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Ask HN: Examples of reliable software you enjoy using

• sbecker 10y ago
  CircleCI (https://circleci.com/ https://circleci.com/) I add this to every new project. Best cloud-based continuous integration platform I've used so far. Sane intelligent defaults, many projects start building out of the box. You can easily link it to Slack (another piece of reliable software) and start getting continuous feedback that your project is working correctly / is getting deployed - as it is being built.
  • donatj 10y ago
    I've become a big fan of Drone CI. Open source, Docker powered, written in Go. Been using it for a couple years. The current .4.x branch has some kinks but it's technically still beta.
• fapjacks 10y ago
  My list will echo others out there: * Linux * vim * tmux * git * ssh * redis * docker * Sublime Text 3
• chubot 10y ago
  Python. To a lesser extent, vim and tmux. ssh/scp. I used to think bash was on that list... it seems relatively responsive and predictable. I use it all the time. But then I realized how often bash has weird issues -- like completion hanging, or inexplicable inability to complete (this could be due to the distro though). Or it just seems easy to get it in a bad state by hitting the wrong keys, or dumping a binary file to the terminal. And recently I have been looking through the bash source code, and it's a bit horrifying. The reliability is done by brute force of special cases over decades, not by good design. I like the semantics of the shell language, in that it lets me get things done fast. But I don't like the syntax or the implementation I happen to use. bash is pretty complete, but not well implemented.
  • analog31 10y ago
    The Python installation called WinPython has worked flawlessly for me, as have the Python environments on both x86 and ARM Linux. My own programs written in Python... not so lucky. ;-)
  • guitarbill 10y ago
    Agree with the list and bash. I switched to fish because of this and never looked back. Although tmux isn't perfect when there's a lot of scrolling output on account of it being a terminal multiplexer, the only decent replacement I've found is terminator, which is a terminal emulator. But I hate the terminator key bindings, and it doesn't have a option for screen/tmux style shortcuts.
    • akkartik 10y ago
      What's wrong with tmux scrollbar buffers?
      • guitarbill 10y ago
        Nothing. However because tmux is a terminal emulator running in a single terminal, the whole thing can freeze with loads of output if you don't rate limit [1]. My understanding (and experience) is that terminator emulates several terminals, so one pane freezing doesn't affect the others. I still prefer tmux, but I do find the different approaches interesting. [1] https://superuser.com/questions/417556/is-there-any-way-to-prevent-tmux-freezing-when-lots-of-text-is-output-to-the-ter https://superuser.com/questions/417556/is-there-any-way-to-p...
  • akkartik 10y ago
    zsh?
• dbarlett 10y ago
  SQLite
• PaulHoule 10y ago
  IntelliJ Idea is head and shoulders better than many other IDEs, particularly Eclipse in the reliability department.
  • gshx 10y ago
    Care to give some examples how? For me, Eclipse has remained very stable. Maybe we are using them for different languages and/or things.
    • turnip1979 10y ago
      When I used it for Java, I often would have to use the menu option to restart. Seriously .. a menu option to restart??? The stability wasn't as bad as the slowness. Also, OSGI seems to be a philosophy or cult. Things are just generally complex and bloated.
      • HillaryBriss 10y ago
        Android Studio, based closely on IntelliJ, has this menu item on the OSX version: File | Invalidate Caches / Restart ...
    • PaulHoule 10y ago
      I worked with Eclipse for a few years and found it was a constant source of stress, refusing to stay synchronized with maven, crashing, having to restart it, etc.
      • stillworks 10y ago
        TL;DR +1 for IntelliJ I was hating maven, until I started using IntelliJ. I don't remember ever Eclipse going to zero error count on a maven project whereas the project would just compile if maven was used outside of Eclipse. IntelliJ just works. FTW it has Eclipse key-mappings as well.
    • AnimalMuppet 10y ago
      IntelliJ lets you do a lot more from the keyboard. It's suggestions for code completion are very useful. It's amazing to see the code almost writing itself, several times faster than you can type!
• projectramo 10y ago
  Gmail Microsoft Excel Scrivener
• revicon 10y ago
  I live out of evernote most days. It could be better but it works for me.
  • theseatoms 10y ago
    Speaking of which, it looks like Evernote's free tier won't be supporting syncing for an arbitrary amount of devices for much longer.
• agentultra 10y ago
  awk, grep, sed, and these days I add jq to my standard tool belt. I also really enjoy fish as my shell language of choice. Languages, runtimes, etc come and go but these programs remain as useful as they were 19 years ago when I first learned about them.
  • thedudemabry 10y ago
    In our R&D Slack instance, it's amazing to see a program with great UX (Slack) enable engineers to post awk, grep, sed, jq, etc. one-liners to solve other engineers' questions. IRC has the same benefits, I'm sure, but Slack is the first command-line-style chat application to gain enough non-engineer mindshare to make it ubiquitous at any company I've worked for.
  • quantumhobbit 10y ago
    I used sed today to complete a "large story" in a single command. Felt like a badass. The email to the product owner was more work than the "coding".
    • mtrn 10y ago
      > I used sed today to complete a "large story" in a single command. Great, I sometimes do that, too. Downside is that your patience level for "enterprise architecture" goes way down.
  • lucb1e 10y ago
    jq sounds like something I was looking for a while ago. Just installed it (apt install jq), let's see if a situation presents itself to try it out soon.
  • AdrianRossouw 10y ago
    doing something with jq always makes me feel like i have super powers. it takes a while to learn how to tame it, but it's crazy powerful.
  • oxplot 10y ago
    Oh I can't remember the time before `jq`. It should be part of the standard linux toolset.
• ashwanidausodia 10y ago
  xmonad
  • steveeq1 10y ago
    Such great software. If you are a programmer and have a big monitor, this is a MUST
  • lowry 10y ago
    Thumbs up. 10 years ago, it was the only window manager properly supporting many monitors.
• rdoherty 10y ago
  haproxy and redis are the two that come to mind. Not necessarily because they make me happy, but they never seem to make me angry or sad. Which with most infrastructure software is rare.
  • Artemis2 10y ago
    Terraform is surprisingly painless for new-ish software.
    • toomuchtodo 10y ago
      I've had several occasions it took action in production that weren't in the plan when we applied. Terraform has not made it to my warm and fuzzy list yet.
  • lucb1e 10y ago
    > Not necessarily because they make me happy, but they never seem to make me angry or sad. I suppose those are the criteria to look for in a thread asking for "reliable software". Couldn't have worded it any better though!
• warpech 10y ago
  OneNote. Works for me so much better than Evernote. Excellent cross-platform sync
  • cromulent 10y ago
    I don't normally recommend MS stuff but I really like OneNote.
  • douche 10y ago
    The Chrome plugin is a little dodgy (Clip to OneNote) at times, but it's hard to blame it, with Google pushing updates every other day.
  • robobro 10y ago
    On that note -- emacs-org mode is a great FOSS note and organization tool.
  • Artemis2 10y ago
    OneNote on Mac is pretty slow, I find the editing features somewhat lacking.
    • softawre 10y ago
      what do you use instead?
      • Artemis2 10y ago
        Still OneNote, it's the one that sucks least. I'm contemplating moving to iCloud Notes though, the new formatting features are neat.
  • gameofdrones 10y ago
    OS X Notes are good enough for me and better than Evernote. Evernote insecurity and quirks were just one straw too many.
  • 3minus1 10y ago
• juped 10y ago
  FreeBSD.
• jeffthespasm 10y ago
  Great thread. Important to keep perspective. So far the responses seem desktop-centric, but I'm going to throw out a few web apps that I have a lot of respect for: - Instapaper - Trello - Google Inbox And, on the desktop side I have to give credit to Garageband and Logic, which I honestly can't recall having crashed or let me down in recent memory. YMMV.
  • thedudemabry 10y ago
    Agreed on all three recommendations. My use of Trello grows and shrinks over time as project management influence shrinks and grows, but it's a great product. Instapaper and Inbox are just amazing.
  • robobro 10y ago
    Inbox lags quite a bit on my desktop. It still needs some work...
  • daveloyall 10y ago
    What is Logic? I'm having trouble performing a websearch on that one...
    • erubin 10y ago
      Logic is music production software.
    • wezm 10y ago
      Logic is professional music production software from Apple: https://www.apple.com/logic-pro/ https://www.apple.com/logic-pro/
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• busterarm 10y ago
  OpenBSD, tmux, coreutils, QNX, postgres, Jasc Paint Shop Pro 6 (Yeah, the 16 year old one)
  • milcron 10y ago
    Seconding OpenBSD!
• VSpike 10y ago
  For me, probably dwm. I almost forget that I'm using it, but in a good way. It has merged with my muscle-memory and never, ever fails.
  • codepie 10y ago
    I recently tried some tiling window managers, but the problem with those was that none of them provided basic default configuration and you have to configure them from scratch. For example you have to add a plugin for small things such as a battery indicator. The custom themes were too much bloated for me. I ended up installing shellshape for gnome. Do you know any tiling window manager which solves this?
    • nanny 10y ago
      I'm fairly certain that i3 comes with a percentage battery indicator by default. The default config is pretty good (except it uses `jkl;` instead of `hjkl`, but that's a simple fix).
      • codepie 10y ago
        For some reasons i3 was showing wrong value for battery. It also had issues with the graphic drivers, showing black screen on logging in. So I didn't consider it as a viable option for me.
      • OJFord 10y ago
        I think that's part of a different package, i3-status or something, which is not strictly required but recommended in docs etc. Possibly it's also installed by default if you just choose 'i3', depending on your package manager.
        • nanny 10y ago
          You're right, turns out Arch's i3 package is a group of packagse: i3-wm, i3-status, and i3lock (screen locker).
    • 10y ago
• blahi 10y ago
  Gretl.
• robinhoodexe 10y ago
  - LaTeX - OS X & iOS - (GNU) coreutils (sed, cat, grep etc) - GNUplot - Mathematica Primary usecase for listed software is studying chemistry. I enjoy using DALTON (quantum chemistry software) and Dwarf Fortress, but neither is really that reliable (yet).
  • throwanem 10y ago
    Dwarf Fortress is extremely reliable! You can always rely on it to make you say "...what?"
• steveeq1 10y ago
  emacs
  • pzone 10y ago
    I'm a huge fan of emacs, but even though I use it constantly, I do not consider it exceptionally reliable. A modern experience really does rely on a huge number of powerful and excellent but sometimes glitchy packages. (helm, org, haskell-mode/python-mode/etc.) I also find it crash prone on Windows, which is not totally surprising given Emacs' ownership, but disappointing.
    • ams6110 10y ago
      I've had emacs go out to lunch on rare occasions, but I find it to be far more stable than Firefox or Chrome. I have had emacsserver sessions run for months without issue, and I do all my email as well as coding and org-mode task tracking in Emacs.
      • pzone 10y ago
        I use Spacemacs on Windows so I'm pushing Emacs a bit past its limits. ;) Actually I was going to compare Emacs stability to Chrome stability. Though for me Emacs gets terminal segfaults more often, Chrome has more random failures that require restarting.
• bberrry 10y ago
  Notepad++
  • projectramo 10y ago
    My first thought was, hey how come you didn't pick Sublime? And my next thought was, you know what, you're right.
  • Yhippa 10y ago
    I want to say I've been using this for over 15 years now? With all the text editors out there this one is my favorite use out of the box.
  • textread 10y ago
    How good is the Notepad++ source code?
  • quantumhobbit 10y ago
    I'm a big sublime text fan but notepad++ just works in a way that makes me never hesitate to recommend it to people of all skill levels. It is like nano for the gui.
• turnip1979 10y ago
  vi, python 2.7, virtualenv/pip unless I need to install MySql.
• cel1ne 10y ago
  Postgresql. Such a marvel of reliability and good design. All features just logically and consistently work with each other.
  • lowry 10y ago
    It's so oraclish an ingresish in the way it treats the command line monkeys...
    • throwanem 10y ago
      There's a reason for that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Stonebraker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Stonebraker
      • ThatGeoGuy 10y ago
        This is actually the first time I've seen POSTGRES referred to as named for being post-Ingres. This wiki page is full of quite interesting tidbits of history on DB research, thanks.
        • atdt 10y ago
          Great interview with Stonebraker from 2013: http://www.se-radio.net/2013/12/episode-199-michael-stonebraker/ http://www.se-radio.net/2013/12/episode-199-michael-stonebra...
    • cel1ne 10y ago
      What do you mean?
  • numlocked 10y ago
    Agree with this. I will regularly write queries plugging together all sorts of odd features in odd ways and it'll just run, run fast, and give me the results I want. Totally amazing.
    • 10y ago
• ammobear 10y ago
  Spotify. Very rarely do I run into performance issues or bugs on any platform.
  • LMAlVvQjSGj 10y ago
    Spotify has been nearly unusable for me ever since Spotify moved to Chromium Embedded. Something is wrong when I have to wait several seconds so scroll further down a list of song names.
  • truncate 10y ago
    I once random lost my complete library. Above that, there was no way to get it back. Spotify people however did recover my playlist. I do use Linux client though, which is not officially supported.
  • dan1234 10y ago
    I got so sick of Spotify randomly taking up 100% of a core that I switched to Apple Music. Yes, I actually found iTunes to be more stable…
  • Khao 10y ago
    I often hear my friends talking shit about the spotify desktop app and web app not working properly. I don't use spotify but it seems like something's not working at least every month or two.
  • cschmidt 10y ago
    I have to quit the Mac app a few times a week, when it just decides it isn't going to play songs.
• facorreia 10y ago
  git
• hack_edu 10y ago
  ffmpeg and libav
  • Khao 10y ago
    I just started playing around with ffmpeg for a side project of mine. I'm sad because it's C++ (and I didn't write enough C++ in my life to be any good in it) and I was looking around for a good C# wrapper exposing a media player that I can simply use in a desktop app, but everything I found was extremely buggy and laggy. I'm currently trying to make an exact copy of ffplay.exe (since the source code is available) in C# using an tiny SDL2-C# wrapper and a tiny ffmpeg-C# wrapper, instead of finding a library that does everything. I'm glad to hear that ffmpeg is reliable and solid, I hope I can make it work in C#! (I'll probably put everything up on github if it works)
  • pzone 10y ago
    Absolutely ffmpeg. I guess it's not "stable" in the sense that the fast pace of development sometimes leads to changes in best practices, but damn is it excellent to use.
  • justinlardinois 10y ago
    Disagree on ffmpeg. It certainly gives you a great degree of control, which is great if you know a lot about video formats and codecs and such, but as a casual user my first step for ffmpeg is always googling "ffmpeg convert X to Y" and copy and pasting from Stack Overflow.
• azazo 10y ago
  Trello Tweetbot Buffer Overcast Pocket Spotify
• pspeter3 10y ago
  Bazel has increased reliability, stability, and speed for all of builds/tests at Asana. We no longer need to clean because of incorrect caches.
• mrgreenfur 10y ago
  Omnigraffle is the software that originally convinced me to switch from windows to mac. I love it so much. Great features, simple UI that doesn't fiddle too much version to version and it basically never crashes on me.
  • xutopia 10y ago
    I bought Omnigraffle a few versions back but when it was time to upgrade I just couldn't afford it. I would upgrade every year for 25$ if they had it at that price point.
  • j2bax 10y ago
    Omniplan is indispensable for me as a project manager. I just wish there was something online as easy/fast to use with support for multiple project managers/projects.
    • brightball 10y ago
      Nice to see somebody else that uses it. I use it for all of my personal organization.
    • blahi 10y ago
      Smartsheet. Or MS Portfolio Manager has a SaaS version as well.
  • gameofdrones 10y ago
    For those Window people, Omnigraffle is basically why there is no Visio for Mac.
  • cturner 10y ago
    Omnigraffle annoyance: it can't load from and save to graphviz dot notation (or even a subset of it). All of the functionality is in the software, but not exposed to the user, and I assume it's a conscious decision by them to lock you into their file format. I evaluate each few years, find the same thing, and then move on. (Would love to be corrected)
• albasha 10y ago
  pip
  • Semiapies 10y ago
    Yup. Maybe I need to learn how to use npm better, but I constantly find myself wishing it were more like pip.
• sirbranedamuj 10y ago
  I recently discovered a new game recording software called "Loilo Game Recorder". It skimps on features, but it records games with really good quality and, so far, without any noticeable performance loss. Does exactly what it sets out to do.
• vblord 10y ago
  Beyond Compare. An amazing/cheap file comparison tool. - http://www.scootersoftware.com http://www.scootersoftware.com
  • steego 10y ago
    What's particularly great about this comparison tool is how fast and efficient is can asynchronously compare and synchronize large sets of remote files whether it be SMB, FTP, SSH/SFTP. You can also compare archives to folders and the custom viewers for comparing things like images are a nice bonus.
  • thedudemabry 10y ago
    I had forgotten about this tool, and having worked mostly on Apple hardware for the last 5 years didn't realize they had a macOS version. But when I used it on Windows, it was phenomenal.
    • JiNCMG 10y ago
      It's SFTP support in the late 90's was perfect. I had to add this to wine so I can continue to use it on Linux and OS X.
      • Melkor765 10y ago
        There's a Native Linux version!
  • vmorgulis 10y ago
    It's a very good tool. Meld is the equivalent under Linux.
    • therealmarv 10y ago
      Meld is not even close to BeyondCompare. I would also say kdiff3 is better when looking at all my Python merge conflicts in the past. Nevertheless BeyondCompare is on another level when looking at extensibility.
• hanoz 10y ago
  LINQPad. Don't know how I'd get by without this for ad hoc / exploratory .NET work. Love it.
• d0lph 10y ago
  Sublime Text Files auto save, so a crash, or even accidental close will not cause you to lose anything. Also handles massive files, which is nice. On top of being a nice, very configurable code editor,
  • billconan 10y ago
    I like sublime text too. but the most recent update seems to have an issue. sometimes when opening a file on linux, I won't see any content rendered unless I resize the sublime text window.
    • zeta0134 10y ago
      I have that issue with some other apps as well. It's particularly noticeable for me with Terminal windows, which will lose their contents if I drag them to another monitor. I'm not entirely sure that's Sublime Text, I think it might be something between the window manager and the GPU drivers.
    • Epskampie 10y ago
      Same problem here, I had to switch back to the previous version because of it. Using ubuntu Gnome 16.04.
  • ianamartin 10y ago
    Second vote for this. This is hands-down the best and most reliable piece of software I've encountered. It's insanely flexible (hello, org mode!), and it is pretty much where I live at work. Almost never fails me. And if a job changes or a work policy changes and I have to switch from Windows to Mac to Linux or whatever, it makes no difference. I clone a repo with my settings and packages, and I'm pretty much done. Maybe change the path to my repls or node, but for the most part, I can be up and running on a new machine and ready to dev in a few minutes. Absolutely love this, and never have stability problems.
  • dj_doh 10y ago
    +1 for Sublime Text. It's one of those things that just works smoothly.
• thenomad 10y ago
  I'm absolutely amazed I haven't seen Photoshop on the list yet. Incredibly powerful, very reliable, thoroughly worth the pricetag - and I don't love subscription software. It's generally a joy to use. And I can't think of another piece of powerful visual creation software that is.
  • huhtenberg 10y ago
    Photoshop is incredibly glitchy, at least its Windows version is. It manages to crash even while initializing.
    • throwanem 10y ago
      Which version? I've been using CS3 for years and it's rock solid.
    • thenomad 10y ago
      I'm on Windows and I honestly can't recall the last time I saw a PS crash - and I've used it more or less daily for the last half-decade or so.
    • simbalion 10y ago
      CS5 never crashes for me... That said, The price tag is obscene. Large price tags for specialty business software is fine when the publisher is an indy developer with a small demographic. Photoshop does not qualify. I understand they will charge whatever the market will pay, but that doesn't make it right or "not evil". It's 2016 and I think we should really grow up as a species. Competing so ferociously with your fellow man that you make all the money and they end up dead should not really be socially tolerable.
      • jpindar 10y ago
        Corel PaintShop Pro is a professional quality program that's almost as almost as full featured for a fraction of the price. I create content for virtual worlds and once I moved past the beginner's stage of using free programs (of which I believe Paint.Net is the best) I bought PSP and found it has everything I need.
• falcolas 10y ago
  From the desktop, most of my development toolkit: bash, vim, git, etc. On the server side of things: nginx, haproxy, redis, memcached, cron, logrotate, Linux And controversially (probably since I've learned their quirks): MySQL, Nagios. They all just... work. I use these tools to set up a server, and after configured, the VM usually goes down before they do. On the flip side of things, tools I have to use and highly resent their lack of reliability: collectd, Docker, Safari/IE/Firefox/Chrome, OSX.
  • donatj 10y ago
    I'd say give MariaDB a try. It does everything MySQL does, fully compatibly without the guilt of supporting Oracle.
    • falcolas 10y ago
      Using MySQL does not support Oracle, unless you buy their support packages. If anything, it's a cost center to them. That said, I do prefer the PerconaDB packages myself, but that's because they are a pure superset of the core MySQL, and improvements to MySQL are improvements to PerconaDB.
• ArkyBeagle 10y ago
  Tcl. Everything about it is reference-grade.
  • gglitch 10y ago
    Can you say more about this? Is there any particular problem space you like it for?
    • ArkyBeagle 10y ago
      Yeah; mainly for: 1) Testing embedded things over comms links. 2) Modelling/simulation, particularly discrete-time simulation. 3) Anything where the ability to generate permutations is important. 3a) At times, generating big tables in other languages like 'C' based on permutations, lists or other data. 4) Operating Excel/Word through OLE. The thing that Python does not have is 1) packaging ( at least not as well ) and 2) sockets and other comms objects are first-class objects in Tcl. It's a bit old (it has a 1990s aroma ) for web-based things, although there are web servers in Tcl, most famously AOL's. It's a fantastic duct-tape language.
• chucknibbleston 10y ago
  #1 - Nginx #2 - Redis #3 - Postgres
• greydius 10y ago
  TexMaker. Does its thing very well.
• patrickmay 10y ago
  Scrivener (http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php). It's a fantastic tool that gets out of your way while writing but still gives you the ability to operate on larger units from paragraphs to chapters, plus keep track of all of your research materials.
• cdeshpande 10y ago
  JVM
• ruler88 10y ago
  FB's messenger - everyone should be using this instead of SMS
  • bluepill 10y ago
    LOL.
  • douche 10y ago
    I liked having my phone battery last more than an hour on a full charge, so I will never install that POS again.
    • kiwijamo 10y ago
      I have the Facebook messenger app on my iPhone and it works pretty well. I still get a full day out of the battery.
  • Draiken 10y ago
    It's closed. I will never vouch for a messaging app that is not open. Long live IRC. Look at slack... it's IRC with some design in the front, and suddenly everyone loves it! Somehow it's even worth billions! Irony aside... I miss the good old days of IRC chatting with bots, privileges (please mod me!) and even file sharing :D
    • Aoyagi 10y ago
      IRC client is one of the first foreground programs that start up as soon as the OS boots. There's no shortage for people using IRC :P
  • justinlardinois 10y ago
    At least you didn't say iMessage?
• serguzest 10y ago
  Notepad++
  • arkitaip 10y ago
    Most definitely. My favorite feature in the auto save feature for unsaved files. So even if you close down notepad++ or it crashes (never actually happens) all you stuff is where you left it.
    • simbalion 10y ago
      it crashed once for me and the auto save didn't work, however there was a cached version in another folder so I was able to recover my work.
• cromulent 10y ago
  Reliability? TCP-IP ;) Homebrew. Rsync. SSH.
• bberrry 10y ago
  SQLite
  • joshuata 10y ago
    I've gotten to the point that sqlite is my immediate answer to any Ask HN about useful tools or good source code. I'm to the point of slight obsession...
• ibudiallo 10y ago
  I feel that sometimes bad is synonymous to "hard to use". A lot of software is hard to use with a bunch of unfriendly settings. But the more time I spend trying to figure out, the better I get. One example is Git. I used to use SVN with a GUI and it was a breeze. When work required me to use git, I hated it. But after a while of using it, I stopped doing the 'how do I do svn feature X with git' now I understand it, and even recommend it to people. I'm mostly familiar with git on the command line and when work required me to use it on a gui with visual studio, I first started by complaining about how complicated it makes it. But after a while, I got used to it. Approaching a new software is always hard and frustrating in the beginning. But the more time you spend on it, the more you will tolerate or appreciate it's short comings and complexity.
  • justinlardinois 10y ago
    As someone who's young enough to have never used anything but git, I get the impression that knowing how a different VCS works makes it hard to learn. Git was super intuitive when I learned it, I think just because I was never taught any other way of doing things.
• RGamma 10y ago
  weechat (IRC client), because of sane defaults, nice UI, active development and simple source code. Oh, and it's basically bug-free from a user's perspective.
• thedudemabry 10y ago
  Synergy. It's a keyboard and mouse sharing client/server application that runs on every platform I use. I don't know if better alternatives exist because it has just been rock-solid for the last 12 years that I've been using it. I've used it in multi-monitor and machine desktop setups (e.g. an Apple laptop paired with a Windows desktop and linux desktop for enterprisey cubicle development), as well as to let me drive my gaming and media PC from my couch using an Apple laptop. I was a bit bummed that the pricing model went from free-as-in-beer to free-as-in-speech, but couldn't be happier to pay $10 for a lifetime license. I feel it belongs in this thread because even when I've neglected to upgrade various machines, or upgraded OSs on machines with the application installed, it just continues to hum along. I can count on one hand the number of times I've had to deal with any problems in any capacity.
  • dmerrick 10y ago
    I just purchased this recently (having used it ages ago) to drive a second computer on my desk. My problem is that once the guest machine goes to sleep, I can't seem to wake it via Synergy. Is this expected behavior? I have WoL enabled, so theoretically I should be able to just move my mouse over to the sleeping monitor to wake it up.
    • abeyer 10y ago
      Unless synergy has explicit support for WoL (it didn't last time I used it, but it's been years), it won't just work. You'd need to patch the synergy server to send a WoL magic packet[1] to wake up the client whenever it sends a message that might hit a client that's asleep. (some systems might support something other than the standard magic packet, but I don't know of anything else that works consistently cross platform.) Might also need to look at making sure the client connection comes back up clean and have some delay to make sure it's ready to receive whatever message started the process, and doesn't timeout while waking up. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake-on-LAN#Magic_packet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake-on-LAN#Magic_packet
      • dmerrick 10y ago
• adultSwim 10y ago
  nano
• tombrossman 10y ago
  Hands-down winner for me is Radio Tray. Simple, works as advertised, and it's running pretty much 100% of the time my computer is on. It has never crashed. Very lightweight too, and the config file is simple enough that a quick glance at it in a text editor is all you need to make customizations faster than using the GUI preferences. A very close second is the ext4 filesystem, but I don't know if this qualifies as software. I've done all kind of stupid things when formatting or unplugging drives and have never lost data. Full-disk encryption on everything and never a problem. SO reliable. I was doing a full backup to two separate drives at once, one external and one SATA internal. The power went out and I wasn't using a UPS. When the power came back on, everything was still fine but I was worried about data corruption so I plugged in yet another, my last good external drive with a known good copy of everything to compare against. Then the power went out again! I didn't even shout or curse, that's how mad I was. No data loss though, everything resumed from mid-backup and happily continued.
• eel 10y ago
  Reliable: vim, Microsoft Word/Excel, SQLite, tmux, GNU coreutils, svn I think most would agree with most of the items, although svn warrants an explanation. I prefer the paradigm of git, but svn always impresses me with its ability to handle large repositories and large files out of the box without falling over.
  • reitanqild 10y ago
    Word has destroyed lots of work for my ex-colleagues. Also it was such a major pain when I had work with two other students on my final project that I ended up doing the last major changes in Open Office writer before reopening in Word to finish off the last details. Admittedly I guess this had a lot to do with how some people don't want to learn how to use styles but Word didn't help either.
    • pdm55 10y ago
      Word was fine for my PhD. My supervisor from those times - now 80 and still collaborating with scientists from around the world - has written hundreds of papers with it. I think I can speak for him when I say that over the last 30 years he has found it a far more reliable option than the typewriter and carbon paper he used to write his own PhD in the 1960s. I frequently use Excel for calculations. Just the simplest way to check I have entered the correct numbers.
  • lucb1e 10y ago
    Word and Excel are not that reliable at all. I can't say LibreOffice is much better, but all graphical office software has let me down more often than I'd like to recount. Excel has trouble opening any kind of CSV files, let alone if they're a bit too big. Word recently got stuck in a "save loop", making you painstakingly click the "don't save" option on your work because trying to save does nothing anymore. Both examples are from the past two months.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• zem 10y ago
  vim. been using it for decades now and i still stop every so often to marvel how much pleasanter it makes my workday.
• Yetanfou 10y ago
  The Linux kernel! It runs just about everywhere from dishwasher to modem to thermostat to PC to mainframe. One size fits all? Well, not if you want to optimize to the last bit, but within a very wide spectrum it actually does.
• nickpsecurity 10y ago
  Someone should thtow in some non-UNIX software. So, OS/400: the OS of AS/400's. I know they can crash but I've never seen it or met someone face-to-face who has. Those jokers just seems to always work for years. OpenVMS was a competitor that also ran years at at time under load with cluster record being 17 years. These are still sold.
• mohsinr 10y ago
  Git, Filezilla, VLC Player they just work have been using for years!
  • thedudemabry 10y ago
    VLC Player! I didn't even think to include it on this list because I rarely think about it, which is a great sign. I always install it on new OSs and make it the default media player. But it plays all the things I've thrown at it well and even changes its icon over the Christmas holiday to have a little santa hat!
  • anonymous344 10y ago
    Vlc: bugs me every time because cant pause movie by clicking it (the movie screen) like in EVERY other video player!
• gosukiwi 10y ago
  Vim and Chrome :)
• aserafini 10y ago
  Reaper DAW. Tiny executable, rock-solid reliability, low RAM and CPU usage, effortlessly configurable. It's closed source so it's just a gut feel but it gives the impression of being 'well made' under the hood. I call it my 'Vim of audio'. It was written by the creator of Winamp.
  • JeremyMorgan 10y ago
    Yes, recently discovered Reaper after using Audacity for a while. Works so much nicer and no surprises.
  • Joeboy 10y ago
    Haven't tried Reaper, but Ardour is pretty solid for me these days.
    • SwellJoe 10y ago
      I try to use Ardour every couple of years (and I think I still have a monthly donation setup for Ardour). So far, I've always gone back to Reaper. Partly that's because audio on Linux still kinda sucks, and often requires a lot of kernel fiddling and other crap, but partly it's because Ardour is bigger, slower, and generally less capable than REAPER. But, it's been a couple of years, so I'm due for another stab at using Ardour for my primary DAW.
      • mwcampbell 10y ago
        What OS do you run REAPER on?
        • SwellJoe 10y ago
          Windows. It is the only thing I reboot for, now that Steam has so many Linux games.
  • chowes 10y ago
    Not sure if you're playing music or just recording, but have you ever tried http://www.cockos.com/ninjam/ http://www.cockos.com/ninjam/ ? Also made by the same people and a lot of fun!
• nekopa 10y ago
  Goodreader on iOS. I still keep my iPad 1 around for this software.
• aiPhie5u 10y ago
  Debian, Vim, Python, Nginx, NTPd, sshd.
• brightball 10y ago
  Navicat Premium. I bought this years ago when I needed a solid OSX database tool that I could use with all of the various databases I dealt with, which at that time was MySQL, SQL Server and Oracle. Now I work mostly with PostgreSQL, MySQL and SQL Server but it has been kicking along make my life easier the entire time. It's almost an extension of my professional self at this point.
• andthat 10y ago
  Ableton Live.
  • daledavies 10y ago
    Live is pretty damn reliable, I'll vouch for this. I've used it daily for years and often had it open for a whole day at a time. Only crashes I've had have been caused by 3rd party VST plugins.
• BruceEel 10y ago
  Glad to see you folks coming up with many examples. For me it's more like a journey of constant sorrow, i'm hardly put coming up even with one example, but maybe: - übertime on iOS = i hate time tracking, this rock solid app makes it bearable. - Brief (under DOSBox) just to remind myself that good, reliable, general-purpose text editors did exist at some point...
  • nichochar 10y ago
    I can help you right now: you shouldn't be using iOS
  • vram22 10y ago
    Wow, Brief. I used it, years ago. Very fast [1] and good text editor [2]. A few years back, in Boston, I was introduced to the person who wrote it. [1] It had all kinds of shortcuts for speed. I think I remember one where, if you pressed an arrow key for a short while, it would move the cursor (up/down/left/right) at some speed. If you held the key down for longer, it would guess that you wanted to move longer distances in the file, and move the cursor faster. May have used low-level assembly language techniques and code for speed. [2] A free version of it was available recently. I have it on my PC and use it sometimes these days.
    • BruceEel 10y ago
      So cool you've met him! I believe he also authored SuperDuper on the Mac, another excellent piece of software I've used in the past. And yes, the speed and the quality of Brief. Especially the fact it didn't try to malloc the whole size of the file, rare nowadays. Opening a 40MB file on my Win98 PC with 8MB of RAM was, essentially, an instantaneous op. Fast forward to last week and one of the IDE's praised elsewhere in this thread, running on my corporate Lenovo with 12GB of RAM, warned me against trying to open an 8MB XML file. Well, at least it warned me, rather than just crashing...
      • vram22 10y ago
        Ha, good points ...
• HeyLaughingBoy 10y ago
  This morning on my way to work, when I needed to merge with traffic quickly, I got the revs on my 350Z up to about 5,000 RPM then dropped the clutch and hung on for the ride. My engine management firmware has never failed me.
• cypher543 10y ago
  VMWare Player. I needed to run Linux in a VM with nested virtualization and hardware-accelerated 3D graphics. VirtualBox doesn't support the former and I couldn't get 3D acceleration to work even after installing the guest additions. Everything worked in VMWare Player right out of the gate.
  • tostitos1979 10y ago
    Player is pretty nice no doubt. I also really like Vagrant + Virtualbox. Just works. And I can't believe Virtualbox is from the loins of Oracle.
    • xemdetia 10y ago
      VirtualBox came to Oracle from the Sun acquisition who acquired InnoTek. I really have always preferred VirtualBox over VMWare player, if you are playing the game of many VM's open VMWare player just is not so fun (I usually am running 2+ virtualbox all the time on my main system, not counting secondary systems). It really is the software I am turning to constantly, ever since I was looking for something easier to use than qemu around the time VT extensions hit the Pentium D.
      • tostitos1979 10y ago
        We should convince the VirtualBox devs to do an AMA or a conference tech talk. Not only is it deep tech, I get the feeling it is a small number of really strong devs running the show (and possibly being ignored by the beast). Their networking options are also fairly awesome IMHO. I guess I'm a VirtualBox fanboy :)
  • busterarm 10y ago
    I found VirtualBox to be super wonky at times. Trying to run an OS X VM on an OS X host on it was "fun". Clang doesn't work out of the box and you had to set some weird and nonintuitive flags to get anything to compile on it. I pretty much will try to use anything else besides VirtualBox when I need a VM.
• tingol 10y ago
  Out of those not mentioned here for me it's beets and cmus. My go to for music for years without a single issue.
• mikestew 10y ago
  In the vein of not "shaving yaks", my list is software that, when something goes wrong, it's almost always my fault. I don't care that it works well, but that it works consistently and predictably. Sadly, that's a rare trait based on some of the tools I have to work with daily. On to the list: vim - going on, what, thirty years of use and it rarely surprises me. bash - same thing. The only surprise is my own ignorance of it after so many years. SQLite - so small, so useful, and so reliable for what it is. I guess that ended up being the list a lot of others posted. Which ought to say something for the products mentioned.
  • nojvek 10y ago
    I really wish there was a Json oriented db like sqlite. I really like making underscore like queries. db('x').table('y').getAll(prop:true).sortBy('propB').limit(100) Or may be there is and I don't know.
    • majewsky 10y ago
      Shouldn't be too hard to translate that syntax into SQL. I actually did something similar in my last team, a simple query language to expose to admins etc. as an API. For example: VirtualMachines.with(os == "linux" and alerts > 0)
• sayelt 10y ago
  GNU/Linux.
• anexprogrammer 10y ago
  handbrake (the video transcoder). It just works. given the mass of containers and video formats this is a little surprising!
• johnorourke 10y ago
  SMS Backup (Android app) - literally "just works"
• conception 10y ago
  Trying not to pick fan favorites/well knowns - SecureCRT - SSH and more client (win) Quicksilver - OSX launcher Pathfinder - OSX finder replacement Notepad++ - Win text editor Gawor's LDAP Browser - still my favorite (Java) Cog - OSX Music player (ala winamp) GCalTookit - Doing Google Calendar Magic (Java) Plex + ShowRSS + Catch - Netflix but better Synology - Their NAS platform is pretty amazing. You can do just about anything with it. Workflowy - Bulleted List Magic (web) Xee - Simple and effective image browser (osx) YNAB Classic - If you don't budget, you should. If you do, you should check out YNAB! NFSManager - OSX NFS Manager All of these apps do what they do well and I've never had any issues with them.
  • KeepFlying 10y ago
    I love that you suggested YNAB here but I have one significant problem with it that doesn't have a consistently good workaround. Reimbursements. When I m out with friends and the restaurant doesn't split the bill I'll often cover it then get paid back with cash or PayPal. YNAB doesn't seem to handle this very well. Then wirh longer term reimbursements it gets worse. Either you forget that you are owed or you float the debt. I still recommend YNAB. but that specific problem means it's not on my "reliable" list.
    • pantaloons 10y ago
      Split the transaction in YNAB, send your part to the correct category "Dining", and itemize owed amounts per person into another category "Loaned Money". It's easy to track if "Loaned Money" has a positive balance, and you don't screw up the budget for your Dining category.
    • brightball 10y ago
      YNAB looks very close to the Dave Ramsey approach to finances.
  • vurrpurr 10y ago
    I'm also using Path Finder because I prefer it's visual appearance much over Finder and Total Commander. However, it does have it's fair share of issues so I wouldn't recommend it to anyone anymore at this point. It is often giving me spinning ball cursor (lack of proper threading?), and there's this several year old bug that comes and goes, where the Places list disappears, which resurfaced for me just last week, and still haunts me :-/
• pcunite 10y ago
  FileSearchEX, a file search tool for Windows 10 that is so beautiful in its simplicity, astonishingly quick, and priced like ya stole it. You'll be driven to madness when you don't have it with you.
  • scholia 10y ago
    Not heard of it before (I'll go and get it) but have you compared it with Search Everything? https://www.voidtools.com/ https://www.voidtools.com/ Maybe the names should be the other way round because Search Everything just finds filenames while FileSearchEX searches file contents too.
• anonymous344 10y ago
  trello.com for 1st. place! They survived katrina, or whatever that was for just couple hours of downtime and that was years ago.
  • anonymous344 10y ago
    And must say Sublime text (currently still v2) This thing has saved me million of times and hours. You can do so much with it.
  • andrei_says_ 10y ago
    I was using them on a project at the time and reading their blog. They were carrying gas upstairs to run the generators for their servers :)
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
• tmaly 10y ago
  vim as a text editor has worked consistently for me since 1996. ssh has worked for me for about the same period of time. the linux kernel has worked for me for pretty much the same time period. the software running in my TI-85 calculator has been working for me since 1994.
• joeyspn 10y ago
  nginx, htop
• ryanisnan 10y ago
  Moom window manager. Vimium chrome extension. Sublime Text is more reliable than Atom, but I do prefer Atom these days. 1Password also always just works.
  • zoba 10y ago
    Seconding Moom.
• SchizoDuckie 10y ago
  Total Commander. I've been using it since the first versions that came out for Windows 3.1 and it provided a smooth Windows transition from Norton Commander for DOS. The changelog goes back all the way to 2002, but it's been there for waaay longer. ( http://ghisler.com/whatsnew.htm http://ghisler.com/whatsnew.htm ) I hope he continues to make a healthy income from it. It's litterally the best piece of shareware in the world in my eyes, that i've happily bought a license for. Super Awesome Footnote: I just found out that you can still get the version 6.5, which is every bit as stable as v8.51a, built for Windows 3.1 : http://www.ghisler.com/wcmd16.htm http://www.ghisler.com/wcmd16.htm
  • artimaeis 10y ago
    I've seen this program come up a few times in the last couple of years - but every time I look at it I can't see a use case that sticks out. I've looked through the FAQ and installed it and I just can't seem to get why I'd use that opposed to Windows Explorer, 7Zip, and WinSCP. Can you share why you find it useful? Thanks!
    • kowdermeister 10y ago
      I hate the Windows explorer, but WinScp is not bad. Bunch of windows are hard to work with and even slow when moving files. It has tabs, which is great for development and quickly jumping between directories in the same window. http://imgur.com/a/4toXv http://imgur.com/a/4toXv The two panels allows me to quickly switch also in different contexts. Lots of handy hotkeys are available.
    • softawre 10y ago
      Two __girls__ windows at the same time! What more could you want.
    • penetrarthur 10y ago
      Stuff I use daily: - extremely quick copy pasting and moving between two folders - filter by extension - dir bookmarks - extremely quick compressing - easy and simple enough file diffs - command line from every folder - fast navigation using smart search of file in current dir - pretty good search within folder - viewer for text files(useful when need to read the last couple of lines from 10GB log file) It is somewhat more/easier configurable than mc or FAR. I know you can get dozens of plugins for all these actions but totalcmd has the right amount of stuff I need and is not bloated. Been using it for almost 15 years.
• suby 10y ago
  I don't use it anymore because it's Windows only, but Foobar2000 was damn near perfect for a music player.
  • RachelF 10y ago
    You could run it under Wine
    • suby 10y ago
      Yeah, I tried it under wine. It suffered from graphical and audio glitches. I'm sure if I fiddled with it I could have gotten it to work quite well, but I didn't have the patience for it.
• nulltype 10y ago
  Go, super stable, reliable and fast. I also love the ideology.
  • wintermute42 10y ago
    I'll give you the first 2 at least. On another note, having an impoverished type system isn't much of an ideology..
    • nulltype 10y ago
      Or it's proof of the strength of their convictions that they can have an impoverished type system despite all the pressure to have an enriched one.
      • xupybd 10y ago
        Convictions won't solve the problems that generics could...
• AdmiralAsshat 10y ago
  A month ago, I would've put Winamp on this list. Unfortunately, the lack of updates to it has made it impossible to read on my new 4K laptop. Huge pity, otherwise, as I still love the thing. I wish they'd just open source it so someone can future-proof it for Hi-DPI displays.
  • feiss 10y ago
    I remember it had a 2x option, to double the size. Did you try it? Still small? Foobar works for me, it has a small memory footprint and it's very customisable
    • AdmiralAsshat 10y ago
      I noticed a scaling option in the Window preferences and tried setting it to 200%. It's not perfect, but I think I might be able to resize it and disable some elements until it works. Thanks for the tip!
• Const-me 10y ago
  Winamp 5. Microsoft Word, Excel, OneNote, Outlook. Total commander, far manager. IrfanView.
• djhworld 10y ago
  Reliable? ZNC (irc bouncer), I've had it running on my raspberry pi for so long now I sometimes forget that it's there.
• gkst 10y ago
  Apache server. I know it is not a hip choice, but I've used it for more than 15 years to serve static and dynamic websites. I've changed tech stacks from perl to php to python used different data bases and Apache always just worked.
  • mwpmaybe 10y ago
    I was in this camp for a long time until I tried to get mod_deflate and mod_socache_memcache to play nice together and the wheels came off. Moved to Varnish (fronted by HAproxy) and could not be happier!
  • noir_lord 10y ago
    Same and I've used it for a similar period, I look at alternatives but since apache has never let me down, is ridiculously stable and I know it well I've simply never seen a reason to leave.
• Finbarr 10y ago
  Alfred for mac. App launcher and so much more.
• adnanh 10y ago
  i3
• simbalion 10y ago
  I'll contribute: Bitvise SSH Client for Windows. It has SFTP, terminal, and simple profile management. It's a great free SSH app, however I recommend sending the developers some money cause it's really worth $10-$15 if you spend a lot of time using SSH.
• agounaris 10y ago
  +1 for major databases, IDEs and web servers...I think there is a lot of good software, one or two bugs is close to nothing
• dyeje 10y ago
  Skitch - Simple, reliable, and to the point.
• rosstex 10y ago
  MobaXTerm, it has all the features I could want in a console/FTP client.
• ssanders82 10y ago
  EmEditor for large text files
• reiichiroh 10y ago
  "Everything" NTFS search engine at www.voidtools.com
• mangeletti 10y ago
  Alfred (https://www.alfredapp.com https://www.alfredapp.com) Alfred is absolutely the most game-changing app I've ever been introduced to. I only use it for finding files, searching, opening a page by direct URL, defining words, calculator, translation (via Google), launching apps, and quickly jumping to apps that are already open. It's probably saved me hundreds of hours in clicking around, etc. I've never purchased the paid version (been using since 2011), but I support them by searching Amazon (results are via affiliate link) when I buy things.
  • mbreedlove 10y ago
    I've installed Alfred before but just kept using Spotlight. I never saw why it amazes so many people. What does it do that Spotlight can't?
    • bordercases 10y ago
      See my comment above. For me it seems more accurate.
    • vurrpurr 10y ago
      there is a lot of features in Alfred, but my absolute favorite is the workflows [1] I use Alfred workflow with dash [2], so i can type "go fmt.Println" into alfred, and jump straight to the man-page. I also use Alfred workflow with SnippetsLab [3], to open my personal notes in a similar fashion. 1: https://www.alfredapp.com/help/workflows/ 2: https://kapeli.com/dash Dash is also an absolutely wonderful app, for having all your coding docs on-the-go. Since I am often without internet access, Dash lets me continue working. It even has offline stack exchange if that rocks your boat. 3: https://www.renfei.org/snippets-lab/ SnippetsLab provides a very much awesome way of organizing all your snippets of code / notes, etc. This way of navigating means I have to use the trackpad pretty infrequently. My only complaint about these tools, is that I'm stuck in Windows at work :-( For another software I use daily and can no longer live without, it would be tmux.
      • adt2bt 10y ago
• reitanqild 10y ago
  Netbeans IDE. Cannot remember one serious crash. Have emptied the cache twice that I can think of over the years I have used it. (And most importantly: I have less problems than my colleague who uses IntelliJ.) Also as others have mentioned I've had major stability problems with eclipse, mostly in connection with the perforce plugin.
  • Draiken 10y ago
    Man times must have changed... Had to use Netbeans on college and it was literally the worst IDE I've ever used. Crashed so often I just gave up. Decided to work with Gedit for a good period before I was introduced to vim. Have never even tried to use other IDEs unless I'm kind of forced to (like android development) and made sure to stay away from Netbeans.
    • reitanqild 10y ago
      As I have pointed out elsewhere sometimes some piece of software isn't a good match for someone. Me personally I don't like Mac OS X or Ubuntu Unity. I don't say they are bad but I will make an effort to avoid having to use them. (And I can tell you why.) I can clearly see how some people might have similar issues with my favourite software. That said: if last time was a few years ago and you youch upon Java code again you could give it another try; maybe it works better on a modern machine?
  • lucb1e 10y ago
    It might be Netbeans, or it might be Java EE as a language, but that's the opposite of reliable. Stuff breaks when you breathe on it and is often fixed by something like deleting your Netbeans cache folder or just restarting Netbeans (after you've been hunting a Java bug for 2 hours). The most common phrase in class as people try to use this for a semester-long fourth-year programming project: "I didn't change anything, this worked yesterday when I went home!"
  • Aweorih 10y ago
    I'm using PHPStorm and wanted to give Netbeans a try since my coworker liked it alot and I wanted to try it out anyways. Well opened it and tried to open a project folder (on windows), while navigating through the directories I accidentally clicked on network and it instantly frooze. Waited for like at least 10 seconds nothing happened. Closed it, never opened again...
• petrikapu 10y ago
  Dropbox
• apjana 10y ago
  I maintain 2 command-line utilities for my own needs: to google: googler - https://github.com/jarun/googler https://github.com/jarun/googler for bookmarks: buku - https://github.com/jarun/Buku https://github.com/jarun/Buku
• reitanqild 10y ago
  The JDK, including the toolchain. Just works. (Yep, not my only posting but I figured they should go in separate comments.)
• mrob 10y ago
  Qalculate!. This is easily my favorite calculator app. It's fast, it has many useful features (I especially like how you can specify units for all your values and get an answer with a unit), and it lets you type in expressions instead of wasting space on skeuomorphic calculator buttons. I configured the dedicated calculator button on my keyboard to run it, and I typically use it multiple times a day.
• fhood 10y ago
  TextWrangler
• pmontra 10y ago
  Emacs, thunderbird
• blt 10y ago
  Ableton Live, a music creation program. Its data recovery has never once failed me. Those moments when I needed to use data recovery were caused by unreliable plugins, not Live itself.
  • jimothyhalpert7 10y ago
    I love how accurate the proposals for missing samples is.
• dpcan 10y ago
  This is actually a topic that I think about often because I LOVE several of the software tools I use daily, and the majority of my favorites are made by either individuals or smaller companies (except a few). I've purchased licenses of the following and have used them all for years. These are all wonderfully simple in my opinion, and the most reliable pieces of software I have ever used and I have been very happy with my purchases: EditPlus Probably the best money I've ever spent. I use it for almost all of my coding. No other code editor seems to be arranged the same way with Folders and Files on the left with a tab to quickly switch to a function view, and simple color coded syntax highlighting. It's SO fast too. ScanWiz 2 Converts scans to PDFs. For me, it has been flawless and perfect in every way. I once had to email because my computer crashed and I needed my license key again. I was literally lost without it. I've never used anything so beautifully simple for the single function it performs for me. XnView and IrfanView I purchased a license for each at one point. XnView for batch processing and IrfanView for almost all other simple image functions. I know I can batch in IrfanView, but I like how I can select filters and such in XnView. Adobe Fireworks I cannot believe this one is supposedly being shut down. I have never used such a simple vector based editing tool in my life. I literally do everything in it, and when I try to use something else, I can't stand it. I pray they leave it available through my Cloud subscription for forever. Bvckup I actually only got Bvckup about a year ago, but it has already saved me - and allows me to run my backups super fast and more regularly. Again, it's all about the simplicity.
  • xenihn 10y ago
    What do you think of XD in comparison to Fireworks?
• Draiken 10y ago
  PuTTY Saved my ass a lot of times when I wasn't around a linux machine.
  • lotyrin 10y ago
    Putty has some pretty strange design choices. They coupled the terminal emulator and the SSH client, and (at least used to have) really bad default configuration (blue color was unreadable, windows codepage instead of utf-8, etc. etc.). Now that Mintty exists, I prefer to use it + openssh on Windows.
    • reitanqild 10y ago
      And the config ux is really ...weird.
      • brokenmachine 10y ago
        Yeah, the way you load/save sessions in preferences is very strange. I'm familiar with it now, but I still need to think too much when trying to set up a session.
    • Draiken 10y ago
      Yes, I completely hate some of their decisions on UX/UI But even with it's flaws, it was always reliably there when I needed it. Had to administer some linux servers with windows machines back on my internship days, and man... that was horrible.
• edoceo 10y ago
  jEdit. It just works. Its been stable for 10+ years
• blaze33 10y ago
  Git, Linux, Python, Sublime Text, Redis, Postgresql, VLC. Also Ubuntu, I remember how I always felt having a half broken setup when I started using it in 2007 but for the past 2-3 years it just worked, really stable, no more release upgrade mess ups, really enjoy it.
  • reitanqild 10y ago
    Belive you about Ubuntu but it is weird: I loved Ubuntu but now don't bother to even try after having tried Unity a few times (no, it's not about stability, it's about breaking alt-tab for me).
• camperman 10y ago
  nginx, SQLite, Reaper, Audacity, VLC, ffmpeg and ffplay.
• teamhappy 10y ago
  zsh, vim, git, tmux, ssh, curl, less, rsync, mosh, ag VLC player deserves extra credit because it's a big, messy, cross-platform GUI app.
  • lucb1e 10y ago
    VLC is a great example I forgot about. If anything mainstream has been reliable over the years, cross-platform, it's VLC.
• gglitch 10y ago
  MOC. Music on Console. I've been using it forever with no issues of any kind. It's immediate, it's lightweight, it never fails, it works with my files in my hierarchies, it has all the important functions mapped to individual keys. It's brilliant. My wife calls it "nerd mode," which obviously makes it even more appealing.
  • gglitch 10y ago
    I also of course love all the other usual suspects in the thread: coreutils, git, emacs, sqlite.
  • brotherjerky 10y ago
    I've been using cmus for a while, which I've been pretty happy with. Anything I'm missing with moc?
    • gglitch 10y ago
      Looks comparable. Moc's interface may be simpler. Moc starts in server mode so you can quit the interface and keep listening, though frankly I don't think that's as big a deal as it used to be.
  • majewsky 10y ago
    This looks similar to mpd, which I like more since it exposes a network API. With the right app, I can control music playback from my phone if my PC is off (with mpd running on the homeserver).
• robobro 10y ago
  Ktorrent is the best torrent client I've ever used. KeyPassX is my favorite password client... generates passwords well and saves them. Very easy to use. And Seamonkey is a pretty righteous browser. It has email built-in and it runs leaner than Firefox on my machines.
• carlesfe 10y ago
  Nethack. It was one of my first games on Linux (circa 1999) and I've been replaying it since then. Infinite replayability, lots of fun, still haven't found the Amulet.
• Klasiaster 10y ago
  moc - Music On Console, use mocp to spwan it and you can also detach again. Never used another music player afterwards. youtube-dl ack instead of grep, most instead of less tor GNOME stuff just works, from gnome-builder to gnome-disks to gscan2pdf
  • gglitch 10y ago
    I've dj'ed several weddings with moc, including my own. I wouldn't even think of using anything else in a high-stakes situation like that.
• virmundi 10y ago
  RabbitMQ. It just works. We're operating with in the normal use case for it. We turn it on, transfer 50k or so messages a day, then forget about. The memory is fairly low, CPU is low and constant. The connections for month or year long clients stay open.
  • lucb1e 10y ago
    We had to use a message queueing system for school, they recommended some Oracle thing. Other systems were allowed though, and most of the people chose RabbitMQ. Can confirm, it's extremely easy to make Python, Java and PHP talk to each other. I haven't found anything it can't do yet, and it's not hogging resources either.
  • darkr 10y ago
    I'm actually a fan of rabbitMQ generally, but I'm not sure I'd put it in the category of notoriously reliable software. It can throw away acknowledged writes (afaik https://aphyr.com/posts/315-jepsen-rabbitmq https://aphyr.com/posts/315-jepsen-rabbitmq has still not been fully fixed). 50k messages/day is pretty low throughout and under that load it should plod through just fine. Under much higher loads than that (10's - 100's millions of messages day) I've seen it die in a pretty ungraceful manner. At that scale, Kafka is a good candidate.
    • busterarm 10y ago
      Under those high loads I've seen every single MQ fall over like a house of cards. At lighter loads you can get the job done with other tools that scale but with a little bit more pain. Leaves me super skeptical about them on the whole.
      • cespare 10y ago
        We push on the order of ~a billion messages / day into one of our Kafka clusters without having too much scaling difficulty.
        • 10y ago
• davidw 10y ago
  Let's see... stuff I have been using for around 20 years and still use today: * Emacs * Postgres * GCC * Apache web server * Linux - although it's big enough in scope that it does have its issues from time to time.
  • sedachv 10y ago
    +1 for Emacs. eshell is my main command line and interactive shell, and since GNU Emacs 24 I have not touched a terminal emulator other than ansi-term.
    • Semiapies 10y ago
      I tinker and putter with my emacs setup all the time. It's like a hobby motorcycle that way...but at any moment, it will still be ready to drive across the badlands like some old Land Rover.
  • justinlardinois 10y ago
    I definitely don't agree when it comes to GCC. While it does its job well and, importantly, has helpful error messages, its command line arguments are a mess. -Wall enables all warnings right? Yep, except for the ones that you need -Wextra. But don't forget there are more that aren't covered here. And let's not even get into the appropriately-named -pedantic. Like I said, GCC gets its job done well, and once I've got what I need spelled out in my Makefile I'm good. But it's a headache to work with when you go off the beaten path.
• CodeSalad 10y ago
  As a MS stack dev: Chocolatey (https://chocolatey.org/ https://chocolatey.org/) VsVim for Visual Studio (https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/59ca71b3-a4a3-46ca-8fe1-0e90e3f79329 https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/59ca71b3-a4a3...) Everything (https://www.voidtools.com/ https://www.voidtools.com/) Wox (http://www.getwox.com/ http://www.getwox.com/) and of course PowerShell
  • workingspaceaC 10y ago
    Mhhh, VsVim is probably the worst implementation of Vim in an IDE in my opinion. Vrapper for Eclipse, does the job, the Vim plugin in Intellij sucks as well but still better than VsVim. The Xcode version is ok. Few versions ago, there was that nasty bug in VsVim where it would throw an exception if you save an unedited file ...
• repeek 10y ago
  1Password on Mac - phenomenal UX, all around joy to use Not as pleased with the Windows version, but it's serviceable
  • tomc1985 10y ago
    It's unfortunate that their browser extensions were an infrequently-upgraded, bloated mess (or at least they were before I stopped using it)
    • NickBusey 10y ago
      Their browser extensions are my favorite part of it! If you haven't used it in a while, you have missed a _lot_ of updates.
      • tomc1985 10y ago
        Well, that and I am no longer on Mac. Still running the Windows version, though... maybe I'll try them again
  • blakeyrat 10y ago
    Starting from the top, I think you're the first person to mention user experience. Man, this topic has done nothing but remind me how far I am outside the "software development mainstream". Vim? Git? Are there seriously that many developers who enjoy using such unusable software?
    • statictype 10y ago
      Good UX for power-user tools is different from good UX for casual-user tools. Vim is highly usable as a power-user tool. Its logical and has a few primitives that can easily be chained and built-up into larger features.
    • bryondowd 10y ago
      I never got my head around using Vim rather than an IDE, but I can say I genuinely enjoy git. It's very easy to get a lot of value out of it without needing to learn the esoteric details by just keeping to a simple workflow planned out by someone who understands it better. Of course, it was the first version tracking system I'd worked with, so I have nothing to compare it to. It just made me incredibly happy after working on a very large system with no version tracking beyond a boatload of comments referencing a date and ticket/project.
• jefe_ 10y ago
  Hype Machine, somehow free and ad free. The music aligns with my tastes and one of the few things that hasn't changed radically since I started using it back in 2008.
• ChicagoBoy11 10y ago
  ngrok I mean, there are so many pain points when it comes to developing hybrid apps and integrating APIs and all the rest.. and ngrok was a true lifesaver. It's also always, always, always worked 100% of the time. Every time I fire it up, I swear I think I'm cheating somehow.
  • inconshreveable 10y ago
    <3
• sbecker 10y ago
  Spectacle (https://www.spectacleapp.com/ https://www.spectacleapp.com/) Github: https://github.com/eczarny/spectacle https://github.com/eczarny/spectacle Easily resize and arrange windows on a mac - move windows between monitors, make them full size, or half size, anchor them left / right, etc. It's open source, it just works, and you'll wish every new Mac you interact with had it installed by default.
  • softawre 10y ago
    Heh. So many times I cmd+alt+left on someone elses mac and it doesn't work and I just :(
• kyriakos 10y ago
  PHPStorm SQLyog
• ommunist 10y ago
  TextMate, now TextMate2. Works for me many years. Nice tool. Chrome DevTools. Before Chrome DevTools was a big fan of Opera Dragonfly (still useful because of this http://www.opera.com/dragonfly/documentation/remote/ http://www.opera.com/dragonfly/documentation/remote/ )
• gameofdrones 10y ago
  Dev: Ruby (chruby/ruby-install), node, postgres, redis, elasticsearch, Dash, MacVim Console: zsh, iTerm, tmux Mac apps: Bartender, Hands Off!, Breakaway (a 10.10+ fork), coconutbattery, iStat Menus, flux, Forecast Bar, TotalFinder, Daisy Disk, VLC (+ trakt-for-vlc)
  • vurrpurr 10y ago
    Ah, i also find flux impossible to live without! But now and then it drops back to cold blue/white colors in the middle of the night. Like when exiting a full-screen game or similar. I seem to recall there was talk about such feature would be integrated into MacOS eventually. I really do hope so! (I am already using the iPhone Night Shift feature). So if any Apple dev read this. Please bring this feature to tvOS, too!!! The cold light of my TV hurts my eyes more than ever these days, thanks to flux and night shift
• squeaky-clean 10y ago
  Ableton Live 9 on OSX is excellent. As well as anything by Native Instruments. I only use NI's Guitar Rig when rehearsing or performing even though I have better sounding amp simulations, because I have never had it crash once on me. One time during a gig, running (pirated at the time) Ableton Live 8 on Windows 7, Ableton crashed. Thankfully Guitar Rig somehow kept running throughout the whole set! Even though the only thing onscreen was the "Ableton has encountered and error... and will now exit. <OK>" prompt. (For anyone who doesn't know these programs, Ableton runs as a host, in which Guitar Rig can be loaded as a plugin). There are a few other plugins I trust, but not many. I've learned the hard way that "Well it's only crashed once this month, what's the worst that can happen?" means "It will crash 3 times during a 45 minute performance with a few hundred people staring at you." I'm only a hobbyist musician, but I'd still like for that to never happen again. Edit: I think Reaper, another audio host program, is even more stable than Ableton. Ability to isolate plugins so if it crashes, the whole system doesn't die. Great crash handling/restore. Faulty plugin crashing every time you load your project so you can't even undo adding it? Try it 3 times, and on the 3rd, Reaper will deactivate the plugin and alert you. Reaper is more "studio" software though, so it's less important. Worst-case scenario in the studio is you admit you've lost the take, apologize, and tell the drummer to go get a cup of coffee while the system reloads, and we'll try again.
• vram22 10y ago
  Good question. Python is one software (among others) that is somewhat reliable, both based on personal experience over several years, as well as according to the Coverity study (some years ago, IIRC). Interesting that at least some replies have some items in common. I also have to say the same, at least about vim and vi before it - hardly ever (or never) crashed on me, IIRC. Linux of course, does crash once in a while, but again, very rarely, much less than Windows, IME. Same for Unixes I used before Linux - okay, not all the same. Some of the PC Unixes used to crash more than once in a blue moon. HP-UX - very reliable software, when I used it in production for some years. Even their patch management system was very good, and helped with the reliability.
• placeybordeaux 10y ago
  neovim + neoterm is now my default terminal emulator.
• kowdermeister 10y ago
  Propellerhead Reason, Sublime text, Total commander, GIT, ConEmu
• rev_bird 10y ago
  Ancestry.com, both its web app and iPhone app. This is a little different than most other responses in the thread, but I'm absolutely astounded how smoothly it works -- sure, you end up with some weird entries (husband/wife get tagged as the opposite in a marriage record or something), but the more I use Ancestry the more I'm convinced it's the best piece of software I've ever used. I'd break down my amazement into a few categories: --Discovery. The search function has some weird responses sometimes, but I'm astounded how frequently the "Hints" feature finds documents about relatives that I'd never have found on my own. Ancestry's search has a huge understanding of which names might be mixed up with others -- I once found a census record from the late 19th century that had both a husband AND wife's name incorrectly tagged, but Ancestry found it anyway. --Intuitive interface. After some initial confusion on the mobile app, it's been smooth sailing. Not only can you pull facts out of documents and attach them to relatives, but Ancestry preserves the "citations" so you can go back and figure out, "hm, how do I know so-and-so's birthday?" or "which facts did I already pull out of this record?" You can also link one record to multiple people in one action. --An unimaginably broad corpus of documents. This one isn't really the software, I guess, but the amount of data Ancestry has access to is unbelievable. I figured out my great-grandmother had a child as a teenager (with a man who was not my great-grandfather) that nobody in my family ever talked about. I found the full text of a 300-year-old will from my sixth great-grandfather while I was sitting on my toilet. Anyway, it's good.
  • deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
• lucb1e 10y ago
  Windows: "Everything" (that's the name). A lightweight, fast and advanced (if you want it) file search engine. Linux: Most tools of course, as they are made with the Unix philosophy, but these days I'm most surprised by print drivers for Linux. Where in Windows the printer is always magically offline or slow, from Linux I can print and scan very reliably. Vim is also worth learning, it makes editing much more... relaxed I guess. No longer have to move your mouse to the arrow keys or even the mouse/touchpad to scroll or select. It also helps that it exists on nearly every Unix system you'll ever connect to. And finally I recently discovered LaTeX, which could be described as markdown on steroids. A little more difficult to get into, but it's easy to create professional documents and have a plain text source (which works nicely with git and other unix tools). If you have trouble getting started in LaTeX, ask me (comment here or see my profile), I also didn't know how to get started for a while. Edit: Another Windows tool is Notepad++. I have not seen the likes in Linux when it comes to robustness. It has all the basics you need for handling any sort of file that involves manual editing, binary or plain text. If there is no binary editor available for your file of choice, or if you just want to have a quick peak, Notepad++ will do just fine. Beware of really huge files, although I have seen it handle some big things on low RAM machines too.
  • barsonme 10y ago
    If you've any latex pointers I'd appreciate it :) I used latex to write a paper for the first time last week, and while i thoroughly enjoyed it, i'm fairly confident there were lots of things I could've done better.
    • lucb1e 10y ago
      I've written two papers in it now, so I'm not a grandmaster yet either. If you managed what you wanted to do and enjoyed it, you probably know as much as me. I'm not sure there is really a wrong way to use it. If you google every little thing to find a good solution (not manually inserting and formatting references for example), I don't think there is too much to be done better. At least, to my beginner's eyes it doesn't seem like it.
    • dbcurtis 10y ago
• jpatel3 10y ago
  pocket. It just works and saves lots of time from distraction without loosing what I want to read.
  • anotherevan 10y ago
    I use Pocket a lot because it has integration with my Kobo ereader. That said, I find it often fails to parse an article that Instapaper or Readability handle no problems. That is my only complaint with it.
• thesumofall 10y ago
  1Password for Mac - For Windows not so much, unfortunately
• dvirsky 10y ago
  1. Go and its toolchain and standard library. Just an awesome piece (or collection of pieces) of thoughtful and stable engineering. 2. Redis. Nuff said. 3. Gnome. Yes yes, don't laugh. Gnome 3's latest versions are very stable and work very well.
• SwellJoe 10y ago
  git is so reliable that I forget that reliability used to be a problem in version control (I've had to reconstruct CVS and Subversion repositories that got corrupted via various bugs and quirks of the system). It's also pretty fast. SQLite is an automatic, and easy, answer. It almost goes without saying at this point, I guess. vim is everywhere. I like knowing I can always run it no matter where I am or what server/VM I'm logged into. That knowledge provides comfort. go. I don't actually love the language, but the solidity of it and it's ecosystem is really nice. Everything around go has a patina of workmanship about it; not in a corporate "professional" sense, but more like a well-made wood plane or something. Perl. Again, I don't entirely love the language, but the incredible backward compatibility (we have ~20 year old code that still runs unmodified!), the rarity of bugs (especially given how big the surface area of a huge language like Perl is), and the overall culture of testing, leads to a pretty nice experience. I feel like I can count on it, even if I might get grumpy at some of the quirks. Python, for different reasons from Perl. I can come back to Python after years away and find that it's maybe even a simpler (but not less powerful) Python than I used a decade ago. I just poked at Python 3 for the first time a few weeks ago, and found it immediately readable and intuitive. The language is more reliably "Pythonic" every year. OpenSSH. Always works. Always trustworthy. Google Inbox. I want to host my own mail (and do, for my business), but nothing is as good as Inbox.
  • littleweep 10y ago
    git is such a great example for OP. It's become so ingrained in my workflow that I forget it's there. It really is a perfect application.
  • mwpmaybe 10y ago
    > Perl ... the overall culture of testing and documentation!
    • plaguuuuuu 10y ago
      I remember stumbling across cpan years ago and being blown away (this was way before github or even google code IIRC) that there was so much code I obtain and use, freely, just off the internets. Of course I had no idea how Perl worked, so it looked like someone stuck a bunch of symbols in their nose and mouth then sneezed, but would've been amazing if I had spent a bit of effort.
• dandelion_lover 10y ago
  Qubes OS¹, the only reliable OS of our time. See also "The Linux Security Circus: On GUI Isolation (2011)" by Joanna Rutkowska². ¹ https://www.qubes-os.org/ https://www.qubes-os.org/ ² https://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.de/2011/04/linux-security-circus-on-gui-isolation.html https://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.de/2011/04/linux-securit..., via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11229517 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11229517
  • milcron 10y ago
    I prefer OpenBSD to Qubes. Over the past couple years, my approach has changed from blacklisting what’s broken, to whitelisting what’s safe. NoScript in the browser, and I’m working on installing OpenBSD on my Libreboot laptop (tricky because UEFI support is so new). OpenBSD has my favorite approach. Continual auditing of the codebase, and they’re always implementing new 'seatbelts', such as ASLR, W^X, and now pledge(2). These seatbelts are used liberally – even in programs that you theoretically shouldn’t need protection from, such as the system-provided implementation of cat. They aggressively delete dead code, and probably have the smallest codebase of all modern nix systems. The best code is no code. :) Theo has some great comments on magical “silver-bullet” thinking about security. In this case, specifically about the security of VMs (2007, so pretty dated now): x86 virtualization is about basically placing another nearly full kernel, full of new bugs, on top of a nasty x86 architecture which barely has correct page protection. Then running your operating system on the other side of this brand new pile of shit. You are absolutely deluded, if not stupid, if you think that a worldwide collection of software engineers who can’t write operating systems or applications without security holes, can then turn around and suddenly write virtualization layers without security holes. Harsh, but not inaccurate. And it’s part of the reason I’d rather use OpenBSD than QubesOS. Eight years after that comment, a critical vulnerability in Xen affected the security of QubesOS, and the developers were shocked, shocked! It is really shocking that such a bug has been lurking in the core of the hypervisor for so many years. In our opinion the Xen project should rethink their coding guidelines and try to come up with practices and perhaps additional mechanisms that would not let similar flaws to plague the hypervisor ever again (assert-like mechanisms perhaps?). Otherwise the whole project makes no sense, at least to those who would like to use Xen for security-sensitive work. http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/10/xen-patches-7-year-old-bug-that-shattered-hypervisor-security/ http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/10/xen-patches-7-year-o...
• pws5068 10y ago
  CMD+F for Xcode; not a single mention. Well, until now.
• Philipp__ 10y ago
  Emacs with org mode, iTerm 2, Sublime Text 3 and Winamp.
• clock_tower 10y ago
  Visual Studio. I can't get much of anything done unless I have Intellisense and GUI debugging/monitoring tools.
• potatolicious 10y ago
  I suspect many are already familiar with this: Sketch (https://www.sketchapp.com/ https://www.sketchapp.com/) It's hard to imagine what life was like before Sketch. You'd work with a UX designer, who would pass you PNGs and PSDs. There would be designs, and then there would be a whole 'nother set of files for specifying dimensions, colors, typefaces, sizing, kerning, and a whole slew of other stuff. You'd also have to get asset packs from your designer - for mobile devs you'd get a large set of assets of different resolutions and sizes specced for different device types. Need a design change? Be prepared for another mega-sized download from Dropbox, not to mention the labor intensive task of the designer re-exporting all of these bits. Then comes Sketch - good for anything from wireframing to pixel-perfect designs. All measurements can be taken directly from the app, so you send the working project file to the engineer and the engineer can take all the measurements they need. Automatically accounts for dp/px translation. Automatically exports all relevant sizes/resolutions for assets into their expected native formats. Color palettes embedded, type parameters embedded. It's saved us mobile devs so much time.
  • ferbivore 10y ago
    Is there anything as good for Windows or Linux out there?
• protomyth 10y ago
  Visio before Microsoft[1] It was super simple and something OmniGraffle never really got right. In fact, it was so easy and nice (particularly boolean shape operations and object properties), it made using OmniGraffle painful. Of all the Microsoft software, that was the one I wished had been ported to the Mac. 1) to be fair, haven't used it after the buyout since I went full time OS X
  • therealmarv 10y ago
    Look at yed or this thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/2x5f3a/what_are_you_guys_using_instead_of_microsoft_visio/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/2x5f3a/what_are_you_...
    • protomyth 10y ago
      Looks nice but doesn't seem to have any boolean operations on shapes.
• talles 10y ago
  git, SQLite and vim immediately comes into my mind. And maybe Redis too.
• samuell 10y ago
  Thunderbird mail client. Just works.
  • xupybd 10y ago
    Yes, until it takes an attached image and replaces it with an image from a previous email....
• benologist 10y ago
  All that 'yak shaving' makes me feel like Windows and OS X are poised to become legacy desktop operating systems. Every other popular consumer operating system today avoids that stuff somewhat successfully and none of us wish devops would disappear so we can manually do that stuff again. Security around traditional desktop operating systems is getting unfunny very fast too. Some of the software we like is so wasteful too. I think we have a duty at this point to not be environmentally callous when we write software - manual updates are a good example, a minute wasted here and there might go unnoticed but something like Alfred nominated elsewhere in this submission probably adds up to millions of minutes of computers on and the operators devoted to watching a few megabytes download for a minute or two every time they update, probably actual tons of coal frivolously consumed. I nominate Chrome OS. It has a lot of warts but it removes all of that stuff and dev mode = Ubuntu alongside Chrome OS. Once the Play Store is integrated Android apps will fill in some more of the functionality holes.
  • donatj 10y ago
    I bark to people all the time about how environmentally unconscious it is to do something on a million client machines which could have been done once on the server and cached. Namely client side JavaScript based document composition. If everyone is going to do the exact same thing, it's just a huge waste of cycles.
    • majewsky 10y ago
      I'm going to agree, but sometimes it's a tough question what action is more environmentally conscious. While you could cache some value on a server to reduce the energy consumption of compute, requests to the server for the cached data will drive up the energy consumption of the network.
    • stuxnet79 10y ago
      Being environmentally unconscious does not increase the average tech company's bottom-line. But reducing load on their servers does. So from that angle it makes sense. Interesting perspective though - I've never considered servers deferring compute tasks to clients to be undesirable. When I first came across the idea it seemed pretty revolutionary and sensible to me (maybe JS hype contributed to my viewpoint).
• sssilver 10y ago
  xmonad
• revelation 10y ago
  TrueCrypt, or one of the various forks now that the original developers are gone. Software with utter class. They released full-disk encryption and it was basically flawless from the first release, just works.
  • mkoryak 10y ago
    whats is the good fork?
• javanix 10y ago
  ZFS. I created a raid-Z zpool in 2010 on FreeBSD and those same bits, with two different drives, are still floating around intact 6 years later, across multiple different operating systems.
• anoonmoose 10y ago
  This might sound nuts, but if you're using LabVIEW to control National Instruments hardware, and you don't write bad code, you've got a surprisingly fast and powerful system available at your hands. You can measure, drive, control, whatever verb for whatever piece of equipment you're using, with surprising speed, accuracy, and reliability. It's a pretty expensive stack for doing some pretty particular weird stuff but I kind of love using it. I would at least say that the prices for the hardware aren't too much higher than the competition, and the software side is way way better than the competition. I have never met a person not employed by NI who liked NI software AND equipment as much as I do. Honestly, I don't think I've ever talked to someone who used it the way I do, though... Swear I wasn't paid to write this. Figured people might have written this stuff off a long time ago and I wanted to toss some respect its way.
  • gamache 10y ago
    LabVIEW was my first programming gig, back in high school. For the unfamiliar, it's a data-flow programming environment designed to drive data acquisition hardware. The programming interface is almost entirely graphical, in which you draw something between schematics and a block diagram; the usage interface looks not unlike laboratory equipment. I always loved how it made such difficult things so easy, while other languages' "simple" matters like loops required mental gymnastics. It's a great tool for its job.
  • kohanz 10y ago
    My personal experience: yes to the NI hardware, but no to LabView. I used LabView during my graduate work and as someone who came from a traditional programming background, I struggled with it. More recently (almost a decade later) I had the opportunity to migrate a LabView project to Measurement Studio (NI's .NET libraries for interfacing with their H/W) and it was night and day. The NI stack works as it should and it is so much more manageable with C#.
  • striking 10y ago
    Goodness gracious, I love LabVIEW. It's so gratifying to be able to watch the data flow from VI to VI, checking what arguments are passed. I used it for FIRST Robotics, and writing code with LabVIEW was a dream compared to its hobbled Java-1.3-like counterpart. Interfaces are great, in terms of putting together "75% tools" (ones that aren't perfect or polished, but get the job done). Being able to pull all sorts of data from an active robot and relay it to the users in an easy-to-design interface was awesome. I still wish there were a good open-source version of some parts of LabVIEW. (I also was not paid to write this. I just loved the dev environment. I never looked at data quite the same way again.)
• DavideNL 10y ago
  For OS X (or should i say macOS...), this is a nice list of apps: https://github.com/iCHAIT/awesome-osx https://github.com/iCHAIT/awesome-osx
• aerovistae 10y ago
  VLC. There have been so many times I thought "man it would be great if there were this crazy hypothetical feature in my media player" only to find out it's like a stable long-established feature that's a keypress away from activation after a quick google search or glance at a dropdown menu.
  • audleman 10y ago
    Or for folks like me: I just want to play my video files no fuss, no muss. Something other major media players seem to have more trouble with than they should. But not VLC! 100% of the time it works every time!
    • aerovistae 10y ago
      Doesn't matter what filetype it is...it just runs them all, instantly, like magic. I have never missed Windows Media Player for even a moment.
      • rsync 10y ago
        "Doesn't matter what filetype it is...it just runs them all, instantly, like magic." Does it play DVD ISO files ? Can you use the menus, etc. ? Just curious ... XBMC back in 2004 could do this (navigate and use DVD menus in a DVD ISO) but then that feature actually went away in the following years, never to return ...
        • antisthenes 10y ago
          > Does it play DVD ISO files ? Can you use the menus, etc. ? Those are semi-loaded questions. It can and does play .vob files, which is enough if you actually just want to watch the video, which is VLC's primary use case. It is not a full media manager with additional functionality.
          • nereus 10y ago
            It does play DVD ISO files. Just drag and drop them in, hit play.
• aerovistae 10y ago
  The original popcorntime.io client was incredible. I've never seen design like that. It worked so unbelievably well, it made me want to watch things just to use it. It has since degraded since other developers took over with various forks.
• aerovistae 10y ago
  TurboTax. The fact that I actually look forward to doing my taxes is just....hard to believe.
• samsonradu 10y ago
  Nginx, Haproxy, Redis
• dopeboy 10y ago
  Surprised no one has mentioned this yet - venmo. Does exactly what I want and nothing more. And it's free.
  • omgdlight 10y ago
    venmo is good and I appreciate, but at least on my android it's not what I'd call reliable. It suffers some random crashes and failures (although it's never done anything too terrible like double charge me)
    • dopeboy 10y ago
      I haven't experienced crashes but I've had trouble finding certain people. Not sure if that's an android specific issue.
• scholia 10y ago
  I note that "good software they enjoy using" includes software that people have been using happily for many years, but less experienced users might still find a bit of a nightmare. As a Windows user, the tools I've used for a long time include Search Everything, Process Explorer, FreeFileSync, Paint.net and David De Groot's PIXresizer, along with the usual suspects: Gmail, Word and Excel.
• walrus01 10y ago
  OSX: TextWrangler for multi-file GUI text editing.
• skoocda 10y ago
  ninite.com Your one stop shop to get a Windows PC back on its feet after a wipe. Ninite always works great for me. The application packages are a single click to install, and it really helps minimise the clammy, sticky feeling of using IE Explorer while you go download Chrome / Firefox / Opera.
• rrecuero 10y ago
  Atom, Slack, Steam.
• kieranajp 10y ago
  Trello. Occasionally, on spotty cellular connections, the sync messes up, but that's rare. Overall, it's a great-looking app, super simple to grok and use, and saves me tons of cognitive load every day.
• kawera 10y ago
  Notational Velocity
• justinlardinois 10y ago
  Probably the most off the wall choice in this thread, but I say HP Scan and Capture: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/apps/hp-scan-and-capture/9wzdncrfhwl0 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/apps/hp-scan-and-captu... It's a Metro app for Windows 8.1 and up to scan with HP scanners. I love it because it just works, which has never been my experience with scanning[0]. You press a button, it scans whatever's on the tray. You can tweak resolution if you want. And at the end you save it as a PDF. Simplicity is something that I think tends to be forgotten when it comes to GUI software. [0] Except for a commercial scanner I used once where you put in your email address at the beginning and for every scanned page it sent you an email with an attached PDF. Although that has its own issues.
  • lyonlim 10y ago
    I use HP officejet printer and pretty much never use any software to scan documents. I scan via their document feeder and it automatically transfers the PDF to a folder on my Mac. I digitise everything so this workflow is especially time-saving.
• rsoto 10y ago
  Firefox. And it has been for years, I remember when I downloaded a zip file with the Phoenix browser, you had to manually enable flash, and even with such an early version, it was magic. If I remember correctly, it even had tabs. Then the add-ons and extensions, which enabled you to do something entirelly different or bring back an old behaviour. I still use oldbar since the «awesome bar» might be too awesome for me. Also, the tabs groups, if you are like me, a hoarder of to-read articles, and leaving things for later, you can have a clean slate without losing those tabs. And if you want to look behind the scenes, you have about:config in which you can bring behind some of the old features. And it's everything open source! I know Firefox has suffered a lot because it's seen as slow, but I open Firefox once a day and never have complained about it.
• zoom6628 10y ago
  Below are the things for me that "just work" day in, day out: IM - Telegram(all),WhatsApp(all) PhoneOS - BB10 Hub Web - Safari(mac) Find Files - AgentRansack(Win), powershell(Win), Alfred(mac),Win-S(Win8/10),'find'(*nix) VPN - ExpressVPN(mac,iOS) OS - Linux Mint H/W - Mac,iPAd,iPhone RF - XBee, NXP, Nordic WiFi- Realtek chips IDE - PyCharm, Lazarus
• throwaway6497 10y ago
  git, mercurial, linux, emacs, vim, intellij, java, zsh productivity: chrome, google docs (slow but works), dropbox, tiddlywiki, gmail.
• subpixel 10y ago
  Private Internet Access. I've been a paying customer for years and use this VPN service to watch sports and tv programming that simply aren't available where I live. It was during the Olympics a while back that I thought "there must be a place where I can watch every contest, on demand" and it turned out that place was a website in another country.
• epynonymous 10y ago
  vmware workstation/fusion, sqlite3, nginx, redis, chrome browser, mac os x, vi, ubuntu server, postgresql
• two2two 10y ago
  Wunderlist. Lightning fast sync across devices, a webapp that is indistinguishable from the local app, a free version is more than I could ask for, 4-5 features that are neatly organized/appropriately available, and even the sound it makes when I check off a task gives me joy. There's more that I can't recall at the moment. For a simple little list application, it reminds me every time I use it that other software could be this good, too.
• NetTechM 10y ago
  Royal TS v3, Solarwinds, SQL Server Management Studio 2014,Python, Cisco Jabber, (Mobile) Secure Apps Manager, Mobile Iron, Powershell, Paessler Data Extractor, PRTG, Vsphere, Sourcefire/Firepower... The list goes on.
• LeicaLatte 10y ago
  Paw is a HTTP client for macs and a joy to use. Its maintained very well. I am more comfortable using curl on the command line but Paw is the one I end up recommending to newer programmers these days.
• sha257 10y ago
  ls - this program has never failed me
• mavelikara 10y ago
  IntelliJ IDEA, WhatsApp, VLC, HotSpot JVM.
• kasperset 10y ago
  SQLite
• nodivbyzero 10y ago
  Emacs with Org-mode
• jakeogh 10y ago
  http://git.suckless.org/surf/log/?h=surf-webkit2 http://git.suckless.org/surf/log/?h=surf-webkit2
• kuon 10y ago
  "ag" that thing is blazingly fast
  • walrus 10y ago
    Never grep -R again! I'm also a fan of this software. Link because the name makes it hard to search for: http://geoff.greer.fm/ag/ http://geoff.greer.fm/ag/ https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher
    • alixaxel 10y ago
      Accidentally misclicked the down vote button. Sorry for that!
• xanadohnt 10y ago
  Late to the party but ... Google Maps. So buttery, extremely reliable, and so many form factors where the experience is the same: superb. I'm afraid it has become such a daily utility that perhaps people don't appreciate just how amazing Google Maps is.
  • brokenmachine 10y ago
    I'm also amazed by it and use it all the time, but the Android version of Maps has been getting progressively slower and less responsive with every new version. [1] Performance should be a feature! [1] https://blog.codinghorror.com/performance-is-a-feature/ https://blog.codinghorror.com/performance-is-a-feature/
• mcs_ 10y ago
  * mint, * git + gitlab ce, * webstorm + nodejs, * chromium
• CPAhem 10y ago
  On Windows: - Notepad++ https://notepad-plus-plus.org https://notepad-plus-plus.org is a superb text editor with support for almost every language and a great number of advanced and useful features. - Everything http://voidtools.com http://voidtools.com is a great local drive search tool and is blindingly fast. - Syncdocs http://syncdocs.com http://syncdocs.com is a better Google Drive client that supports multiple users and a host of other advanced features.
  • nkg 10y ago
    Notepad++ is a must-have! I have been using Eclipse, Sublime, Atom, Nano and Visual Studio, but when I just need to edit a file in a hurry, none of them is as convenient as Notepad++.
• scottlocklin 10y ago
  Nobody has mentioned screen. This is unacceptable! screen is extremely reliable and useful. I'd like to say emacs, but it's not really that "reliable" in that it often goes crazy and eats up a CPU, and I must maintain separate .emacs files for slightly different computers and vintages of emacs. It does work very well though.
  • jjfine 10y ago
    Someone said tmux above.
  • rbanffy 10y ago
    Byobu too is a great tool (that builds on top of screen and tmux)
• happyslobro 10y ago
  Vagrant, Ansible. I'm slowly reducing our scattered flock of precious little snowflake servers to nice, boring, version controlled configs. Being able to sleep for 8 hours every night is glorious; I will never take that for granted, for the rest of my life. First I SSH into local VMs to prototype a minimal cluster. Then once I'm done making mistakes, I write out the playbook. Spin up some EC2s, add them to the inventory, and deploy. Reading through a Git history of playbook changes beats the hell out of searching for an email thread from a sysadmin who no longer works with us. I guess Git is the real hero here, I keep forgetting that there was a time before git. Those were dark times.
• nojvek 10y ago
  VSCode - Not too light, not too heavy. JS development and debugging is a breeze. VLC. Related Popcorn time. Great interface. RethinkDB - RQL is a great query interface. I wish there was an embedded version like sqlite. Chrome-dev-tools: As a JS Dev, love what they've done. Whatsapp - Their focus on simplicity and doing one thing very well. PowerShell Bash Charles Proxy
• paxunix 10y ago
  /bin/true Without fail, it has always done exactly what I wanted it to do. Simple. Solid. Reliable.
  • brokenmachine 10y ago
    The Seven Signs are clear: We will be struck by deadly plagues, famines and earthquakes; The sky will turn dark and oceans will turn to blood; And the antichrist will emerge to fight the final battle between good and evil. Oh, and /bin/true is false.
  • majewsky 10y ago
    Also /bin/false. Its manpage describes too many of my weekends: false - do nothing, unsuccessfully
    • philsnow 10y ago
      sounds like when i try to meditate sometimes
    • stevekemp 10y ago
      I have a shell-script in my sysadmin-tools repository called `maybe` which sometimes is /bin/true, and sometimes is /bin/false. Keeps me on my toes ;)
• paxunix 10y ago
  /bin/true Without fail, it has always done exactly what I wanted it to do. Simple. Solid. Reliable.
• hollerith 10y ago
  Glasgow Haskell Compiler Arch Build System
• zelon88 10y ago
  Sublime Text 2, Plex, AudioStreamer2.1, LibreOffice, and Unoconv. I'd also like to mention that for archives I prefer Rar & Unrar instead of 7zip. I'd also like to add that I find 7z to be somewhat unreliable. Does anyone else agree or have another alternative?
• jfb 10y ago
  mbsync [0]. It is a great example of blue-collar software. Unshowy, unfeatureful, it Just Works. Combine with mu and mu4e [1] and my mail situation is pretty much just fixed. [0] http://isync.sourceforge.net/mbsync.html http://isync.sourceforge.net/mbsync.html [1] http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu
• pocketstar 10y ago
  Notational Velocity. The project has been abandoned for years on github, because NV is perfect. Syncs with simplenote if you want. NV is just a simple, fast, notes app, full of useful hotkeys. I've used NV daily for the past 6 years with zero issues.
• rbosinger 10y ago
  It's been a while (and therefore several versions since) I've done audio recording/editing but I was always impressed with Propellerhead's audio software. I remember using Reason alongside Adobe Audition or ProTools or whatever-else and Propellerhead's Reason would be running all these synths in parallel and never hiccup or crash. This was on machines from 2005. I recall Windows semi-crashing (and Audition or ProTools with it), explorer.exe completely gone and just a desktop background screen and our midi keyboard still controlling a multi-layer synth set-up and playing from the speakers with perfect responsiveness. (for those who might say that Reason crashed the rest of it and hogged all the resources I'll say this: It never happened when we only had Reason running. It only happened when we had other editing software open as well... and we always had plenty of memory available). I don't know if their stuff is still the same or has started to rot but there was a point where it was a real engine that blew my mind.
• therealmarv 10y ago
  Forklift on (OS X) or even better: Total Commander (only program I miss from Windows). rsync if you copy a lot (it can be overwhelming with all options but I trust it).
• unexistance 10y ago
  firefox + tiddlywiki ffmpeg vlc virtualbox vi / awk / grep / more / sed [windows only] notepad++ (I sorely miss this in linux T_T) SysTrayPlay mp3
• shermanyo 10y ago
  For music production, I use Ableton Live. It has a non-linear workflow that increased my creativity by an order of magnitude, and is a joy to work with. In my experience, its been rock solid reliable (generally give them 6 months before upgrading to most recent versions).
• vithlani 10y ago
  Emacs. One of he first things I do these days on a new machine is fire up Emacs in daemon mode. After that, I edit using the emacsclient -- files open in micro seconds and due to everything being pre-loaded I have all of my tailored config available right away.
• juliancox 10y ago
  TinyPNG and JPG. https://tinypng.com/ https://tinypng.com/ Very reliable and makes me happy - thanks Panda.
• lewisl9029 10y ago
  Discord has been rock solid so far for VOIP, and actually has great UX. A refreshing change after years of using mumble/teamspeak and maintaining my own servers on flaky cheap VPS providers.
  • infectoid 10y ago
    Ridiculous how well this actually works. The target market is gamers but I use it for business.
    • Semiapies 10y ago
      I just use it to talk to friends and drop links. Much nicer than Skype or Google Hangouts (after Google took out all the functionality).
• ymse 10y ago
  From the systems/operations side of things.. Ganeti: rock solid clustered virtualization suite. OpenBSD: no fuzz server/router distro. Ceph: clustered network storage without tears. Varnish: covers any HTTP needs. Add haproxy or nginx for HTTPS. Corosync/Pacemaker: Designed for reliability. Leave VRRP where it belongs (I'm looking at you keepalived). xCAT: Little-known but widely used datacenter lifecycle management suite. Comes with cluster-aware shell, native remote consoles, BMC provisioning, unattended installs, DNS and much more. Guix: The package manager for the future. Things that make me want to tear my eyes out: Openstack: keeps breaking inexplicably, nightmare to configure and maintain. Terrible documentation. Vyatta: Don't even want to talk about it. RHEL: Upgrades systemd 207->219 in minor release. Backports unstable kernel patches. Requires EPEL for lots of standard software. RabbitMQ logging has been broken more than two months (BZ 1324922).
  • mwpmaybe 10y ago
    > Corosync/Pacemaker: Designed for reliability. Leave VRRP where it belongs (I'm looking at you keepalived). I just set up a floating IP address for the first time today and went with keepalived. Why would you recommend Corosync/Pacemaker over keepalived?
    • ymse 10y ago
      If you need just the floating IP address, keepalived is fine. I'm mostly bitter from spending days tracking down a race condition stemming from its notification scripts, which wasn't really keepaliveds fault per se. But if you need to start/move/constraint/notify anything along with the IP, or require sub-second failover, Corosync/Pacemaker is a far better choice. However due to their complexity, for just a floating IP address, keepalived is unfortunately the best option for Linux (I usually have OpenBSD in that spot).
      • mwpmaybe 10y ago
        Thanks for the explanation. Out of sheer curiosity (and because I run BSD-based pfSense and FreeNAS at home), how do you handle floating IPs and that sort of thing on OpenBSD?
• rmsaksida 10y ago
  There have been lots of Windows and Mac OS replies to this thread, so here's a few Linux ones for a change: i3wm. I've experimented with many tiling window managers over the years but none of them got me to switch. i3, however, is something else. It's extremely simple, intuitive and easy to configure, and it might give you a small productivity boost depending on your workflow. For me this is tiling WMs done right. Sublime Text 2 and 3. It's rare to find multi-platform desktop software that works reliably on Linux, and ST does it exceedingly well. Valgrind. It's a game changer for certain kinds of development. Ruby. I rarely write scripts, because most of the time I can just run irb and do everything with an one-liner. The apt package management tools, or just Linux package management in general. Whenever I'm forced to use Windows or Mac I realize how fortunate it is that in Linux we're able to apt-get pretty much anything. SQuirrel (agnostic SQL client). It's not very well known but it's a solid client for anything that has a JDBC driver. Transmission. I find it has the perfect balance of features and simplicity for a Bittorrent application. It does what it needs to do reliably and doesn't get in your way. mplayer/mpv. This has been my media player of choice for what, 15 years? Back when my PC wasn't fast enough to play some video formats reliably, mplayer could do it if I killed everything else and used the vesa driver. No other software could do this. Comix. This is probably the best software I've ever used for browsing images sequentially in a folder (not just comic books). The interface is so simple but has all the features one would need (automatically uncompressing files, fast thumbnail generation, fit-to-width zooming, etc). youtube-dl. Give it an URL, it will download media from it, no questions asked. It's hard to find software that does the right thing as often as youtube-dl does. curl. For the same reason as above. ffmpeg. It can get quite advanced with the command line options but with just `ffmpeg -i format_in.<ext1> format_out.<ext2>` you can do any video conversion you can imagine. And of course, the favorites that have been mentioned here and I couldn't live without (git, ssh, bash, vim, python, sqlite, postgres, nginx, redis).
  • rsync 10y ago
    "youtube-dl. Give it an URL, it will download media from it, no questions asked. It's hard to find software that does the right thing as often as youtube-dl does." I will second that. youtube-dl is like magic. It's too good to be true.
• znpy 10y ago
  StumpWM: despite being Emacs-inspired, you can get going with very few keystrokes (just like in ratpoison) and despite I would like to switch to i3 (many friends have super cool setups) I cannot manage to stop using StumpWM. It just like vim: you learn those 4 things and you can do 90% of the things you usually do. For the remaining 10%.... there is the manual.
• steveax 10y ago
  BBEdit - it truly doesn't suck. Supremely scriptable and stable. Pinboard - amazingly good bookmarking. Pathfinder - the Finder is better than it used to be, but still no match. Soulver - the notepad calculator. Fiddler proxy - I use Charles on the Mac, but miss Fiddler. Omni Outliner - superb outliner. Arq - awesome backup software. jq - never work with json without it. iTerm2 - so good httpie - does what I mean. Audio Hijack - record anything.
• textmode 10y ago
  Anything from djb. Juxtaposed against the usual autoconf/Makefile insanity, his more recent make-free build system is a work of art. Part of the reliability equation to me is highly portable, quick, easy compiling. I've not come across anyone who does it better.
• combatentropy 10y ago
  psql, vim, git, bash --- all the old Linux command-line tools for that matter. For something with a GUI: Gmail. Don't know if this will help or not: http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ http://gettingreal.37signals.com/
• leephillips 10y ago
  As others have said before me, Linux, vim, git, postgresql, Apache, and XeLaTeX are worthy of becoming part of the infrastructure of your life. I'd like to add mutt, which makes wrangling thousands of email messages a breeze, and dovecot/imap, which is a very solid imap server - I can access my mail from several devices simultaneously and it never falters. Also, the amazing ImageMagick.
• syphilis2 10y ago
  These are software I love to use. I don't assume they're the best, and if you have any similar suggestions I'd love to hear them. There's a heavy Windows OS slant to this list. SunVox - Sequencer and tracker. The user interface is a big evolution from more traditional trackers because of how visual it is. This reduces the barrier to getting started, but it also make using the program simply more enjoyable. http://www.warmplace.ru/soft/sunvox/ http://www.warmplace.ru/soft/sunvox/ VirtualDub - Video processing. This is my go-to tool for simple video editing. It remains the quickest and easiest way I know of to make animated GIFs from video. http://www.virtualdub.org/ http://www.virtualdub.org/ HxD - Hex editor. Handles GB scale files very well. https://mh-nexus.de/en/hxd/ https://mh-nexus.de/en/hxd/ Foxit Reader - PDF reader. There's some conflict in the past with bundling adware installers with the software, I hope that practice is long gone. This is the most full feature Adobe Reader alternative I know of. https://www.foxitsoftware.com/ https://www.foxitsoftware.com/ Daemon Tools Lite - Virtual disc drive manager. Unfortunately limits to 4 drives. https://www.daemon-tools.cc/products/dtLite https://www.daemon-tools.cc/products/dtLite Space Sniffer - Disc space visualization. The clean look and intuitive visual interface is why I prefer this over WinDirStat. http://www.uderzo.it/main_products/space_sniffer/index.html http://www.uderzo.it/main_products/space_sniffer/index.html Other software I use, but which I expect is already well known: 7-Zip, Audacity, Blender, GIMP, ImgBurn, Inkscape, IntelliJ IDEA, Kodi, Libre Office, Notepad++, PuTTY, Unreal Engine 4, VLC
  • vaibhavsagar 10y ago
    I'd recommend Sumatra PDF and WinCDEmu over Foxit and Daemon Tools.
    • syphilis2 10y ago
      I tried out both of these today and I agree. Sumatra feels snappier than Foxit. It doesn't have as many buttons to interface with, but there are common keyboard shortcuts for the things I use. I dislike that the Advanced Options do not have a GUI interface, they're edited by modifying a text file. WinCDEmu is exactly what I wanted. I also appreciate that both programs are portable.
• rasengan 10y ago
  sed, chattr, dtach, screen, ssh, bash, etc. are all nice tools that can help you get shit done and mad reliable.
• bbcbasic 10y ago
  Virtualbox - means I can run Linux on the same computer very easily. Easy to use and reasonably fast. Keepass - been using that password manager for years. Nice search feature that always saves my *. Vim - nice way to code on a laptop. Makes super efficient use of space and rarely requires me to use the track pad.
• jessriedel 10y ago
  Everyone should knoe about alternativeto.net for finding better software.
• egypturnash 10y ago
  Adobe Illustrator. Which is probably a teetering pile of kludges on top of hacks on top of "quick fixes". But I've been using it to draw for about fifteen years now, I have a sixth sense that tells me I'm about to do something that may cause a crash and makes me hit "save". Earlier this month I was playing with running it on a Surface, and ultimately stopped because there is some interaction between Illustrator and the drivers for the stylus MS used in that device that drops the first half-second of every pen stroke I make. And I draw fast. So one of the things beneath it that's so reliable I never even consider it could be a problem is the tablet drivers I'm used to using with a Wacom tablet on my Mac. (There was a lot of other yak-shaving in those weeks, in which I tried to turn a Windows system into something that wouldn't drive my Mac-using self crazy, and into a super-portable art tool. Keyboard remappers, Dropbox, tons of Windows settings... the only part that wasn't pretty unpleasant and tedious to wrangle was Dropbox.)
• the_watcher 10y ago
  Snip. It's a screenshot tool that just works. I mapped to CMD+CTRL+A and it saves the image to the clipboard. It just does exactly what I need it to do.
  • majewsky 10y ago
    How's this different from OS X's built-in screenshot tool (Cmd-Shift-3/4)?
• untangle 10y ago
  PopClip on Mac. A tiny menu-bar app that does so much, so easily. All cliches apply, including the one where Apple should buy them. This should be part of MacOS. Extensible architecture too.
• mwpmaybe 10y ago
  Varnish HAproxy Ansible Ubuntu Server Redis Postfix Ruby: Sequel, Sinatra, Sidekiq, Puma
• emacsygen 10y ago
  On OS X - Emacs, Alfred, VLC, Postgres.app, Spectacle, iTerm
• spapas82 10y ago
  Under windows: mencoder which I prefer over ffmpeg that some users have mentioned. It uses the same libraries and has -at least for me- a simpler command line interface (mencoder file.in -o file.out -ovc select_video_codec -ovc select_audio_codec -of select_output_format -- try mencoder a -o o -ovc help -oac help -of help to see all options). Also its sister program mplayer is great for playing everything under windows - I also prefer it over VLC that has been mentioned here. It has a much simpler interface (only uses the keyboard - left right up down page up page down f o + - etc) than VLC and can be run through the command line (run mplayer test.avi and the video will immediatelly start). Finally, it can easily be integrated with windows explorer: Just add a "Send To..." mplayer shortcut and you'll be ready to play everything under windows! I'm using these tools for around 7-8 years for all my audio/video (transcoding and playing) needs, they munched everything I had thrown at them!
• geff82 10y ago
  Knuth's TeX and Texstudio, in conjunction with gnuplot.
• l0b0 10y ago
  xterm is a great terminal for a tiled window manager. Never crashed in several years, and does one thing well enough.
• curryMyLambda 10y ago
  Been using the Ramda lib for functional programming. It's been a great intro lib to the aspects of func. programming, and while the learning curve is steep, the result is cleaner code with less chance of making a mistake.
• zubairq 10y ago
  i enjoy LightTable as my text editor. And it has amazing global search
• tujv 10y ago
  nvALT, which is a fork of the Notational Velocity note-taking app on OSX. Rock solid and very fast!
  • tuananh 10y ago
    nv is already simple and very fast. I found nvAlt rather buggy
    • tujv 10y ago
      Just curious, but what bugs have you encountered in nvAlt? I switched over for the Collapse Note List function.
• netgusto 10y ago
  The PHP5+ interpreter. Has served the world reliably for over a decade.
• tujv 10y ago
  The Public Domain Korn Shell version 5.2.14. A rock solid shell that hasn't been (or needed to be) updated in nearly 20 years.
• Aoyagi 10y ago
  On Windows: Everything - simple and quick file search tool Ditto - clipboard history Nokia PC Suite - I still use Nokia 808 PW as my primary device, and the PC Suite is one of the reasons Puush - quick screenshot/file sharing tool KVIrc - IRC client Pidgin - multi-protocol IM client Opera 12 - living with this thing is becoming increasingly difficult, but I don't want to imagine living without it WinDirStat - storage space allocation visualisation ... Then there's a ton of regular stuff: VLC, Photoshop, GetDataBack, Winamp, Telegram, Astroburn, CrystalDiskInfo, NetLimiter, LibreOffice, OpenVPN, Filezilla, 7Zip, Deluge, VirtualBox, TeamViewer.....
  • stuxnet79 10y ago
    Can you integrate Pidgin with Google Hangouts?
    • Aoyagi 10y ago
      As far as I know you can, but some features may be limited/nonexistent.
• dmytroi 10y ago
  Far Manager http://www.farmanager.com/index.php?l=en http://www.farmanager.com/index.php?l=en - works perfectly, still have this Norton Commander feeling from 80-x.
• xchaotic 10y ago
  1. Operating Systems: it's easy to take them for granted, but nowadays they just work, for both Windows and macOS and even Ubuntu are fine. Linux kernel is particularly impressive - I have a server with 1800 days uptime. Mobile OSes are dumbed and locked down so I am not a big fan, but again, they just work. 2. Browsers: Edge, Chrome, Firefox, Safari - they just work. 3. Text editors: Sublime, Notepad++, VSCode etc 4. Virtual Machines: VirtualBox, VMWare - again the core software has not crashed on me once, even when using dual virtual NICs etc 5.Steam, Source Engine or Frostbite Engine or id games. Generally with some sad exceptions (Batman) you can just launch a game and enjoy it. 6. Plex - I've had it running 24/7 for years, streaming movies.
• wvh 10y ago
  rsync+ssh: Still more reliable than other sync software or exotic filesystems. Inkscape: When you have to do graphics and diagrams for slides and posters, you don't have all that much choice on Linux, so I'm happy a quality vector graphics program exists. It might be a bit more cumbersome than commercial software dedicated to schemas and technical drawings, but at least you can rely on it to get the job done, with only your creativity as the limit. Cog/Cogx, XMMS and Winamp: I don't have Windows or Mac OSX, but I have good memories of using these simple (in a positive sense) music players on occasions I had to use those operating systems, and I still miss a basic player such as XMMS these days when everything looks like it's trying to out-iTune iTunes. Then there's mostly server-side software such as Nginx; Sqlite and Postgresql (and other database software); and typical mail server software like Postfix and Dovecot that I guess most people would agree to be vastly reliable, but that shouldn't be a surprise given the nature of server-side software.
  • rsync 10y ago
    "rsync+ssh: Still more reliable than other sync software or exotic filesystems." Remember that rsync.net has a "HN Readers" discount. Just email us.
• atsaloli 10y ago
  CFEngine for configuration management. CFEngine is a promise engine -- you can see what promises about the system state have been verified, which have been repaired and which couldn't be repaired. I like the insight into infrastructure that it provides. It's been around since 1993 and is quite mature. Working with CFEngine, I got into git. I trust git too. :-)
• Sophistifunk 10y ago
  SQLite is probably a contender, but think a pretty good case can be made that the JVM is the best software ever written.
• bronlund 10y ago
  Counter-Strike: Global Offensive I would go mad if I don't get to blow someones head off :D
• dkersten 10y ago
  Checkvist, a checklist, task management and planning tool. I mainly use it for brainstorming and planning and its great. Been using it for many years now. Just wish the mobile experience was better (its too easy to accidentally move items on mobile), but they have a decent API, so maybe one day I'll hack one together that works how I want.
• homoSapiens 10y ago
  iTerm on mac. You'll appreciate it more if you've used a linux (Ubuntu etc) OS for a long time before.
• dorfuss 10y ago
  winamp. sublime text. anki. libre office. audacity. quicktime. eclipse. komodo. english dictionary (part of mac os). TextEdit. codeblocks. virtualbox. join.me, vcl broken software I hate: all web browsers, thunderbird, gimp, microCommander, calibre, itunes, iphoto, cyberduck, skype,
• frik 10y ago
  WinAmp 2
• sidcool 10y ago
  Google Docs/Spreadsheets are amazing.
• collyw 10y ago
  Django. Makes me way more productive, and the guys who wrote it know a lot more about web dev than me. It has taught me a lot and made me a better coder as well as improving my productivity. Docs are good as well.
• rbanffy 10y ago
  Emacs. Does what I need, is versatile and fast.
• dagw 10y ago
  FME (www.safe.com)
• Grue3 10y ago
  Emacs, git, GIMP, postgres, SBCL, Winamp, uTorrent (old version), PuTTY, Dropbox, 7zip, IrfanView
• lode 10y ago
  Can’t live without: 1Password - First install on any system I use. I only know 2 passwords by heart: my login password and my 1Password vault pw. Also supports TOTP 2 factor authentication. Dropbox - It’s a folder, it syncs, and does this very well. Syncs my 1Password vault as well. GrandPerspective - Visualise where your disk space is going. Every time I fire this up I find stuff I’ve forgotten about that takes up a lot of space, or something that is using disk space it shouldn’t. (Once a WiFi log hadn’t rolled over and was using 8GB of space.) - http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net/ http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net/ Synology - It took some investment, but now I finally have a place where all my data is, safer than on one or two external drives. But that’s not all, Synology also is a fantastic home/office server with an “app store” where I can run applications, run a VPN endpoint, run Docker containers, ... Crashplan - Not the fantastic lightweight native Mac & Linux tool I’d want, but rather a somewhat heavy Java tool. But the business model for me is great. Free replication between endpoints, ie. all my family and my NAS and unlimited replication to their datacenters for my own devices for $5/month (Crashplan Family) - http://www.crashplan.com http://www.crashplan.com Plex - For me it’s always been super reliable. Server runs flawlessly on my Synology. - http://www.plex.tv http://www.plex.tv Pinboard.in - Proudly non-free, stable and boring. The author’s presentations and twitter feeds are insightful and hilarious, I’m glad to support his work. Superduper - I use it less often than before, since I now have a proper NAS and backup solution (see above), but Superduper has helped me so much in the past it deserves a mention. Always provides a safety net when I do a migration between hdd and sdd, between systems, ... I even bought two licenses as I lost my previous one, spending another $28 on it was a no brainer. http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription... Coda - Still my html/css/php/… editor of choice. - http://www.panic.com/coda/ http://www.panic.com/coda/ Waze on my phone: best navigation I’ve ever used youtube-dl wget & curl - they have slightly other use cases, and I love them both. I use both of them at least weekly, mostly daily VMware Fusion & vSphere/ESXi: still rock solid after all those years. (Disclaimer: I work there) Other software I particularly love: Sketch (mentioned elsewhere in the thread) and Affinity Designer. I like Illustrator, but as a non-professional it’s way too expensive for me.
• the_watcher 10y ago
  Don't see it anywhere, but ack has been such a big improvement on grep for me, particularly once I aliased a few ack --with-flags
• aphextron 10y ago
  WinDirStat
• ivanyv 10y ago
  RubyMine. Went through TextMate, Sublime, vim, you name it. For Ruby development this IDE is superb and a joy to use everyday. Only downside is getting used to it when sometimes it isn't available (vim comes to the rescue usually).
• LarryMade2 10y ago
  Inkscape - May not be AI but it does a great job for what it is - recent improvements have set it in a class of its own. Eclipse - slow probably, reliable yes. Thunderbird - Just works A Good Text Editor - (choose your flavor) When word processors or other text tools just get in the way - you can clear up a lot of frustration with a decent text editor. Meld - Great file & directory comparator/text editor MacOS/OSX - compared to other OSs Mac "just works" (though over the decades it doesn't "just work" always as well as it had - but still "just works" better than most for those not OS savvy.) Linux - may be a bit of a struggle to get up to speed initially but it doesn't let you down Ubuntu - Some years are good some are bad but even on the bad years the community support will get you up and running and once you are there you're good for a few years.
• pdm55 10y ago
  I mention Geogebra, https://www.geogebra.org/ https://www.geogebra.org/, because I believe more people interested in exploring mathematics should be using it. Me, I cannot get enough of it.
• tokhi 10y ago
  I like pgAdmin3, a great tool to manage your postgres DB.