Ask HN: Little things/tools that improved your work or life lately? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Little things/tools that improved your work or life lately?

75 pointsrokhayakebe139 comments

I found that sometimes the little tiny changes have the biggest improvement in your work or life. For example yesterday I installed "Tab Mix" which forces FF to open external links in a new tab and take you there. +3 for me.

What tiny tools, hacks, changes do you know off that improved your work or life significantly?

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Every time I learn something about Emacs or incorporate someone's nifty elisp code, it pays off and keeps paying.

Latest:

  ; CSS color values colored by themselves
  ; http://xahlee.org/emacs/emacs_html.html
  
  (defvar hexcolour-keywords
    '(("#[abcdef[:digit:]]\\{6\\}"
       (0 (put-text-property
           (match-beginning 0)
           (match-end 0)
           'face (list :background 
                       (match-string-no-properties 0)))))))
  
  (defun hexcolour-add-to-font-lock ()
    (font-lock-add-keywords nil hexcolour-keywords))
  
  (add-hook 'css-mode-hook 'hexcolour-add-to-font-lock)

Clever idea! Now I want to hear about some of your other favorites.

Thank you. [re:Favorites] The best I can do for now: http://github.com/ki/my-dot-emacs/blob/master/dot-emacs.txt

.txt?

Just a name :) It is ~/.emacs in my machine.

http://github.com/ki/my-dot-emacs/raw/master/dot-emacs.txt

You might prefer to manage your dotfiles with something like:

http://github.com/jrockway/dotfiles/tree/master/bin

Cool. Thanks!

Until you pick one that has the background colour by accident!

Be weird to see that floating semicolon in there.

The #rrggbb text is still displayed with normal text color. So it will never look like a floating semicolon. Try it. It is not even a problem when #rrggbb color is same as the foreground, as I have (global-hl-line-mode 1)

1. Setting all the Step-Over and Step-Into shortcut keys to be the same in eclipse, Xcode as well as the Visual Studios

2. Going through my life-todo list and just getting rid of a lot of stuff that I am not going to ever do

3. Deciding that instead of the vague 3-4 foreign languages I wanted to learn in my life, I will just pick one and stick with it

4. Generally cleaning out the past - getting rid of peoples numbers I will never call, throwing away all old bank statements etc

5. Having a series of pictures of the concepts and figures that motivate me directly above my desk. In case you are curious they are all from movies (I have Mr. Glass, the Lina Leandersson Eli, Wei Tang as Wong Chia Chi, Omar Little, Alfie)

6. Using TheLastRipper with Winamp to play my songs, such that I discover new songs, but get to save those I like

7. Using XMarks

8. Synchronising my work across both of my computers (laptop, desktop) using Dropbox

9. Being sure to read every single night before I go to bed

Having someone else do my laundry for about a dollar a pound. No more buying detergent, waiting around, having to find change if you don't have your own washer/dryer, loading/unloading, folding, etc.

I wish this kind of service was available in the UK. It doesn't seem to be a popular thing to offer, at least not in my town.

Service wash at a laundrette. They're still reasonably commonplace I think.

If you check your local newspaper you'll find people offering ironing services, you should try ringing them up and asking if they'll do laundry as well, then you get your laundry washed and ironed.

Also you have an incentive to wear lighter, sexier clothes.

Laundry: big time saver. I only use it occasionally (it's $/# where I go), because it seems extravagant to pay another human to handle my underwear all the time, but when I've run out of time it's great.

There were two in my local area, one laundry stopped offering the service. I assume the labor was too much to support the service, vs all other costs for that particular business. I expect this service to gradually disappear.

Windows desktop: I like http://virtuawin.sourceforge.net/ , provides multiple desktops. It's the only one I've tried that I didn't eventually uninstall in disgust.

Even better is employing a cleaner. 3 hours a week makes a huge difference for me. Even if you were only earning the same after tax as what you pay the cleaner it's worth it. I'd much rather work than clean.

Exercise. Seriously, it keeps you healthy, gives time to think (away from a computer) and keeps your mind fresh.

And sleep! I am focusing on sleeping more this year. It does wonders for my productivity.

Yes! Naps help me greatly and since I work from home, I consider them a luxury.

I recently started running, it's awesome!

Running is rubbish, slow and boring, and you never get anywhere exciting. Try cycling, you can actually go places, have a great time, and see a lot of the world around you.

Running if for people to cheap to buy a bike:)

I have two bikes. But I still prefer running everyday, keeping cycling more of a holiday activity.

I agree, although the way you make your argument makes you sound like a fanboi.

The advantage of cycling is that you get tired/bored when you are 30 miles away from your house. When I run, I get bored after a block, and can just walk home :)

"I believe that Running is rubbish, slow and boring, and you never get anywhere exciting". FTFY.

Have you ever run in a natural park or a mountain?

I agree. I've been a regular runner for a few years now and its a great way to relax, let off some steam, and get into great shape. Also depending on where you live there's usually a tight-nit community of runners so you can make some great friends.

I've recently moved from running only to running and lifting weights at the local gym — the gym is even a short run from home.

It's been a great way to meet new people too.

Same here. Helps keep my mind and my mood healthier and I can get more done.

Important point: it doesn't have to be vigorous, nor a big production.

A daily 5 minute half-brisk walk gives a disproportionate share of the benefits.

Screen: started using it because of this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=848821

Now I really cannot imagine working without it. The ability to detach and re-attach to named sessions is fan-tas-tic. Add the ability to run multiple named processes within each session and it makes working on multiple tasks during the day really pleasant. You can switch tasks and simply drop right back to the exact point you were working on whenever you continue.

In gVim

au WinLeave * set nocursorline nocursorcolumn

au WinEnter * set cursorline cursorcolumn

Everything http://www.voidtools.com/ for searching files fast in Windows ( it makes use of the USN journal so doesn't need reindexing)

Reinteract http://www.reinteract.org/trac/ for hacking Python code. It can re-evaluate from where you made changes, so it doesn't run the whole program, just from where you changed something, I wish I could do something like this with IPython.

Xrefresh XRefresh can refresh browser as you modify source files http://code.google.com/p/xrefresh/

SharpKeys for remapping caps-lock to esc. http://www.randyrants.com/sharpkeys/

oh and do watch these in succession to feel better.

http://www.ted.com/talks/garrett_lisi_on_his_theory_of_every...

http://www.ted.com/talks/john_lloyd_inventories_the_invisibl...

http://www.whatthebleep.com/

Keeping a notepad by me at all times (I use a pencil sketch pad). Great for jotting down ideas, scratch area, doodle, design, plan. End of day, I quickly write down what I want to get done the next day. Productivity++

I use graph paper, I can't concentrate without something to write on.

QuickSilver (http://www.blacktree.com/) -- Lets you do just about anything by just typing it on a Mac. For example, to email a document to a friend, I start typing the name of the document. It shows up, so I hit tab and type "email", hit tab, and type my friend's name and hit enter. That composes an email with the attachment and all I have to do is hit send.

Launchy on a PC is great, I miss Enso, it had more of the power of QuickSilver but its not very stable any more

I also use Quicksilver pretty extensively. It drives me nuts whenever I work on another person's Mac, hit cmd-space and spotlight pops up.

Growl is also a pretty cool thing to have if you're on a Mac.

Eproject (for emacs). Basically, lets me do things like "find file in current project" or "switch to buffer in current project".

http://github.com/jrockway/eproject/

Projects are found automatically by searching parent directories for _darcs or .hg. (This requires some additional configuration to make it work with anything.el, email me if interested, can't post since I'm not at my home computer right now.)

You should add any insight to the eproject wiki:

http://wiki.github.com/jrockway/eproject

Glad you enjoy using it :)

Done.

Water...all I can say is water....

While I knew that drinking more than 1-2 glasses of water is good, I never thought that the impact of drinking 1-2 liters of water a day could have such an significant impact on my ability to concentrate and focus on programming.

My suggestion: drink at least 1-2 liters of water without bubbles (or gas) and try to work on a mentally challenging task. And if you are stuck, drink half a liter more.

Is there any particular reason you say without bubbles/gas? I'm a big fan of Pellegrino but I can easily switch to water with a slice of lemon if it is beneficial.

The bubbly stuff is supposedly bad for your teeth if you drink too much of it.

Googled a bit and found this collection of links to articles about possible effects: http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=1006

I feel that while bubbles "refresh" me more, when i drink 2 liters of bubble water i start to feel uncomfortable. can't tell you exactly why, just a personal feeling

Something I discovered: drinking a big glass of water right before bed, I sleep better and wake up without a sore throat or muscle soreness.

I do this mainly to keep me from sitting in one spot for too long - and getting sore wrists, back, etc. Drinking green tea and water for me forces me to go to the bathroom at regular intervals.

Look at me! My pee has no color!

(credit Lewis Black)

Setup git bash completion + put the branch name in your PS1 (previously mentioned on HN).

http://www.simplicidade.org/notes/archives/2008/02/git_bash_...

I knew if I read this whole thread I'd pick up something cool. (Just did both of those things, and they rock.)

If you're on OSX, this one will work for you. http://blog.ericgoodwin.com/2008/4/10/auto-completion-with-g...

Recently I've been having to do a lot of editing inside a Firefox text widget in order to update some Wiki documentation. The stupid mediawiki editor rebinds a lot of my emacs keys, which makes it really hard to for me to edit. I found this great firefox plugin called "It's all Text" that puts a little edit button at the bottom of every multi-line text input field in your browser. This button can be configured to shell out to Aquaemacs so I can do extensive edits there, and when I save it updates the browser's edit box. It's really made wiki editing a lot easier for me.

org-mode for Emacs (http://orgmode.org).

It's made a big difference to my life. I've finally got a reliable place to keep notes, a good way to schedule stuff, nice todo lists, a quick way of publishing stuff to HTML / PDF, all accessible (and customisable) in a highly efficient way from Emacs.

After years of using Emacs, I only just discovered that incremental search works within the ordinary find-file (C-x C-f) function. Try it: C-x C-f, then C-r, and search for a piece of a filename you opened in the recent past. Try C-M-r, and it works with regexes, too.

Is this Emacs 23-only? I don't get that behavior with 22.3.2.

Possibly. I didn't find this trick until recently, and I switched to Emacs 23 pretty much right after it came out.

I think you mean M-R to search previous input. This works for just about any interactive input.

No, I mean reverse incremental search. M-r doesn't show matches as you type (at least not with Emacs 23 and my setup), but C-r does.

iswitchb-mode is a cool little thing I recently discovered. I somehow enabled it accidentally, was puzzled for a moment until I realized what it was doing, and now I love it.

If you like iswitchb-mode, try out ido-mode (http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/InteractivelyDoThings). It's like iswitchb-mode, but it also works with C-x C-f. I assume it does more than that, but I haven't looked specifically for the differences. I don't think you should have both of them, though.

http://ditz.rubyforge.org/

A self-contained issue tracker. I switched from hand-hacked TODO lists to Ditz a few weeks ago, and haven't looked back. I'm able to organize my tasks as I would a codebase (components, releases, comments, et cetera). I saw an immediate and sustained increase in my productivity.

Its tight integration with git is a huge plus.

http://www.autohotkey.com/ This is a great tool. You can easily configure short cut keys to do every day stuff, which would need several steps.

(01) Pixel ruler has been with me for a couple of years http://www.mioplanet.com/products/pixelruler/index.htm

(02) Reverse image search, good if you sitting with a hardisk full of images and want to use some on your blog

http://tineye.com/search/1c6e572120c79bf875264447d3f08eb9fbe...

(03) Answering emails on odd days of the month. Opening my mail 3 days after payday.

Obviously they get a lot of love here, but I'll list them again:

Dropbox

I find I am majorly neglecting by USB thumb drive. And sharing files with random people is much easier now.

http://stereopsis.com/flux/

"it makes the color of your computer's display adapt to the time of day, warm at night and like sunlight during the day."

Is this just a neat toy, or does it really help you sleep, concentrate & prevent eye strain? Anyone else here use it? Does it use brightness values that you'd expect, or is it sometimes too bright when it ought to be dim, or vice-versa?

It takes a while to get used to, but once you do, it reduces eye strain a lot. Especially if you sometimes get too absorbed in work and forget that it's getting darker and it's probably time to turn the light on.

The brightness values are nowhere near extreme enough, and they're not adjustable beyond a few presets. The intent, which it does okay, is making your computer match the color tone of whatever your indoor lighting is, which makes the display more red than it makes it dark. But what you really want it to do is make the display dark enough that it won't keep you artificially awake late at night when the monitor is the only light source. On the Mac, the best tool I've found for that is Shades (http://www.charcoaldesign.co.uk/shades) which unfortunately doesn't have a timer. But binding to alt-space or whatever is pretty much just as good.

As a side note, the effect that monitors and other bright lights have on preventing sleep is the suppression of enzymes in the pineal gland that convert serotonin into melatonin about an hour before bedtime. There's a deletion mutation in the genes that code for one of these enzymes (ASMT) that's very common in autistics and relatives of autistics (which is a non-trivial subset of hackers/coders/geeks), so you might not be benefitting from the darkness anyway. You can solve the problem more directly and reliably by just taking melatonin supplements.

Thank you. I've installed Shades and it seems good so far. I'll try it tonight to see if I find real-world benefits to it.

Not to discredit shades, but I just tried it and it was giving me this annoying brightness flicker. I'd imagine it has something to do with my extra display, but without that display, what's the point? It's trivial to adjust the brightness on my MBP with the F1 and F2 keys.

I do end up adjusting the brightness of my displays as the night goes on, but I do it using a couple presets on my display.

I'm running Shades with two monitors without any problems. Did you have fl.ux running at the same time? If so, that'll mess it up.

Basically, it automatically adjusts the RGB elements of your display to be more subtle on your eyes depending on what time of day it is and lighting conditions in your room. It does a fair job at it. I highly recommend it.

I've been runnning it for about 3 months, and its great. Every once in a while I'll turn it off to work in Photoshop, and the brightness of the screen is jarring.

It fixed a problem I didn't know I had.

If your tasks don't require looking at a lot of images or color, nocturne for mac is another good tool.

* Exercise

* One day without computer (mediafast) (thinking time)

* iPhone/Simplenote/Things

* Snow Leopard/Quick Silver/Things/Dropbox

* Friends & Family

* Absence of scheduled TV (no cable or disc) Hulu instead

If you're a Linux user, try out tasque + gnome-do w/ tasque plugin + remember the milk screenlet. This is how I manage to sync all my GTD throughout my computers and laptop on the go.

Klok time management software. I like know how much time I'm spending on each project/task. This can be sync'd between machines using rsync but with a small catch. Hopefully they can get some real syncing features built in. And yes, I know it's a memory hog but I like the layout.

Oh and powerresizer for Windows, great tool to have if you have to manage window sizing on 1 screen.

Spamgourmet.com I've been using it for years to register and try out new services (online and offline) that require an email address. I'm surprised why it hasn't gained more traction.

Personally, I use mailinator.com for that kind of thing. At least, things that require an email address where I don't need the emails stored for longer than required to click the "activate account" link. It's beneficial because there is no signup, and you don't need to go to mailinator before giving the email address out.

I use nameofsite@mydomain.com. It lets you turn off an email address if you want and you can also track the source of spam.

I can see your way working well. I use nameofsite.X.myusername@spamgourmet.com where X is the number of emails you want to receive from the service. Also, I like that I can filter all @spamgourmet.com incoming mail in gmail for easy organization of my online accounts

Working with special-needs kids with soccer every Saturday.

So, do you consider kids "little things" or "tools"?

Such a utilitarian view of children.

No.

Actually, most of them are dealing with their Autism or Down syndrome.

That was an attempt at humor, given the title of this thread:

Ask HN: Little things/tools that improved your work or life lately?

Food processor and a multifunction rice cooker and steamer. No more burger king :)

Windows environment:

Ditto clipboard manager/history. This helps both in avoiding context changes (alt-tabbing back and forth, etc.) and in retrieving older items. Quite configurable.

Winsplit Revolution window size/position manager. Put windows where you want them with a single chord. Quickly get windows e.g. side by side, without having to mouse around.

ToDoList list/project management. Hierarchical lists with priorities and many other identifiers, as well as full text comments. Gets items and relationships down quickly and without a lot of kerfuffle.

Paper and pen environment:

Original notes in black ink or pencil. Post meeting / follow up notes (e.g. fleshing out what was originally noted more briefly) in blue ink. Items of particular concern in red ink or marked up with red ink. Occasional, judicious application of a highlight marker.

A digital camera to quickly capture or to provide a quick copy of items of particular interest, written, printed, or otherwise (great for capturing the state of a whiteboard).

I use PTHPasteboard on OS X (equivalent to Ditto). The principle is to be able to keep more than one item in your clipboard, you can retrieve older ones with a keyboard shortcut.

This should be implemented in every OS by default.

I should add that the ink colors I described work equally well as text colors in electronic documents.

In particular, I'll take/make notes in a layered, bulleted list / outline format. This lends itself to quickly noting items together with at least some structure, while avoiding the superfluous words needed to tie things together in a less structured format. Original notes in black. When I get some time to myself, I flesh things out in blue. Items of particular note in red.

It's very helpful to have shortcut keys for changing indent. There's no need to keep reaching for the mouse to execute those changes.

Not trying to take all of my school notes on my tablet. There's an extra layer of complexity/distraction that hurts my ability to learn.

De-consolidating my email accounts. Instead of using Gmail to access all of my accounts, I keep them each separate. It makes categorizing my emails much easier. Wonderful on my iPhone.

Totally unsexy, but a notebook that has gridlines instead of regular ruling and a pile of pens (some people really hate them, but I love Pilot G7 pens).

Having grids makes it really easy to flesh something out on paper, take notes, etc. and you are forced to pay attention to things in sequential order.

Fences - it's a Windows desktop tool that I installed about a week ago and it's made my desktop much better. Right now it is free - Nov 1, I think, it goes to pay but I don't know how much.

http://www.stardock.com/products/fences/

If you're writing software as DLLs, the venerable Depends.exe is critical:

http://www.dependencywalker.com/

If there was something that made debugging linking errors this easy, then C++ development would be a snap... kind of...

I bound Super to the Fn key on my Macbook in Emacs.

What method did you use to do that?

It turns out to be as simple as:

  (setq mac-function-modifier 'super)

I discovered this after spending an embarrassingly long time failing to figure out how to bind Capslock to Super instead. I thought that would be relatively straightforward given how often people talk about rebinding Capslock, but I couldn't figure out how to do it (from Emacs anyway).

Keeping short ToDo lists for every project (not necessarily software) that I do which contain only the next 5-8 things to do next. Writing down a little note along with the todo to help me restore state next time i work on the project.

I've started doing that also. I'm using 37signals Tada List which has a nice iPhone web app for managing lists on the go.

Things for Mac OS X and the iPhone.

I'd never really kept up with a to-do list before (I usually just used a piece of paper at my desk), but I'm able to do more things now because I want to get rid of the red reminder icon.

http://puttycm.free.fr/cms/ multiple putty sessions in one tabbed application.

Related, get cygwin ssh server running on your windows box (and set it up to disallow password login, only keys). If you use putty then you'll like being able to use putty for shell access to your own machine. You'll also like putty to your own machine as just another tab in putty connection manager above. Your option whether to allow connections from outside your machine.

Setting grub to prefer linux over windows on a dual boot machine. :)

It seemed more productive to smash my hands with a hammer than to Twitter. But I like the connections (and conversation) I'm making.

When I tried using it for news, I got bogged into the day to day hysteria.

I remapped my keyboard to avoid some common wrist-wrenching motions. I bound Shift-space to _ (underscore). I also changed the backslash/pipe key into a modifier key called Woot, then bound Woot-[ and Woot-] to ( and ) respectively, Woot-- (minus) to * (asterisk), Woot-0 to & (ampersand), Woot-; to | and Woot-/ to \. I also used Woot to add some greek letters like lambda, just for fun. It took a bit of getting used to but was well worth it.

1. Evernote, the best notetaking software I know of - it starts to serve me as an universal "external memory". The most undervalued software in 2009.

2. Live Mesh - something similar to dropbox, for syncing files between computers, while also provides online backup for up to 5GB of data

3. Executor - application launcher for Windows, combines best stuff from Launchy and AutoHotKey. You can quickly start app by starting to write it's name or by assigned hotkey.

I second Evernote :-) The free version is good enough but I felt it was worth shelling out the $45 for the premium upgrade.

Yes, the premium is much better, if nothing else, just being able to store any file type is worth that money, IMHO.

Have you taken a look at Wiznotes? This is specifically designed for students however professionals are also finding it useful. It is not just note taking software, it is a productivity tool to help students succeed in their exams.

Eli Cohen Mesoraware (Wiznotes is a division of Mesoraware) (This was posted here because it is relevant to this article)

rlwrap to fix the awful command line interface of sqlplus.

gqlplus is pretty good too.

I used to to use yasql as a sqlplus replacement, it was pretty basic but much better.

sql-oracle mode in emacs takes away a lot of the pain of using sql-plus (if you're an emacs-er)

I use sqlpython.

PowerPro (http://powerpro.webeddie.com/) and ClipX Clipboard Manager (http://bluemars.org/clipx/), hands down. I've even donated to the fella who developed ClipX. The regex-based automatic navigation feature in ClipX is worth the price of admission.

I'm now using a Kinesis Advantage keyboard, which is awesome in ways I didn't appreciate till I tried it; see more here: http://jseliger.com/2009/07/20/kinesis-advantage .

DevonThink Pro is a tremendously useful program that I didn't appreciate till I began organizing bits of my life around it.

Windows Key + D = minimize everything. Most of you probably know this, but for the few that do not... you are welcome.

On Windows 7: Windows+1, Windows+2 ... Windows+0, bring to the foreground any of the first the first ten items in your taskbar.

That might be useful. I just have a view desktop button I click.

Weird, I use Windows + M for the same thing.

Scheduling my day the night before in Google Calendar. And then when I don't meet the schedule, I alter it so that the schedule then becomes a journal.

It offers amazing perspective and turns vague concepts like when I got to sleep, and when I actually played video games into solid temporal events.

Signing up for a third-party hosted Subversion account. The prices are so low these days, there's no need to manage the SVN server on your own. I tend to use SVN more now that I don't have to worry about managing it.

The sharing features of Google Docs has also been a big time saver.

i'm on Win XP so:

1. PomoTime: One of the new things i'm into for productivity based on Pomodoro technique Although i don't follow it religiously, but i still get manage to get a lot more done than before.

2. Microsoft OneNote: i jot down almost everything and anything there before it slips my mind.

I am fan of lightweight apps:

3. VirtuaWin: lightweight multiple desktops

4. Q-dir: file mgr

5. Console: instead of cmd.exe

6. Locate32: i dont use content indexing stuff like Google desktop yet. I find them too heavy and also, i already have everything arranged in folders with relevant names. So searching by name is instant with this.

7. TeamViewer: a free app to share desktop. It found it a little bit easier/better/faster/lighter than VNC, DimDim.

8. Miranda: for twitter/irc/gtalk/yahoo

9. Most importantly, Executor: moved from launchy a while back.

I highly recommend

MinTTY for Cygwin instead of Console2 for cmd.exe Everything instead of Locate32.

I can't do multiple tabs inside one window. The mess on the taskbar really hurts my eyes :-)

Since you mentioned desktop searching, check out Everything (http://download.cnet.com/Everything/3000-2379_4-10890746.htm...)

Using Putty (Windows) or iTerm (OS X) in full screen. Or use Visor in OS X http://visor.binaryage.com/.

This allows distractions from other stuff to vanish for a while.

Also, I don't check the email as often ... productivity^2

Visor has helped me a bit. It drives one of my coworkers nuts whenever he tries to work with me on my computer, though. He keeps searching for the terminal window that has the Mongrel instance without knowing that it's in Visor.

I'll say 1Password and The Hit List (both OSX software). They are totally worth the money.

Seconding 1Password - a big game changer for me.

I've been using Wallet (http://www.acrylicapps.com/wallet/) on my Mac and iPhone instead of 1Password.

It might be a little less featured than 1Password, but it's also half the cost on the Mac and AU$1 cheaper on the iPhone.

vim: Recursively load all java files (i.e. in all subdirectories):

  :args **/*.java

Refactor a package name throughout the project ("e" suppresses the "No match" error message):

  :argdo %s/oldpackage/newpackage/e

Read HN a little less often - serious here. I am trying to read news (I feel like I am addict sometimes) a little less these days. Productivity gains are obvious and my time is sliced up less.

Started using backpack from 37signals and have found myself using it all the time - now a very important part of my workflow. Granted it has many downsides but for now its working great!

In Safari, Cmd-1, Cmd-2, etc. activate the first, second, etc. bookmarks in your toolbar. Great for things like readability. (e.g. Cmd-1 to make the current page readable.)

Wanderlust (Emacs Email client).

I use it with gmail imap interface. Completely changed the way I manage emails.

http://www.gohome.org/wl/

BOXING! I haven't gotten in the ring yet, but its an amazing workout on top of my usual regiment (granted, I'm an exercise junkie).

1. Switch from PHP to Ruby (on rails). 2. Switch from Windows to OS X. 3. Meditates.

Quicksilver on OS X.

I know it's far from obscure, but if you still haven't tried it, it's worth it.

PhraseExpress. It is a clipboard manager and text inserter (like Autotext).

Taking two days off per week, one for rest; one for self-development.

I call this weekend.

StrokeIt - mouse gestures in WinXP.

I've started using AutoHotKey recently, and it's a wonderful little tool to automate things.

Also, this great file search tool called Everything. Basically like locate on *nix, except it uses NTFS tables directly to search (it indexed the names of the ~600k files on my laptop in less than a minute, and searches through them instantly).

TextMate~

esc for function name autocomplete //todo: comments in the source appear when you hit ctrl-shift-t cmd-shift-t search by method name cmd-shift-f search for phrase within entire project ftp+ssh bundle

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