to see the slides and code but can't understand the audio. It's rare but sometimes very useful.

The secret is captions. You speed read through videos. I still watch most dense tutorials at 2x speed though, and TV shows at 1x speed

ngrok: https://ngrok.com/ expose local servers to the public internet (super helpful for building webhooks)

grpcurl: https://github.com/fullstorydev/grpcurl awesome tools for testing gRPC services

objective-see: https://objective-see.com/products.html tons of awesome security tools for mac, for free!

f.lux: https://justgetflux.com/ great tool to adjust the color of your screen depending on the time of day

I extensively use [pngpaste](https://github.com/jcsalterego/pngpaste)

Now I can copy any images from browsers/screenshot into any location in terminal I want

"paste" -- an unexpectedly useful data-wrangling tool. I used a hand-rolled version for years before discovering it was available "as standard".

link?

https://linux.die.net/man/1/paste

Generic resource (mac/OsX):

https://tinyapps.org/osx.html

Cannot judge for Mac, but the selection of Windows little tools has traditionally been very good, the only Mac one I ever used (and it proved to work well) was WakeOnLan:

http://www.readpixel.com/wakeonlan/

For me it's tmuxp (https://github.com/tmux-python/tmuxp/blob/master/README.rst). It allows to create scripts for tmux sessions. It easily shaves off about 1 to 2 minutes of my time everyday.

Scapple - by far my favourite brainstorming / mind mapping / thought collecting tool. I use it every day. Features are just perfect, simple and useful.

I combine this with monosnap screenshot tool so I can drag images into notes.

(It's from the maker of Scrivener)

I run https://serveo.net. Lets you expose local services through a proxy server (a la ngrok), but uses SSH as the transport, so there's nothing to install.

BitBar (https://github.com/matryer/bitbar)

Allows you to create custom MacOS menubar items from the text output of any script.

Drafts 5 combined with workflow and Pythonista on IOS. For everything ranging from diary, personal crm, search adress/telephone number/e-mail in a given text, meeting notes and well almost anything. Very usefull combo

What actions do you have set up? Would you mind describing it in a little more detail? (Particularly the Drafts stuff)

Sure.

Diary:

  - Python script that fetches the diary template and fills it with information like location
  - With x-callback-url it is sent to drafts
  - in drafts I can edit the rest and have an action to upload it to working copy

In drafts the action Call: With x-callback-url open pythonista and parse the text for a telephone number. Then that's sent to the call program

Drafts Meeting notes: Launch python script. Scripts get the template from working copy and fills it with date and through a popup a Title. Want to change that so you can select the meeting from the calendar and have it filled in. Then sends it back to drafts.

I have a vacation list drafts pulls from working copy.

In drafts I have shortcuts to add that draft to due, Things or mail/whatsapp it.

The drafts forums and resource directory are a good starting point. Once you add Pythonsita all bets are off it becomes the most versatile app on the phone. Working copy is nice to have so you don't have to deal with templates in java script code or with tags in draft itself. Apparantly a mac app is coming, currently a pc user, this would almost be enough to just get a mac :-)

I use kickstart to manage my templates, including projects (https://github.com/Keats/kickstart/)

- httpie -- command line HTTP client - bat -- A cat(1) clone with wings

smcFanControl - makes my old '14 MBP with replaced-almost-everything tolerably warm.

menuBUS - for easy switching between built-in audio, Bluetooth, digital output + equalizing each of them in their own ways.

Spectacle - for window management and easy fullscreen, half-screen and whatever-part-of-screen shortcuts.

Karabiner - for complicated hotkey rebinding and controlling those Logitech presenter sticks where clever designer put a tiny "Close presentation and exit" key right next to "Next slide".

LICEcap - for capturing screen to GIF files for easy sharing.

+1 menuBUS is great. Too bad it's not being developed anymore.

Was. A Licecap user too, but now switched to GIPHY capture. Recommended.

Vanilla -- ‘hide Mac menu bar icons’ (https://matthewpalmer.net/vanilla/)

Clocker -- ‘Menubar World Clock’

CheatSheet -- ‘active short cuts of the current application’ (https://www.cheatsheetapp.com/CheatSheet/)

https://tab.bz to share lists of links to other people as one link, or just across devices that aren’t synced

For Mac automation I use: Keyboard Maestro, Hazel, Automator, AppleScript. Not a tiny ones, though.

Jumpcut — macOS menubar clipboard manager with keyboard shortcuts

Spectacle - macOS window resizer / manager

Snappy - Let's you keep screenshot on-screen, annotate and so on.

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