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Ask HN: What are you favorite tiny tools?
Everybody I know has a set of little software tools that they use that make their work either slightly easier or slightly more pleasant.
What are the tiny tools that you use for your work?
Some of mine:
Skitch -- Little Mac app that makes it easy to take screenshots and draw/write on them
Be Focused -- A simple Pomodoro timer for Mac
"Remove Stickies" -- A URL bookmarklet I wrote that removes all floating elements from a page
- mbrock 8y agoA little alias that rewrites clone foo/bar into git clone --recursive https://github.com/foo/bar is one of my favorites.
- ioddly 8y agoI like this one, here it is for Fish shell: https://gist.github.com/upvalue/4f34df2397786535732a77676a726197 https://gist.github.com/upvalue/4f34df2397786535732a77676a72...
- mikebos 8y agoDrafts 5 combined with workflow and Pythonista on IOS. For everything ranging from diary, personal crm, search adress/telephone number/e-mail in a given text, meeting notes and well almost anything. Very usefull combo
- JHonaker 8y agoWhat actions do you have set up? Would you mind describing it in a little more detail? (Particularly the Drafts stuff)
- mikebos 8y agoSure. Diary: - Python script that fetches the diary template and fills it with information like location - With x-callback-url it is sent to drafts - in drafts I can edit the rest and have an action to upload it to working copy In drafts the action Call: With x-callback-url open pythonista and parse the text for a telephone number. Then that's sent to the call program Drafts Meeting notes: Launch python script. Scripts get the template from working copy and fills it with date and through a popup a Title. Want to change that so you can select the meeting from the calendar and have it filled in. Then sends it back to drafts. I have a vacation list drafts pulls from working copy. In drafts I have shortcuts to add that draft to due, Things or mail/whatsapp it. The drafts forums and resource directory are a good starting point. Once you add Pythonsita all bets are off it becomes the most versatile app on the phone. Working copy is nice to have so you don't have to deal with templates in java script code or with tags in draft itself. Apparantly a mac app is coming, currently a pc user, this would almost be enough to just get a mac :-)
- dasmoth 8y ago"paste" -- an unexpectedly useful data-wrangling tool. I used a hand-rolled version for years before discovering it was available "as standard".
- designnomad 8y agoVanilla -- ‘hide Mac menu bar icons’ (https://matthewpalmer.net/vanilla/ https://matthewpalmer.net/vanilla/) Clocker -- ‘Menubar World Clock’
- designnomad 8y agoCheatSheet -- ‘active short cuts of the current application’ (https://www.cheatsheetapp.com/CheatSheet/ https://www.cheatsheetapp.com/CheatSheet/)
- Artemix 8y agoI use kickstart to manage my templates, including projects (https://github.com/Keats/kickstart/ https://github.com/Keats/kickstart/)
- superasn 8y agoVideo speed controller chrome extension. It lets you speed up videos on any site. I usually watch videos at 4x to 6x speed now (in addition to saving time I feel that I don't get distracted / daydream as much). Sadly it's like an addiction and now I even watch Netflix at 1.5X speed too (which makes it impossible to watch with family)
- garyng 8y agoI have this extension too, I usually watch videos at 2x (a way to be "productive" while watching youtube videos ). But I wonder how can one watch at 4x/6x...
- superasn 8y agoI think it's a matter of habit and the more you do it the easier it gets (like training a muscle). 4x is very useful when watching video tutorials (lynda, udemy, etc) and generally I'm able to understand everything including the audio. 6x is when I just want to see the slides and code but can't understand the audio. It's rare but sometimes very useful.
- Kagerjay 8y agoThe secret is captions. You speed read through videos. I still watch most dense tutorials at 2x speed though, and TV shows at 1x speed
- jpincheira 8y agoJumpcut — macOS menubar clipboard manager with keyboard shortcuts Spectacle - macOS window resizer / manager
- yesenadam 8y agobash, AWK, sips. A couple of bash commands I use daily: cdf - change directory to the folder open in (Mac) Finder cdf () { currFolderPath=$( /usr/bin/osascript <<EOT tell application "Finder" try set currFolder to (folder of the front window as alias) on error set currFolder to (path to desktop folder as alias) end try POSIX path of currFolder end tell EOT ) echo "cd to \"$currFolderPath\"" cd "$currFolderPath" } #dlm - "dlm filename" downloads filename.mp4 from URL in clipboard until its finished, resuming if interrupted fname=$(pbpaste) echo "Download $fname as $1.mp4 : " until curl -C - -kLo $1.mp4 "$fname" do sleep 5 done
- cuchoi 8y agoWhere do you put this bash script?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- JonathanMerklin 8y ago~/.bash_profile is the macOS equivalent of a .bashrc It's also possible that the author is source-ing it (spelled that way intentionally :\) ) from another file in their .bash_profile Note also that the author of the comment above was fast and loose with their description of dlm, and if you copypaste it as-written, it'll bomb. (Perhaps obvious, but you did ask where to put it!)
- yesenadam 8y agoAh thank u, yes, sorry. I have dlm saved as a shell script file. I didn't paste here the first-line bash shebang, which would have made that clearer. Maybe I use most: alias ..='cd ../' Then ".." moves up to the parent directory.
- theknarf 8y agoI don't use finder that much. My workflow usually involves finding stuff in the terminal and then using `open .` to open it in finder if needed. But that snipped was neet! So I'm adding it to my dotfiles.
- schappim 8y agoI'm surprised no one has mentioned Alfred App https://www.alfredapp.com/ https://www.alfredapp.com/ I cannot give it enough upvotes!
- teknico 8y agoYou could have added a description, though, so that uninterested people don't have to click the link. Here it goes: "Alfred 3 for Mac Alfred is an award-winning app for Mac OS X which boosts your efficiency with hotkeys, keywords, text expansion and more. Search your Mac and the web, and be more productive with custom actions to control your Mac."
- orcs 8y agoSounds like autohotkey.
- enjayz 8y agoAvid fan of https://htmlcolorcodes.com/ https://htmlcolorcodes.com/ However, since a while ago if you search "HTML color picker" google brings up a built-in color picker as the first result.
- mstaoru 8y agosmcFanControl - makes my old '14 MBP with replaced-almost-everything tolerably warm. menuBUS - for easy switching between built-in audio, Bluetooth, digital output + equalizing each of them in their own ways. Spectacle - for window management and easy fullscreen, half-screen and whatever-part-of-screen shortcuts. Karabiner - for complicated hotkey rebinding and controlling those Logitech presenter sticks where clever designer put a tiny "Close presentation and exit" key right next to "Next slide". LICEcap - for capturing screen to GIF files for easy sharing.
- cortinaone 8y ago+1 menuBUS is great. Too bad it's not being developed anymore.
- tnolet 8y agoWas. A Licecap user too, but now switched to GIPHY capture. Recommended.
- LVB 8y agoThe ‘z’ directory switching bash script is usually the first thing I miss when away from my own environment: https://github.com/rupa/z https://github.com/rupa/z
- xelxebar 8y agoNot precisely a tool, but YouTube channels actually have RSS feeds associated with them: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=<channel-id> From your subscriptions page, you can even download an OPML with feeds for each channel. Most RSS will let you import this just fine. As I love the cli, my preferred reader is newsboat[0]. [0]: https://newsboat.org/ https://newsboat.org/
- tnolet 8y agoHttpie - basically a nicer cUrl. Adding json and headers is super simple. https://httpie.org https://httpie.org Puppeteer Recorder - tooting my own horn, but is a Chrome extension that records Puppeteer scripts. https://github.com/checkly/puppeteer-recorder https://github.com/checkly/puppeteer-recorder
- tarellel 8y agoHTTPie is a great tool for testing API and stuff. I love it, I've also started using an Electron GUI app similar to HTTPie that works pretty well as well. - https://insomnia.rest/ https://insomnia.rest/
- msadowski 8y agoFor me it's tmuxp (https://github.com/tmux-python/tmuxp/blob/master/README.rst https://github.com/tmux-python/tmuxp/blob/master/README.rst). It allows to create scripts for tmux sessions. It easily shaves off about 1 to 2 minutes of my time everyday.
- mohitmun 8y agoI extensively use [pngpaste](https://github.com/jcsalterego/pngpaste https://github.com/jcsalterego/pngpaste) Now I can copy any images from browsers/screenshot into any location in terminal I want
- wingerlang 8y agoSnappy - Let's you keep screenshot on-screen, annotate and so on.
- ivanmaeder 8y agoColour picker: https://sipapp.io/ https://sipapp.io/ Download videos from YouTube and other sources: https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/ https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/ (was the only way I could get a video from the BBC site recently) Chrome extension for taking a screenshot of a full web page: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/full-page-screen-capture/fdpohaocaechififmbbbbbknoalclacl?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/full-page-screen-c... Shameless plugs: Script for renaming multiple files at the same time: https://github.com/ivanmaeder/vimv https://github.com/ivanmaeder/vimv Button in macOS Finder for creating a file in the current folder: https://github.com/ivanmaeder/finder-touch https://github.com/ivanmaeder/finder-touch That last one written in AppleScript which is craaazy.
- filosofikode 8y ago- httpie -- command line HTTP client - bat -- A cat(1) clone with wings
- jaclaz 8y agoGeneric resource (mac/OsX): https://tinyapps.org/osx.html https://tinyapps.org/osx.html Cannot judge for Mac, but the selection of Windows little tools has traditionally been very good, the only Mac one I ever used (and it proved to work well) was WakeOnLan: http://www.readpixel.com/wakeonlan/ http://www.readpixel.com/wakeonlan/
- rusinov 8y agoFor Mac automation I use: Keyboard Maestro, Hazel, Automator, AppleScript. Not a tiny ones, though.
- txmjs 8y agoBitBar (https://github.com/matryer/bitbar https://github.com/matryer/bitbar) Allows you to create custom MacOS menubar items from the text output of any script.
- beckler 8y agongrok: https://ngrok.com/ https://ngrok.com/ expose local servers to the public internet (super helpful for building webhooks) grpcurl: https://github.com/fullstorydev/grpcurl https://github.com/fullstorydev/grpcurl awesome tools for testing gRPC services objective-see: https://objective-see.com/products.html https://objective-see.com/products.html tons of awesome security tools for mac, for free! f.lux: https://justgetflux.com/ https://justgetflux.com/ great tool to adjust the color of your screen depending on the time of day
- albertgoeswoof 8y agohttps://tab.bz https://tab.bz to share lists of links to other people as one link, or just across devices that aren’t synced
- trevordixon 8y agoI run https://serveo.net https://serveo.net. Lets you expose local services through a proxy server (a la ngrok), but uses SSH as the transport, so there's nothing to install.
- maio 8y agoCaffeine - http://lightheadsw.com/caffeine/ http://lightheadsw.com/caffeine/ Caffeine is a tiny program that puts an icon in the right side of your menu bar. Click it to prevent your Mac from automatically going to sleep, dimming the screen or starting screen savers. Click it again to go back. Right-click (or ⌘-click) the icon to show the menu.
- amorphous 8y agoScapple - by far my favourite brainstorming / mind mapping / thought collecting tool. I use it every day. Features are just perfect, simple and useful. I combine this with monosnap screenshot tool so I can drag images into notes. (It's from the maker of Scrivener)