Ask HN: Which software do you feel thankfull for this year

Anki has been my bread and butter for over 10 years. It still blows my mind that it's a free piece of software. Not only that, but provides a free cloud syncing service.

Wenlin and Pleco Chinese dictionary software are both amazing pieces of software.

Goldendict/-ng is great for accessing EPWING dictionaries, an inconsistent, mostly undocumented, hopelessly complex Japanese dictionary format that most electronic dictionaries were published in during the 20th and early 21st century.

Emacs is not only something that I've used every day for years now, but opened a whole new paradigm of computing back up to me after drinking UNIX cool-aid for the last decade.

Linux and the GNU toolchain for obvious reasons.

foobar2000 for a great music player, something which sadly doesn't exist on Linux.

WINE for obvious and related reasons.

Firefox for obvious reasons.

And now I've run out of time, so mea culpa to my future self who will think of something I'll wish I'd mentioned

Starting myself :

- Factory games : factorio and satisfactory where definitely a good discovery this year. It's been a long time since i sink so much hours into video games, and even made me upgrade my GPU and screen :)

- KidCad Started exploring PCB design for various hobby project, and i was pleasantly surprise by the quality of the tools. Much better than what i remember things being 20 years ago during my university days

- Krita : I find the UI a big clunky, and it seems to be quite taxing on my iGPU. But the quality of the brushes and the amount of functionality is amazing.

Probably https://helix-editor.com/

Use it daily for $DAYJOB and privately. Can't recommend it enough.

I use it basically as my "IDE". I even have a PyCharm Professional license at $DAYJOB, but I've never installed it, as I'm just way faster with helix and a combination of python-lsp-ruff and pylsp-mypy.

I use it now since at least 2 years and I don't think I'll ever stop using it.

NotePlan for Mac is beyond fantastic! I’ve been on the Mac since 1984 and NotePlan is the best outliner, markdown editor, and notes organizer that I’ve used. Highly recommend!

Obsidian - I moved from Trello to Obsidian for notetaking this year and it has been a great choice. Well worth the transition pain.

ChatGPT totally changed the way I create software

Definitely webclient ChatGPT

Oh man, too much to list. But a few of the obvious ones would include:

Linux

Java

Python

Emacs

R

Firefox

xmms

Eclipse

Apache httpd

bash

gcc

glibc

OpenOffice

Anki