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

Ask HN: What are your favorite tools?

29 pointsblueridge41 comments

A few apps that I enjoy using every day:

https://ia.net/writer for writing.

https://usecontrast.com/ for checking contrast.

https://sipapp.io/ for picking colors.

https://nova.app/ for editing code.

https://cleanshot.com/ for screenshots.

https://getpixelsnap.com/ for measuring elements on screen.

https://netnewswire.com/ for reading things via RSS.

https://panic.com/transmit/ for file transfers.

https://usefathom.com/ for web analytics.

https://balsamiq.com/ for wireframes.

https://tome.app/ for slides and presentations.

https://www.hey.com/ for email.

Amphetamine for keeping my Mac awake.

What else? What are some of your favorite tools?

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I use many of the one you’ve listed.

In addition:

SublimeMerge and Sublime Text.

Alfred.

Iterm2.

Datagrip.

Ruby and Ruby on Rails. I’ve built multiple long-lived apps as a single dev. The productivity this stacks gives is incomparable and the joy of writing Ruby - irreplaceable.

CSS - elegant and powerful when used as intended.

fzf

Davinci resolve

Photoshop and Lightroom.

Figma is incredible. Finally an editor which defaults to what I’m trying to accomplish.

Breadboarding diagrams (see rjs’ work).

Basecamp is irreplaceable for collaboration and makes any other tool feel like unnecessary agony.

Things for personal gtd style todo lists.

Google sheets and google docs are more than good enough. My 82 year old father wrote a 500 page book using google docs and went over editing suggestions with the book editor - without major hiccups.

SCSS is still great and useful.

Utopia.fyi for fluid typography and spacing.

Fujifilm xpro3 with 23mm f1.4 lens brought me back the joy of photography.

Yeah, as much as I've tried to get Google out of my life, I'm having a hard time parting ways with Google Docs. It's really a top notch writing tool.

Tmux, vim, Linux like every other nerd in this thread. aider is my favorite recent piece of software. Some scripts I made do a lot of work for me, although they're very simple.

Also my 14" band saw, which I tuned most of the vibration out of. And some screwdrivers that belonged to my grandfather. And a beautiful set of blue point wrenches that belonged to someone else's grandfather. A cheap set of wrenches my mom got me for Christmas in 1999. And my old Coleman gas lantern. Those are my favorite tools that I use at every opportunity.

What's aider?

https://github.com/paul-gauthier/aider

Not a very big learning curve.

I built a home file server for windows games that are directly playable from the server. I did not want people hunting for the binaries though as they can be buried. I found WinLaunch to point to each binary and display an icon to an interface like iOS. It’s great.

https://winlaunch.org/

Otherwise I like vim, Bodhi Linux, vs code, typescript, yD Firefox add on for YouTube, ffmpeg, samba runs my file server

TCL/Tk and Lazarus for programming.

Trinity for a desktop GUI and file manager.

VirtualBox for multiple testing environments.

VNC and SSH for managing remote machines.

VLC for playing videos.

Speedcrunch for calculations. Imagine if your calculator worked like a text editor... it solved problems I didn't even realize I had.

Right now I don't have a preferred text editor, having finally weaned myself off the one I learned back in the mid-1980s, that had to run in an emulator on modern machines. I've been switching between several GUI and text mode editors, but I haven't found anything I like enough to stay with.

A thumbdrive with Puppy Linux, which is my go-to "unhork the gestupfed computer" Swiss-Army-tool. There are other distributions specialized for that task, but Puppy has managed to do the job so far.

A Raspberry Pi with a carefully curated Pi Hole, so I don't have to configure multiple hosts files and web browsers across multiple real and virtual machines. The Web is a miserable experience without adblocking.

The first thing I install on a new system is a window manager because I absolutely cannot function without one. It's muscle memory at this point. I had used XMonad in the past, but I decided to write my own using the Penrose library (it's not as hard as it sounds), mostly because I find Rust easier to understand than Haskell.

I use alacritty as my terminal. I use Firefox as my browser, and I could go on indefinitely about the different tools I use on the web, but I won't.

For writing code I use VS Code. The Remote SSH extension is a must. Then, I'll have language-specific extensions installed and a theme extension.

I'll add that I use Obsidian as my knowledge base.

i use obsidian too! i have a question. how you recheck your note though obsidian in another device, as obsidian is only a local offline store base. i recently use github rep to synchronous notes. if there are some better ways?

I use Obsidian Sync.

> I could go on indefinitely about the different tools I use on the web, but I won't.

I'd be interested if you did list them out.

My 3 go-to app this year, after I give up a phone for a tablet, are MoonReader, Paperpile and Google Colab. MoonReader for book reading (lots of great textbooks this year on data science), Paperpile as reference manager (and pretty nifty way to share too), and Colab for coding on the go.

The other essential tools are a good fountain pen, a good notebook and a bottle of water.

https://obsidian.md/ mainly for personal notes and journaling

Would you mind telling me if you're also finding it slow when the vault contains a lot of files? I do have some community plugins installed (the usual stack, I'd say), so it might be that they're the cause, but I'm not sure. And, I'd say the machine is reasonably fast for this type of task (random hexa-core laptop). It will take a second to switch notes, and opening up the graph view is also super-slow. I'm wondering if Obsidian has become bloatware.

How many notes do you have? I just have 150. For me, it takes around 3 seconds to start up Obsidian where the first thing it opens is the graph view. I think it takes longer on my phone especially because it has to wait for iCloud sync.

It could be your plugins. They have a guide to debug why Obsidian is running slowly: https://publish.obsidian.md/hub/04+-+Guides%2C+Workflows%2C+...

Or you can just leave it open if startup time is the concern

I think I have somewhere around 1k notes. Startup time is not my concern as I keep it open all the time. It seems like I bumped into https://github.com/zsviczian/obsidian-excalidraw-plugin/issu... tl;dr: Minimal theme doesn't get along with Excalidraw.

vscode, datagrip, dash for offline docs, tmux, docker, spotify, aldente for better battery management, hey for http perf testing, k9s, terraform, go, rust, dotnet, node, bun, python and some tools around each runtime, drawio, pkgx, raycast, obsidian, synology drive for backups to my nas

24v Electric drill Ifixit repair kit Dewalt Socket wrench set Starter fluid ;)

Chrome extension My Notes for taking notes:

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/my-notes/lkeeogfaie...

Notion for daily task management Copilot for all AI tasks

A custom code generator. It generates 90+% of the code I would otherwise have to write by hand at work.

SeaMonkey for irc/mail/web browsing, dokuwiki for personal notes, emacs for code editing.

VSCode for personal projects.

Jetbrain editors for work.

Caffeine for MacOS.

Wechat for taking screenshots.

> Wechat for taking screenshots.

Wat?

Wechat desktop for taking screenshots . Yeah you heard it right. It's the best screenshot app on Windows bar none.

Emacs, or vim. GNU/Linux. Docker/podman. Most of my tools are replaceable, but these are the ones I won't do without.

In general, as I become more and more experienced in the art of programming computers, the fewer tools I use. Only apprentice craftsmen obsess over their hammers.

Emacs OR vim?

Wait, you can use both?

This can't be true... How...

Ok. Now i finally have the opportunit:

I would appreciate your thoughts of pros and cons with them?

Emacs is metaprogrammable. vim is a good modal editing system. And if you're really asking, yes, you can have both. Look up "evil-mode" for Emacs.

I can use one without the other, though they work well when combined too. Like peanut butter and chocolate.

Not OP, but I am using Spacemacs with evil bindings, so I am also kinda using both.

> Emacs OR vim? > > Wait, you can use both? > > This can't be true... How...

Yes. It's called evil-mode[1]

[1]: https://github.com/emacs-evil/evil

fzf is my newest addition. A fuzzyfinder for your commandline.

(Yes, I know I'm late to the party).

Search after files, history or navigate directories.

one of the first things i do is install caffeine(stops screensaver/locking), sizeup(window manager).

Linux, bash, awk, sed, curl and jq.

- Debian GNU/Linux

- GNU Emacs

- Steel Bank Common Lisp (SBCL)

- Mozilla Firefox

Does Nova support Copilot yet?

- tmux

- emacs

- zsh + oh-my-zsh

Vim, zsh, and dotnet

obsidian for my notes

- helix editor

- tmux

- bash

helix editor

A few that I use the most:

- awk

- bat

- fd

- fzf

- git

- jq

- lazygit

- neovim

- parallel (GNU Parallel)

- ripgrep

- spotify-tui

- tldr

- tmux

- vifm

- yadm

- zoxide

- zsh

- sed

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