Ask HN: What software sparks joy when using?
I've spent my last few hours working with Jira-Align. I am beginning to hate computers at this point. To up lift my mood I'd like to use something which sparks joy. Does anyone have any suggestions?
Apple has almost never been an option for me because I like being able to run software on diverse hardware.
Windows gets more inscrutable and annoying every time I'm asked to do family tech support. I can't believe how many ads are baked into the current version of the OS.
I'm not a gamer, so the lure to tolerate Windows for a single app has never been strong for me.
What exactly you might ask, well, just ... how it looks, for example. Still modern. I like the search bar. Dicking around in the registry. It's weird antics, like Win32 file namespace API not allowing folder names to end with a space but the file system supporting it so you end up with some weird behaviour if some scanner manages to create a folder with a trailing space and then you end up with two folders, one with a space at the end and one without, and you can't delete the one with the space without looking up \\?\
Stockholm syndrome.
(I also like Linux)
That IDE/hardware combo beats anything I've ever developed on in my career. By a long way.
Shameless plug but I mention it and a few of my other favourite software tools here:
The other "sparks joy" software I use regularly are Sketch - which after a lifetime of using Adobe products felt like a breath of fresh air when I switched to it - and Proxyman which is hands down the best HTTP interception/proxy software I've used on the Mac (and iOS).
And even better than that are hardware synthesizers with all the direct control knobs to fully and dynamically shape the sounds that come out. I also prefer them because looking at an Ableton screen feels too close to my day job.
It's pretty much the same story as in cars: software with a touch screen can only get so good--with a physical UI it can be better.
Full-screen uxterm, with vim with 3 splits, LHS for a terminal. Multiple tabs when necessary, proper syntax highlighting (I use a monochrome/shades of grey color scheme), with Guake mapped to ctrl-~ and 9 workspaces arranged in a 3x3 grid.
Let's see it.
> Let's see it.
So I'm unreasonably excited by bittorrent, storage based on consistent hashing, and rsync (rolling checksums are just amazing).
Interestingly I hate distributed consensus with a passion because it always seems to achieve the opposite - causing more complexity.
Claude or ChatGPT let me bash out my frustrations.
But, honestly, when I feel like that it's often best to get away from the computer entirely. Go for a walk, read a book, spend time with friends, do some old fashioned craft - whatever floats your boat.
visidata - https://www.visidata.org
just - https://github.com/casey/just
ripgrep - https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep
macports - https://www.macports.org
sloth - https://github.com/sveinbjornt/SlothI'll also give Excel a shout. It's brilliant. The learning curve is steep, but once you're there it's a joy to use.
I rarely use it since I don't generally work with that kind of arbitrary data hands-on much, and I don't tend to use a lot of math outside of code, but whenever I do it's usually great
Transit.app was once quite simple and elegant, though, that's less true these days.
Jellyfin may be a little rough around the edges but it works well with almost no intervention on my part.
uBlock Origin, I can't even imagine the web without it.
Feeeed - completely customizable RSS reader with no data collection.
Widgy - Custom widgets on iOS. Not talking like "mmmm widget green now" I'm talking custom javascript in the widget, API calls, custom symbols, colors, transparency, sizing, whatever you need. The complexity of photoshop almost.
iSH: Alpine terminal emulator. Its surprising what you can do with it.
For desktop:
Tesseract: FOSS OCR(optical character recognition). Can convert text on images to actual encoded text.
OpenRGB: FOSS interaction with a diverse set of RGB devices
MultiMC: Minecraft Java edition custom launcher
I know it's still going in a more modern capacity on myth-weavers.com and other sites, but I miss the mail version, chore that it was.
- z (https://github.com/rupa/z)
- fzf
- vim
- Fastmail
- WireGuard
- draw.io
- PowerShell (it’s difficult to overstate how much PS has improved Windows system administration)
- Microsoft PowerToys
- WSL (alternating joy and extreme frustration)
- Home Assistant
- Airfoil
Web based: The Pirate Bay, Wikipedia, Nebula, phpBB, Internet Archive.
Android: Google Maps, Musician (tuner & metronome app), Hacker's Keyboard.
Probably left a lot of good ones out.
Uses i3 on X11, sway on Wayland.
No more fiddling with config files to make basics like system settings actually work under i3.
That said, these days I’m making custom scripts in Python and I love Click for CLI. I love solving problems with scripting.
Everything else is just a struggle to get something done and go home.
in seriousness though this is a great question and i look forward to the answers. i could not think of one.
More often than not the notification came through before the receipt had even printed.
MS Paint
https://www.mobygames.com/game/1975/monty-pythons-complete-w...
Historically: BeOS, WebOS from Palm, and any BBS software ever. The joy of hearing people call in never faded, even as the world moved on.
I wish it was ported to Mac.
Recent GIMP versions, Realthunder's fork of FreeCad, PrusaSlicer, neofetch, Ardour, SculptGL, Vorta/Borg, Git Cola
It handles pretty much everything about development. I can have my terminal in the bottom, any problems detected in the current file on the right. It's a perfectly good Git merging tool too.
The debugger is very easy to use, and it's got a ton of extensions that are easy to manage. It's even got settings sync in the cloud to keep track of it.
Prologue [0] - iOS Audiobook player, used Plex as a media source
Overcast [1] - iOS Podcast player
CleanShotX [2] - macOS screenshot/video/gif capture with annotation
Drafts [3] - iOS/macOS note taking tool
Paprika [4] - Cross platform recipe app
YNAB [5] - "You Need A Budget" - web/mobile budgeting app
1Password [6] - Cross platform password manager
Carrot Weather [7] - iOS weather app
Color Slurp [8] - macOS color picker tool
Phoenix [9] - macOS scriptable window manager
Alfred [10] - macOS app launcher
Bartender [11] - macOS menu bar organizer
Coderunner [12] - macOS tool to run snippets of code in a number of supported languages. Great for testing something quickly
DaisyDisk [13] - macOS disk space analyzer
iTerm 2 [14] - Rock solid macOS terminal
JetBrains IDEs [15] - Cross platform suite of IDEs
Rocket [16] - macOS emoji quick substitution tool
Transmit [17] - macOS SFTP/FTP/S3/etc tool
VLC [18] - Cross platform video player
CarbonCopyCloner [19] - macOS disk cloning/backup tool
Pixelmator Pro [20] - macOS photo editor
Preview [21] - Built-in macOS image/pdf viewer
QuickLook [22] - Built-in macOS file preview tool
[4] https://www.paprikaapp.com/
[5] https://www.youneedabudget.com/
[7] https://www.meetcarrot.com/weather/
[9] https://github.com/kasper/phoenix
[10] https://www.alfredapp.com/
[11] https://www.macbartender.com/
[12] https://coderunnerapp.com/
[13] https://daisydiskapp.com/
[14] https://iterm2.com/
[15] https://www.jetbrains.com/
[16] https://matthewpalmer.net/rocket/
[17] https://panic.com/transmit/
[18] https://www.videolan.org/vlc/
[19] https://bombich.com/
[20] https://www.pixelmator.com/pro/
Great list. I second these recommendations!!
Special mentions for: Alfred, Bartender, Daisy Disk and ColorSlurp
If you don’t have vertical monitors then yes, rectangle/magnet are awesome.
Dunno how people edit code without vim.
1. Linux
2. Emacs (with org-mode, org-roam, and other plugins)
3. Nushell
Ada (is programming language a software?) is my most recent discovery and I haven't experienced such pure joy of working with a programming language in, like, 10 years.
- arc
- shots (camera app for ios)
BBEdit
SimCity 2000
Old issues of Wired (pre-9/11, let's say)
the fish shell.
atuin.
Linux with Sway window manager.
youtube-tui (allows local management of YouTube saves and playlists, written in the frankly lovely ratatui framework)
Iotas (nextcloud enabled notes software)
MobaXTerm: https://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/ this one is a bit more Windows centric but I ended up paying for it and replaced mRemoteNg and PuTTY with it, it's even better than Remmina or whatever Linux has to offer - you can manage SSH/RDP/VNC/... sessions, input across multiple sessions side by side and it just simplifies things a lot (jump host support, a port forwarding too and so much more).
GitKraken: https://www.gitkraken.com/ also a piece of software that I paid for, this one actually makes using Git pleasant, feels better to use than SourceTree and Git Cola (even though that latter is wonderfully lightweight, too) and honestly I prefer that to the CLI nowadays.
Most modern text editors and IDEs: I personally pay for JetBrains IDEs but also like Visual Studio Code as a text editor and both have helped me immensely, they're reasonably performant when you have the RAM, look nice, often give you suggestions about how to improve your code and also have a plethora of plugins in their ecosystems. Nowadays I unapologetically use LLMs as well and overall it feels like I have these great tools and cool autocomplete (that is sometimes a bit silly and wrong) at my disposal, that makes me happy.
Kdenlive: https://kdenlive.org/ imagine if there was a successor to Windows Movie Maker, though something that gets most of the important stuff out of Sony Vegas, except is also completely free and works on most platforms. Kdenlive is all of that and also somehow quite pleasant to use, I actually prefer it to DaVinci resolve. There is a bit of a learning curve to any piece of software like this, but everything mostly makes sense in this one.
Linux Mint with Cinnamon: https://www.linuxmint.com/ as far as desktop OSes go it's familiar (Ubuntu without snaps by default), whereas the UI feels both snappy, doesn't use too much resources and is actually pretty to look at.
Gitea: https://about.gitea.com/ I still use this for my personal Git repositories and integrating with CI systems and it's lightweight, looks good and just feels pleasant to use. Previously I self-hosted GitLab and constantly ran into resource exhaustion as well as doubts about the next update is going to corrupt all of my data and break (it did), so now I use Gitea instead.
Drone CI: https://www.drone.io/ a container native CI solution that I can also self host. It's container oriented, integrates with Gitea nicely, is similarly nice to GitLab CI and doesn't cause me headaches like Jenkins would.
Docker: https://www.docker.com/ yes, even Docker desktop. It just makes working with containers really pleasant and predictable, even when something like Podman also exists (and also is great). I don't know, I feel like Docker really saved me from having brittle legacy environments, even self-contained containers with health checks and resource limits with still the same brittle code inside of those make me feel way more safe.
chatgpt
copilot