Ask HN: What's a tool that has made your life 10x easier?

I was going to put functional programming, even though I don't specifically use FP languages. But this is just one example of 'clearer thinking' being the tool that saves so much time not going down unrewarding paths.

  - immutable data, pure functions, stateless objects/classes
  - separation of mechanism and policy
  - distinct understandings of why, what, and how
  - thinking of code as maintaining rules or logic invariants
  - knowing the 'factor' when refactoring (I prefer the verb factoring)
  - getting better at naming and organizing things
  - getting a feel for the 'shape' of a problem or solutions without distracting names of things
  - fine-grain understanding of why things work or don't
    e.g. transaction isolation + large nested transactions vs microservices

That last one came up in a discussion of alternate datastores like ScyllaDB or CockroachDB (which I really like). But the problem wasn't really a limit of sharded MySQL which works really well, but how transactions are scoped and different domains of data are being written into the same db with the same connection and tx.

This kind of understanding lets you solve bigger problems with smaller solutions (i.e. less effort and risk).

For me it was the web browser on which I could install a tiny wiki with a Lisp-like language, which I use 99% of my time. For instance :

http://lambdaway.free.fr/lambdawalks/?view=coding

http://lambdaway.free.fr/lambdawalks/?view=oops

http://lambdaway.free.fr/lambdawalks/?view=oops5

Thanks

Somewhat standard ones: Copy / paste Alt + Tab Control + Shift left arrow : control + left to delete the whole word.

On a Mac, I frequently use Spotlight- simple math, finding files, launching apps. (Yes, I’m familiar with Alfred…but I’m frequently switching computers and having something already installed is great).

This extension to search anything Rust on Rirefix: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/rust-search-e...

I got some cheap ($50) ottomans that I can sit on when I'm sweaty -- so I don't have to sit on the floor, which I can't get up from.

I think a variant of things question was asked before, but my answer remains: SourceTree for version control. IntelliJ for coding. These 2 are literally game changing for me

Using aliases with similarly named folders to organise incoming emails by source. Examples: financial statements; alias = box123F, Google emails; alias = box666

Do search engines count? If so, that is the one for me.

working out and eating plant based.

(bash +) AWK