Ask HN: What's the Most Underrated Tool in Your Developer Toolkit? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's the Most Underrated Tool in Your Developer Toolkit?

1 pointalexliu5184 comments

Hello HN community!

As developers, we often rely on well-known tools and technologies to get our jobs done. However, there are always those lesser-known, under-the-radar tools that can be surprisingly effective. Today, I'm curious to learn about the hidden gems in your toolkit.

1. What is one tool or resource you use that isn't very popular, but has significantly improved your productivity or workflow? 2. How did you discover it and why do you think it hasn’t caught on more widely?

Whether it's a code library, a productivity app, or a hardware device, I'm excited to see what underrated tools you all are using. Let's share our best-kept secrets and perhaps we can all discover something new to add to our arsenals!

PowerToys.

The screenshotting, color picker, image resizer, keyboard remapper, image to text transcription, and window tiling manager are superb. Tons of other stuff, but those are what I use most.

Probably underrated because it is called "Microsoft" PowerToys, and some people have an aversion to them. But it's seriously great.

Greate tool, I use this too.

For me it’s actually something I built myself, though it will never ever be used by anyone but me probably lol.

I build a lot of chrome extensions, and they don’t have a nice dev experience by default. So I use the Vite build tools to introduce a live reload-like functionality while I’m building extensions.

It’s much faster than the default experience, but the setup is too complex for most.

It requires installing an npm script, running it (which runs a web socket), running a Vite build step In watch mode, setting up your folder in a specific manner, installing my extension, and then passing a web socket port number and extension ID to my extension.

Doing all this give make the extension you are developing instant reloads while you code it up in whatever framework you are using (typescript, react, svelte, whatever …)

But it also breaks randomly lol

Although it is a bit tedious, it is also very valuable if it can solve practical problems. I think if you encounter some problems and solve them, you can share your experience. I believe there must be people who have encountered the same problem as you.

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