Ask HN: What are your essential tools you wish you had discovered sooner?

9 points·tlrobinson··7 comments

Someone recently suggested I try iTerm2, after I tried and dismissed earlier versions years ago, and now I'm wondering what else I'm missing out on.

By tools I mean anything, even physical tools, not just software, and not just for software development.

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I finally bought a mitre saw [0], and it makes me want to build things. I built a set of rolling carts for my kid to store books and toys in, and I made him a swing last week. I think the next project will be a kid-sized picnic table.

Those are small projects, but they're getting me back into the habit of building simple but useful things. I think next summer I might build a little dory [1] with my son.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/Hitachi-C10FCE2-10-Inch-Compound-Miter...

[1] http://www.spirainternational.com/tipsandtricks/tipsandtrick...

Unite[0] and Vimfiler[1] for Vim. Before, searching with ag[2] required using the command line, now I can do it directly from Vim. Also, opening NERDTree took seconds, vimfiler opens in less than a second.

[0] https://github.com/Shougo/unite.vim [1] https://github.com/Shougo/vimfiler.vim [2] https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher

CodeRunner[0]. It might seem like it does not actually do all that much but it's a pretty big time saver for me.

[0] http://krillapps.com/coderunner/

Sketch, Framer.js

Paper (iOs app)

The Silver Searcher

ievms

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