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Ask HN: What's the best piece of software you use every day?
After "What's the worst piece of software you use every day?" I am now very curious what the best software is we can learn from.
- thdrdt 6y agoI like Blender a lot. Especially since v2.8. How you can rearrange the interface. The shortcuts. How fast it is.
- forgotmypw17 6y agoI'm a huge fan of qutebrowser. It feels years ahead of any other competition in just about every sense. Runner-up: IntelliJ. I haven't written a line of Java in several years, but I still use it. Probably goes without saying, but I don't know how I would survive without GNU/POSIX. Many blessings to all involved.
- The-Compiler 6y agoYay! :)
- vegetablepotpie 6y agogit It lets you keep track of your file history in one place. You can share that history with others in many ways. Use it as a collaborative tool. It allows everyone to work independently and combine their code on their own terms. It’s really hard to mess it up and put it in a bad state, almost everything can be undone without consequences. You can set up central repos on shared drives or servers, or choose to forgo central repos all together. It works fine using simple paradigms but can scale to be as sophisticated as you need. It’s easy to set up and doesn’t get in the way of your other work.
- XCSme 6y agoFunny how git was also mentioned a lot in the "worst piece of software" thread.
- jis 6y agoemacs -- Well, heck its emacs! git -- Change history is your friend, and you get out what you put in (hashes verify data against corruption) tinc -- There Is No Cabal: Mesh VPN lets you build a VPN across diverse environments including different clouds.
- yadco 6y agoMy web browser
- polyacr 6y agoZsh
- smabie 6y agoProbably Emacs. Also I like OpenBSD.
- Barrin92 6y agoemacs although that's probably not a surprising answer. Something a little less known I found recently was 'Kitty Terminal', which is very snappy gpu based emulator, makes more of a difference than I thought it would. Also ripgrep and fish shell, and i3.
- billconan 6y agovscode sublime photoshop krita
- rogual 6y agoI'm conflicted about Photoshop. It is, at its core, an absolutely fantastic piece of software, but as time goes on it slowly accrues this accretion disc of bullshit: dialogs implemented with web-views, video tooltips, mandatory sign-in, Adobe service tie-ins, and shortly before I stopped using it, I started seeing honest-to-god popup ads inside the UI.
- artembugara 6y agoElasticsearch. When using it as a text search engine. Love it.
- darkteflon 6y agoWhat do you like about it specifically?
- christiansakai 6y agoVim/vi. Was forced to use the bare bones because of some company’s machine config and yes we debug in production lmao. I slowly discover that I don’t need fancy configs.
- shoulder47834 6y agoHow do you get line numbers in Vi? I tried once but `:set number` put them inside the file!
- jdan222 6y agoI am pretty sure you have to add it to the configuration file for line numbers to display each time you open a new file.
- ShinTakuya 6y agoSo the "rc" in vimrc means "run commands". And while the term gets abused, by and large what's in vimrc can just be run directly by yourself in vim without a file. All the config file really does is run a list of commands on startup.
- tkjef 6y agoto get line numbers: :set nu to remove line numbers: :set nonu the line numbers aren't added to the file. they're just shown on the vi editor. and if you like vim & git i highly recommend: vim-gitgutter
- hanselot 6y ago:set rnu will give you relative line numbers from current line in both directions, so you can quickly 20jyy20kp to copy whatever is 20 lines down to here, etc etc. Its infinitely useful on servers. And you can script macros like nothing.
- realpanzer 6y agoMy brain K-Meleon browser MiXplorer Block This
- toomuchtodo 6y agoMacOS. Everything “just works” (iCloud, FaceTime, unlock with Apple Watch, multiple wide screen monitors) and I can still drop into a terminal whenever necessary to run something I wouldn’t run in a container.
- immago 6y agoRecently - linear app. Long term - Vi/vim as many have mentioned already. Well, more specifically it's bindings in vscode, but still. It's just so powerful :)
- jeffrallen 6y agoEmacs
- topicseed 6y agoChrome, VSCODE.
- yftsui 6y agoiMessage and FaceTime. Simple, works, keep me connected with people who are relevant.
- Shared404 6y agoFor me personally: Pop!_OS Alpine Linux Firefox Alacritty Vim
- tuesday20 6y agoHow do you find pop os compared to Ubuntu?
- Shared404 6y agoFor my use case, far superior. It has basically all of the benefits of Ubuntu, with few of the drawbacks. The biggest benefits for me personally: 1. I have a laptop with optimus graphics. Pop played nicely out of the box. 2. Uses flatpak instead of snap. I prefer native to flatpak, but flatpak to snap. 3. Has very little bloat in a default install. 4. System76 has been consistently moving in the right direction UI wise.
- SirensOfTitan 6y agoFor work and productivity: emacs and org mode. For personal life: Marvin for reading (infinite auto scroll, custom fonts are awesome), Insight Timer as a simple meditation timer.
- Jtsummers 6y agoEmacs is probably the only piece of software I've used nearly daily (regardless of OS) for the past 20 years, and org-mode for the past 10 or so. Really good pieces of software.
- ha-ckernews 6y agoVirtualbox All-in-one Messenger eReader Prestigio (Android)
- WheelsAtLarge 6y agoAmazon's Alexa on my Echo. I use it everyday as soon as I wake up and when I go to sleep and through out the the day. It's quirky but for the most part it works. Pretty amazing...
- dorkwood 6y agoHoudini. It has so many uses: procedural generation of 3D geometry, as a learning tool for understanding matrix transformations, as an FX and simulation tool. It's the most powerful piece of software I've ever used. It feels like it's from the future.
- naveen99 6y agoAutohotkey
- dave_sid 6y agoIos
- originalvichy 6y agoApollo for Reddit on iOS. It checks boxes for - good feature set - active development - native UI elements
- badinsie 6y agosublime text
- gtaylor 6y agoI'm not an engineer anymore so this is going to be pretty unexciting: Google Docs (and Sheets). Or really any product that offers the same rock solid realtime collaborative experience. I'm not always excited to open them up. Docs and Sheets don't seem to be seeing much visible improvement over the last few years. But in my org they're the way we build consensus, make decisions, track, document, discuss, and more. It's easy for me to complain about them, but they are both so effective and valuable (to me). As an engineer I probably would have said JetBrains IDEs. I find myself spending less time thinking about tooling, syntax, the standard library, finding/moving/renaming things, and more time thinking about what I'm building.
- Mekantis 6y agorupa/z Being able to type something like "z ab g f" to reach a fairly deeply nested directory is almost akin to magic. I absolutely hate cd'ing everywhere, and often I'm cd'ing between the same couple of directories for a number of projects, so I feel like it helps retain my sanity. I've also written scripts to take advantage of it, such as a cp clone that doesn't require an immediate target. So I can cp a file (or number of files, or a directory), z-jump to a different directory and paste it there instead of laboriously typing out all the directory paths. I love it.
- darkteflon 6y agoJust wanted to say thanks for this rec. Tried it this morning and I'm smitten. Adding this to my (tiny) set of non-standard tools, alongside ripgrep, fzf and fd-find.
- g8oz 6y ago* ublock origin * chromium devtools * vs code * bitvise ssh for Windows * Sumatra PDF reader for Windows * moon+ reader for android (epub reader) * F-stop Gallery for Android (Picture library management)
- terandle 6y agoYouTube, supports delivering 8k video on a massive scale and a recommendation engine that is probably too good.
- knaik94 6y agoDaum Potplayer
- sanjeetsuhag 6y agoTelegram - It's fast, syncs perfectly across all platforms and the UX is perhaps the most intuitive I've ever seen in a messaging app. Great search features, an API for analytics/bots, large file sharing limits...
- iron0013 6y agoRstudio. It was clearly made by people who come from a data analysis and statistical programming background, rather than traditional programming. Having started with R in college, I just took it for granted that every IDE would be as straightforward and easy to use as Rstudio, getting out of the way and allowing the user to get shit done. I sadly learned otherwise! In particular, there is no environment of equivalently high quality in the Python for data analysis ecosystem. Nothing even comes close.
- stratified 6y agoPyCharm / IntelliJ - I used to be a die hard vim user but these products just blew my mind. Worth every penny and then some!
- noema 6y agoIntelliJ / Android Studio / other JetBrains IDEs. Maybe a little too resource intensive, but the UX and context-sensitive intellisense is light-years ahead of the competition.
- XCSme 6y agoVSCode - Opens quickly, no freezes, regular updates, huge ecosystem I am also pretty satisfied with YouTube (premium, so no ads): high quality videos that load fast, clean UI, very good recommendations, huge community. I would also like to say Twitch, but their platform is a lot more buggy than YouTube, quality not that great and it's harder to find good content/streamers.
- kvark 6y agoIrfanView - by far the fastest, most convenient and powerful image viewer. WinAMP 2.95 - simple and effective music player TotalCommander - brings file management on the next level, very smooth and robust. All of these are from 10-15 years in the past, unfortunately
- joddystreet 6y agoPostgreSQL (it just keeps blowing my mind). Firefox.
- forgotmypw17 6y agoI just thought of another one: XScreensaver.
- tmaly 6y agoMS Teams. It has really helped my team as we work from home. It is a lot easier to stay in contact and conduct group meetings.