Ask HN: Which tools are worth the time?

There are an overwhelming number of tools and techniques that (allegedly) improve productivity. With my limited free time and brain capacity, it can be difficult to gauge whether the returns will be worth the time investment. Some examples that come to mind:

- Learning more advanced Vim techniques, adding new Vim plugins

- Learning more shortcuts for my daily drivers like my IDE(s), shell, etc.

- Adding new shell plugins

- Learning "modern" tools like ripgrep and fzf (There's a list here: https://github.com/ibraheemdev/modern-unix)

- Anything related to Kubernetes like kubectl-aliases or k9s

What do you find essential? What gives you the most bang for your buck, and conversely, what do you think is overhyped and not worth the time? It doesn't have to be strictly related to productivity; if you found something that makes your job more enjoyable I want to hear about that too!

One thing I wish I picked up earlier is a familiarity with Perl regular expressions and basic Perl syntax. Perl seems to be everywhere and being able to whip up a fancy one-liner with lookarounds and embedded code execution can be incredibly useful. I wouldn't say there's a steep learning curve, but, like most things, the skill atrophies if not exercised regularly.