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Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)

• TeddyDD 4y ago
  https://grep.app/ https://grep.app/ and https://cht.sh/ https://cht.sh/ for quick reference.
  • return_to_monke 4y ago
    I very much agree with cheat.sh! I just do curl cheat.sh/X instead of X --help and then man X and then the search for "how to do y in X"
• mtmail 4y ago
  Not 100h yet but I've been replacing custom Linux command output parsing with https://kellyjonbrazil.github.io/jc/ https://kellyjonbrazil.github.io/jc/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33448204 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33448204) lately.
  • spockz 4y ago
    I know this is the modulair way with piping. How would ` jc command args` be as opposed to `command args | jc —-command`?
    • kbrazil 4y ago
      Both ways work: $ jc ifconfig lo0 $ ifconfig lo0 | jc --ifconfig
  • hedora 4y ago
    That actually looks nice! (I've written at least 10,000 perl one-liners.) Will definitely check it out.
• huseyinkeles 4y ago
  Home Assistant [0] through bunch of automations we have around our home must’ve saved 100h in total for me and my partner so far. [0] - https://www.home-assistant.io/ https://www.home-assistant.io/
  • orthecreedence 4y ago
    I hook tons of stuff up to HA and I love it. It's great with Sonoff switches flashed with Tasmota.
    • BrandoElFollito 4y ago
      I've moved on my Sonoffs from Tasmota to ESPurna and finally to ESPhome which I find excellent.
    • tabulatouch 4y ago
      Which switches models? Zigbee? I am still fighting with them (unflashed at the moment)
      • orthecreedence 4y ago
        I'm using the S31's. Fairly easy to pop open and flash if you've got some alligator clips and one of those flash programmers (eg https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B075N82CDL/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B075N82CDL/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...).
  • tunesmith 4y ago
    What kind of automations have you found necessary? Any time I think about getting into it, I can only think of automations that sound silly or extra but nothing truly time-saving.
    • theblazehen 4y ago
      Where I live we have frequent scheduled power outages, I use that to schedule when and how far to charge my batteries
• DarrenDev 4y ago
  Easily https://vanyalabs.com/ https://vanyalabs.com/ (Access your FHIR API Data) My own app, not even at the Alpha stage, has already saved me and my team 100s of hours of parsing JSON results in Postman.
• tandav 4y ago
  * https://virtualenvwrapper.readthedocs.io https://virtualenvwrapper.readthedocs.io also alias to create jupyter kernel for activated environment: mkkernel() { if [ -n "$1" ]; then KERNEL_NAME=$1 elif [ -z "$VIRTUAL_ENV" ]; then echo "Pass either kernel name as argument or activate virtualenv" return 1 else [ -z "$1" ] KERNEL_NAME="$(basename $VIRTUAL_ENV)" echo "No kernel name provided, using name from virtualenv $KERNEL_NAME" fi pip install ipykernel python -m ipykernel install --user --name=$KERNEL_NAME }
• xmonkee 4y ago
  RedwoodJS https://github.com/redwoodjs/redwood https://github.com/redwoodjs/redwood I launched my startup from 0 to first customer in 3 months thanks to this guy. Most of my time saved was because of a solid collection of libraries, brilliantly integrated together (backend to frontend), and I didn't have to suffer analysis paralysis every time I needed something.
  • qrio2 4y ago
    Very interesting project, It's interesting to see trends coming back to bundled BE/FE. What would you say are the biggest issues you have with Redwood?
    • xmonkee 4y ago
      My issues are kind of specific to the idiosyncrasies of my app. Its multi-tenant and two-sided (admins and applicants), so I had to kind of roll my own auth system on top of the existing one. The fact that I could do that really means that it’s flexible enough honestly. Another issue is that it doesn’t expose a server.js file, so its hard to do stuff like integrate an APM.
    • BossingAround 4y ago
      Seems like a replacement for MeteorJS.
  • esperent 4y ago
    I've just been researching this the last few days. There's a couple of other similar tools that I'm also checking out: Refine.dev Wasp-lang.dev I'm quite early into researching these so I don't have anything much to say about them yet. Wasp is a DSL so it's a bit different.
    • matijash 4y ago
      Wasp DSL creator here, let me know if any questions :)
  • ckvjdonee 4y ago
• orthecreedence 4y ago
  Vim. I can never leave modal editing now. Been using it since 2010 and I think in vim when editing. It lets me enter a flow state so much easier. My brain maps into writing and editing.
  • INeedMoreRam 4y ago
    I feel similarly. My journey has been: VS Code, to Codium, to Atom, to Sublime, to now Vim where I feel the most productive.
    • forgotpwd16 4y ago
      I get moving to more minimal lightweight software but why go from VSC to Atom?
      • INeedMoreRam 4y ago
        Wanted to avoid Microsoft's telemetry and felt like I was being spied on.
  • Bekwnn 4y ago
    I try to stress this more than anything when talking about the merits of vim/emacs/etc. It's not about speed, it's about how effortless and 2nd nature editing text becomes. Which is really counterintuitive when you look at how complicated the programs are. But I felt that it became better/easier than regular text editing after only 3 weeks of fulltime use. The uninterrupted flow of keyboard use, and reduced mouse navigation, feels great. You only need to learn a very small subset of features to be very effective with it. Some people just stick to that forever. But you can also slowly add to it.
    • heipei 4y ago
      I'm a long-time vim user, and haven't really used anything else over the past 15-20 years. I use a nice color scheme, barely any plugins and a moderate but static vimrc. I feel like this is my happy place, it let's me write with the setup I'm used to, in any terminal, on any machine, and on any codebase (JS, Python, Go, HTML, C, etc). Every now and then I see the magic of modern text-editors (VSCode et al), especially with code completion /intellisense and file trees. For me, I rarely feel like I need to be able to complete function parameters in my code to be more productive. Code-writing takes up such a small amount of the creative process that I'm perfectly fine looking up seldom-used functions in a web-browser. I wonder if anyone has ever attempted the jump from longtime-vim-user to these and can share their stories about why or why not.
• wdrw 4y ago
  The Mosh SSH client for intermittent connectivity ( https://mosh.org/ https://mosh.org/ ) has definitely saved me at least 100 hours. Too bad that it's only available for Windows as a Chrome extension, and Chrome will discontinue support for it starting in the new year. Really not looking forward to having to search for an alternative...
  • ohbtvz 4y ago
    I guess you can install it in WSL?
  • yanokwa 4y ago
    I've switched from Mosh to Eternal Terminal (https://eternalterminal.dev https://eternalterminal.dev) because of its excellent native scrolling support.
    • ladberg 4y ago
      To add on to that, I use iTerm2 with tmux control mode which combines a native UI frontend with a tmux backend on a remote server, meaning I can spawn new native tabs, windows, or panes and they're all tracked by the remote so I can reconnect to all of them at once if I disconnect. I keep one laptop at home and one laptop at work and can seamlessly switch between the two without having to manage my active sessions at all. If I open a new tab at work and go home for the day it'll be there on my laptop at home.
    • chungy 4y ago
      Eternal Terminal pitches itself as entirely superior to Mosh, but also describes itself as using TCP (Mosh uses UDP). I'm curious how that can actually cover the use cases Mosh provides? Mosh using UDP means that as a connectionless protocol, your end points can move (eg: from WiFi to LTE, or vice-versa), and beyond a small hiccup, your connections remain alive and well.
      • yanokwa 4y ago
        ET adds a layer between application and TCP sockets that persists connections. https://eternalterminal.dev/howitworks https://eternalterminal.dev/howitworks has more. If you are mostly on unreliable and high-latency connections, mosh will likely feel better, but with no native scrollback.
• silverfrost 4y ago
  Red Gate's SQL Prompt for SQL Server Management Studio. Saved countless hours in very small increments: https://www.red-gate.com/products/sql-development/sql-prompt/ https://www.red-gate.com/products/sql-development/sql-prompt...
  • ckvjdonee 4y ago
• hprotagonist 4y ago
  The pure power of ripgrep + emacs to speed up refactoring _probably_ offsets the lots of game time i've spend diddling with my editor. at least that's what i tell myself.
  • robertcarter 4y ago
    care to share your .init etc, I still having figured how I want to couple the two
    • hprotagonist 4y ago
      for big edits and refactors, i've been using rg.el: https://rgel.readthedocs.io/en/2.1.0/usage.html?highlight=edit#edit-and-apply-wgrep https://rgel.readthedocs.io/en/2.1.0/usage.html?highlight=ed... as such: (use-package rg :straight (rg :type git :host github :repo "dajva/rg.el") :config (rg-enable-menu) ) and for short stuff/searching around, etc, i bound consult-ripgrep to M-s r.
  • pksebben 4y ago
    I have a bash function that mashes sed and rg together and it's dreamy. "hey, change all these to that, and don't make it complicated"
• nikivi 4y ago
  Still Karabiner and it's probably 1000 hours yearly at this point. https://wiki.nikiv.dev/macOS/apps/karabiner https://wiki.nikiv.dev/macOS/apps/karabiner On order of 100 hours, this year I'd say it's Sublime Merge, VSCode, Height (to manage projects) and Telegram.
  • jamesgreenleaf 4y ago
    Karabiner and Keyboard Maestro have saved me a lot of time as well. Being able to remap consistent shortcuts for every application is really nice. https://www.keyboardmaestro.com/main/ https://www.keyboardmaestro.com/main/ Alfred is another good one for Mac. Being able to add your own custom commands & workflows is useful. https://www.alfredapp.com/ https://www.alfredapp.com/ Hammerspoon too, which is great for scripting all different parts of Mac OS. I use it mainly for custom window layouts. https://www.hammerspoon.org/ https://www.hammerspoon.org/
    • CharlesW 4y ago
      Along these lines, Raycast¹ is excellent. It's got lots built-in capabilities and available extensions² that I've used to replace several miscellaneous utilities. ¹ https://www.raycast.com/ https://www.raycast.com/ ² https://www.raycast.com/store https://www.raycast.com/store
      • sarlalian 4y ago
        Raycast is on track to replace Alfred for me. The simplicity of scripting with it is so nice compared to relative complexity of Alfred workflows.
  • jesterson 4y ago
    Never heard of Height. What it does better if compared to say ClickUp/BaseCamp?
    • nikivi 4y ago
      I just like the way it lets me sort tasks. Mention how I use it below: https://wiki.nikiv.dev/focusing/goals https://wiki.nikiv.dev/focusing/goals https://wiki.nikiv.dev/research/solving-problems https://wiki.nikiv.dev/research/solving-problems
• jonathanstrange 4y ago
  make + pandoc + a build script in my own programming language + latex allow me to auto-generate the reference manual for my toy Lisp interpreter.[1] That was definitely a huge time-saver, since I already had the help entries for an online help system. [1] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rasteric/z3s5-lisp/main/docs/reference/build/reference.pdf https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rasteric/z3s5-lisp/main/do...
• Apreche 4y ago
  Of all the software I can think of quickly, the one I think may have saved the most time in my life is Google Maps.
  • teknopaul 4y ago
    How come it saves 100 hours for you? In the old days we had paper maps and I checked routes before I left: not doing that anymore has cost me time rather than saved me time. Many a time Google maps has sent me to the wrong place. Once to the middle of a mustard field in France which was a destination it changed to mid-route to a house called La Mutardier. 5 hours wrong lost there. Less than useless on a motorbike due to its UI, actually quite dangerous. I would say it has cost me many hours and saved me from carrying a map. Evermore useless adverts, and now hiding places that it doesn't get a kick back from. Oh and it's cost me money in fines from taking me the wrong way down streets I was not allowed to drive on. With no way to feed that info back into the system. When its wrong it stays wrong for years sometimes where I live, and we have street map, it ought to be half decent and at least safe for drivers.
    • forgotpwd16 4y ago
      >Many a time Google maps has sent me to the wrong place. Have used it for years and have never seen this happen. Neither has send me the wrong way in a lane.
    • Jensson 4y ago
      Google maps is a map, you can map out the routes yourself just like with old maps, but it is way faster to do so than with paper maps.
    • burnished 4y ago
      Searching the map for your target given only incomplete information is much faster. It also scopes the map to your screen size, paper does not do this, you save time finding the right resolution. It sounds like the real problem you are experiencing is that you stopped checking your route. If you treat it like a paper map on crack then it’s a great tool. And, to be fair, it does sound like you run into more frustrating ‘wtf!’ problems than others. Credentials: I used a paper map as a pizza boy.
• RedShift1 4y ago
  Not exactly a program but Postgraphile saved me a ton of time to write an API. All things considered probably way more than 100 hours.
• tunesmith 4y ago
  Flying Logic Aeon Timeline ObservableHQ - particularly the discovery that I can use most of it locally and privately for free. I've tried with quarto so far, but I think there are other ways too. What I want is a way to instantly switch between dag and tree data structures: graph for visual editing, tree for easy data entry. So something that would analyze/cluster intelligently to minimize links when converting to tree, for when children have multiple parents.
  • madjam002 4y ago
    Out of interest how do you run most of Observable locally?
    • tunesmith 4y ago
      I followed the instructions at Quarto.org, integrated with VS Code. So they are text documents stored locally. I didn't realize observable-cli was open source. I find it can't do nested logic the way observablehq.com can though. For instance, I like having inputs embedded in paragraphs of text, which requires having logic mixed in with a markdown cell. There are certain things that I can do on the web that don't work locally. There's also https://observablehq.com/@asg017/introducing-dataflow https://observablehq.com/@asg017/introducing-dataflow, which I haven't tried yet.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• LunarAurora 4y ago
  Instant Data Scraper [1] [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/instant-data-scraper/ofaokhiedipichpaobibbnahnkdoiiah https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/instant-data-scrap...
  • MattyMc 4y ago
    I wish there was some sort of 'export to selenium' function to this.
• yanokwa 4y ago
  ChangeDetection https://changedetection.io https://changedetection.io. Self-hosted website change detection.
• andwaal 4y ago
  JetBrains software.
  • fxtentacle 4y ago
    Specifically CLion's excellent code browsing features. It's the only thing between me and insanity when I have to "quickly" patch a binary with source code spread out over 1000+ files.
  • LouisSayers 4y ago
    Especially local history - being able to go back in time before any commits were made saves you rewriting code or having to remember what something was doing before. Otherwise the number of times I "show usages" or refactor shortcuts (rename, extract method / variable) throughout the day... All of it out of the box as well, it's great value for money.
  • pwenzel 4y ago
    XDebug in PHPStorm. Can't live without it!
• silasdb 4y ago
  Matrix Docker Ansible Deploy [1] allows me to unify all chat networks that I use under one single server (and, therefore, one single client), avoiding switching windows. I do believe it saved me hundred of hours... [1] https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy
• drmaximus 4y ago
  Sioyek: https://sioyek.info https://sioyek.info It's a PDF viewer that automatically finds and previews references in documents, even when the PDF doesn't have links. Makes reading some math books a very enjoyable experience instead of a chore.
• ramblerman 4y ago
  mpv, mpvacious [1], and anki I've been learning spanish, and since hitting the intermediate stage outside of talking I mainly watch spanish shows or dubbed shows (Star trek TNG). I can create flash cards of difficult to understand phrases, or new words in seconds. I usually still edit them slightly depending on my purpose for the flashcard, but having > 2000 cards right now, I can't imagine what doing this by hand, or manual review would have cost me. [1] https://github.com/Ajatt-Tools/mpvacious https://github.com/Ajatt-Tools/mpvacious
  • raffraffraff 4y ago
    My biggest problem with anki is that the isn't a nice way to make cards. There's a vscode plug-in that lets you do markdown but it's too limited and clunky last time I used it.
    • Siira 4y ago
      org-mode has some spaced repetitions tools (e.g., org-drill). I personally don't recommend SR by flashcards too much. It's better to do it more naturally. For example, read books regularly to learn a language; common words will repeat themselves enough times that they'll effectively be a form of SR.
• namuol 4y ago
  Seeing a lot of “fiddly” software being listed here. Stuff that lets you configure and tune a workflow endlessly. It’s ironic that this is the sort of thing most of us will think of, since it doesn’t really account for time saved so much as time spent fiddling… Keeping an eye out for software that you barely use, as this is the kind with the most potential to truly save me time.
  • alexchantavy 4y ago
    From that perspective, using Ctrl+R and Ctrl+S for reverse-i-search in a shell saves me so much time from writing commands especially big Kubernetes ones.
    • namuol 4y ago
      Cmd/Ctrl-F in general is probably the biggest invisible time-saver if you can count UX patterns.
    • hedora 4y ago
      The 'history' command is helpful the 1% of the time Ctrl-R and Ctrl-S fail you.
      • bobbob1921 4y ago
        Bash alias. And my large bash_alias file
    • eftepede 4y ago
      Try fzf for history management, it's a life changer.
    • 5e92cb50239222b 4y ago
      Add fzf to get fuzzy search for your history. I reuse long complicated commands all the time by pressing Ctrl+R and then typing the first letters of a few words I remember using. https://github.com/junegunn/fzf https://github.com/junegunn/fzf It's also useful to remove duplicate commands and store infinite history. Add this to ~/.bashrc: export HISTFILESIZE= export HISTSIZE= export HISTCONTROL=ignoredups
• superpope99 4y ago
  +1 to moto. Does anyone know of a similar library for GCP? Searched and not been able to find anything and I miss it dearly
• BonoboIO 4y ago
  PHP Propel 2.0 It’s a small ORM with nice features and it saved me a ton of time. Just generate the classes from the database. Very fast to iterate from. https://propelorm.org/ https://propelorm.org/
  • hedora 4y ago
    Probably showing my age here, but their database:reverse feature just blew my mind. The problem with most ORMs is that language object models are way more expressive than SQL (due to having multiple subclasses of the same superclass / interface, or even multiple inheritance, and none of those mapping to SQL foreign keys). Targeting the less expressive data model should automatically avoid most ORM footguns. I wonder how it works in practice.
    • BonoboIO 4y ago
      It just works :D I work with it every day and the the documentation is not the best, but for 95% of pure php projects it’s the Right answer. There maybe other right answers, but propel is definitely one of them. If you iterate the database as you go, simply create the classes and there you go. I m amazed how good it works. I m a single developer, so your results may vary, but for small to medium projects it works fine. And most of all projects are small to medium.
• ninawalters 4y ago
  GoLinks! https://golinks.com/blog/the-ultimate-guide-to-go-links/ https://golinks.com/blog/the-ultimate-guide-to-go-links/
• oakpond 4y ago
  fzf: https://github.com/junegunn/fzf https://github.com/junegunn/fzf
  • fotta 4y ago
    I probably shouldn't admit this but the fzf fish shell integration is basically how I remember useful commands instead of writing them in a note, because I'm too damn lazy
    • MH15 4y ago
      Haha yes- and then when I open a new machine or somehow lose shell history it takes me a bunch of time to get back up to speed. IMO worth it for me but it can be a speed bump.
      • fotta 4y ago
        I recently moved to a new machine and copied the history file over, definitely helped me immensely
• bsnnkv 4y ago
  kanata[1] and komokana[2]. kanata is basically like QMK for any keyboard without the firmware requirement. I use kanata with my trusty old iMac keyboard which is to this day my favourite keyboard of all time. But now I have all the cool QMK-style layers with it. So that is awesome on its own, but where it gets even better for me, and this is where the seconds have really added up to hours, is that I wrote another piece of software which programmatically changes layers on kanata whenever a different window is focused in my tiling window manager. This has honestly changed -everything- for me. I no longer have to waste keys on my keyboard to switch layers, I no longer have to -think- about switching layers, I just focus another window with alt+hjkl and whatever keyboard layer I expect for any given application is automatically applied. Definitely one of those "you can never go back" experiences for me. [1]: https://github.com/jtroo/kanata https://github.com/jtroo/kanata [2]: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komokana https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komokana
  • fouronnes3 4y ago
    This is exactly what I've been looking for, thanks! QMK has always been weird to me: why is it hardware specific?
    • deadso 4y ago
      One advantage of it being hardware specific is that I can move my keyboard between machines and not have to worry whether my shortcuts are available. Also, I believe tools can only register themselves so early in the input processing stack in the OS which can prevent you from having your macros/shortcuts available in certain applications. An example of this is for RDP in windows, where if you use fullscreen RDP, it will use the remote instance's keyboard shortcuts instead of triggering the hooks you have on the host. Having the shortcut in firmware makes your shortcuts resolve before even leaving the keyboard. Of course, there are downsides to having it all in hardware as well.
• billylo 4y ago
  Mobile app build/deployToAppStore automation: https://github.com/fastlane/fastlane https://github.com/fastlane/fastlane
• sergiotapia 4y ago
  TablePlus for dev and prod database stuff. Easy as hell, worth the cash. ChatGPT at it's worst saves me an hour a day.
  • rex-mundi 4y ago
    What do you use chat got for, I could definitely benefit from an extra hour
• 7952 4y ago
  I work as a consultant and have to do a timesheet. I use an old app called TimeSnapper that records screen grabs every few seconds. Works brilliantly for timesheets and has saved me numerous times.
  • karencarits 4y ago
    The developer is also very kind and responsive, even here at HN. I was impressed! And it is a nice way to let go of "do I need to remember this" (in combination with the Ditto clipboard manager)
  • bhandziuk 4y ago
    How does such a tool know what project you're working on?
  • ianmcgowan 4y ago
    I use timebro.com, which is a paid service (though recovering one extra hour to bill covers the monthly cost for me). Once you have to log time in multiple systems, it's essential to get something to help manage that process or chaos quickly follows.
• inasio 4y ago
  Not really a program, but this year the Tabu [0] heuristic saved me at least on that order of time. I work on combinatorial optimization problem (think traveling salesman), typically we use local search heuristics like simulated annealing or parallel tempering that work well but require a lot of hyper parameter tuning. Tabu is super simple, has very few parameters to tune, and works great. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabu_search https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabu_search
  • hedora 4y ago
    How do you implement "tabuList.contains(sCandidate)"? Has it been successfully generalized to problems with infinite / continuous search spaces? I imagine you could use edit distance or something for large combinatorial spaces.
• mastudebaker 4y ago
  On windows, http://symbolclick.com/index.htm http://symbolclick.com/index.htm is great for XML and JSON viewing. Use it pretty much everyday. Really love the way it display data in a table format.
  • jodrellblank 4y ago
    Microsoft offerx XMLNotepad for a similar idea, but free (gratis and libre): https://microsoft.github.io/XmlNotepad/ https://microsoft.github.io/XmlNotepad/ (I haven't used Symbolclick, presumably it has more features or something for the money)
• ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  I'd say that Charles Proxy (https://charlesproxy.com https://charlesproxy.com) is my "secret sauce." It allows me to quickly evaluate server interactions in my software, without having to program in all kinds of logging.
• fotta 4y ago
  k9s makes me feel like (and look like to my coworkers) a k8s wizard, the parenthetical especially when I'm sharing my terminal and zipping around using keyboard shortcuts https://github.com/derailed/k9s https://github.com/derailed/k9s
  • worldsayshi 4y ago
    It looks intimidating but is very quick to get into. Essential k8s tool.
  • dpcx 4y ago
    I love k9s, it's completely changed the game for me. I really wish the keyboard shortcuts and available commands were better documented, though. Figuring out that you have to be in the deployment view (and how to get there) to scale something took some doing.
    • whatthesmack 4y ago
      This really rings true! We had an outage that was essentially due to errant use of the keyboard shortcuts and default read-write settings in k9s. "Bye bye super important deployment" is a bit too easy.
• daniel_reetz 4y ago
  Ultrafast, super lite file search on Windows, Voidtools "Everything": https://www.voidtools.com/support/everything/ https://www.voidtools.com/support/everything/ I haven't touched the Windows Search utility since I found it.
  • sixothree 4y ago
    Everything paired with AstroGrep (or your favorite grep program) is the ultimate pair for searching on Windows. We pretty much force new devs to install these otherwise we watch them struggle for way too long.
    • frizzlebox 4y ago
      Everything is a godsend and ought to be built into Windows. Agent Ransack (free for commercial use) and FileLocator Pro (paid, has near-instant indexed search) are the go to grep alternatives for Windows on my dev team. https://www.mythicsoft.com/ https://www.mythicsoft.com/ I also hear VS Code has ripgrep built in, but I haven’t used it extensively.
    • smusamashah 4y ago
      I use RipGrep with it.
  • radicalriddler 4y ago
    Yup, Everything is a godsend. It also makes it more likely for me to download a portable exe instead of a full install because I can quick search for the exe, where as windows search struggles.
  • Alifatisk 4y ago
    Everything combined with Wox
    • aagha 4y ago
      Loved Wox. Try Fluentsearch.
• kennedy 4y ago
  Terraform: mainly because my organization used to make everything manually, using boto3/sdk scripts, and poorly tested/constructed cloudformation templates
  • nijave 4y ago
    While not perfect, `terraform plan` is a massive time saver. A lot of IaC tools still don't have good (or any) support for "dry runs" and provisioning a bunch of infrastructure to see if your thing works is really slow
    • kennedy 4y ago
      100%, `terraform plan` is such a useful time and cost saving step when developing terraform. Ive read about pulumi and casually used it (python) to learn about it. Benefits like taking advantage of proper python language niceties, like running pytest on your IaC. Additionally, it uses terraform's providers behind the scene, both contributing their success to the other.
• ss48 4y ago
  Everything Search by Voidtools.
  • cccybernetic 4y ago
    Woah, this is a blast from the past. I switched over to Mac a few years so I can't use this anymore, but this was my favorite piece of software from a prior job when I had a PC. This thing completely changed how I thought about performance and speed in software. I know there's the old adage about avoiding "premature optimization", but occasionally you use something like this that leaves your jaw on the floor in terms of what hyper-optimized software is capable of.
• usrme 4y ago
  If you use Ansible at any larger amount, then you're doing a disservice to yourself if you're not using Mitogen[1][2]. The amount of waiting it has spared me is innumerable at this point. --- [1]: https://scribe.rip/@einarum/speed-up-ansible-with-mitogen-b3a9bf40bc93 https://scribe.rip/@einarum/speed-up-ansible-with-mitogen-b3... [2]: https://mitogen.networkgenomics.com/ansible_detailed.html https://mitogen.networkgenomics.com/ansible_detailed.html
  • gtirloni 4y ago
    This should have been integrated into upstream Ansible a long time ago. People say it's not a big deal these days but it still is.
  • rwky 4y ago
    Just tried this, shaved a playbook from from 8 minutes 30 seconds to 3 minutes 10 seconds! Thanks :)
    • usrme 4y ago
      You are very welcome! Please spread the word about this magical bit of software to anyone else using Ansible. Together we can make iterating on Ansible configurations great again!
• codetrotter 4y ago
  JetBrains CLion. I used to program in Vim/Neovim. Using a full-blown IDE is a real productivity boost when programming in for example Rust, which is what I write the most, and use CLion for the most. CLion has Vim emulation also. So I still have normal mode, insert mode, and most other main features of Vim that I know and love :)
  • sseagull 4y ago
    Similar story for me. Used to basically use vim, but after taking over a large-ish python project I switched to PyCharm. Its support for detecting type errors (I use type hints pretty consistently) and its refactoring support have probably saved me way more than 100 hours. Just Shift-shift searching has probably done that by itself, too. And import optimization. I could go on and on. Plus integrated sql/db stuff is just icing on the cake. Best subscription I’ve ever paid for.
  • modernerd 4y ago
    The CLion/JetBrains Vim emulation via IdeaVim is _so_ good. Better than VS Code and on a level with Emacs Evil mode for me. Adding shortcuts to my ideavimrc saved me a bunch of time and has made CLion largely keyboard-driven for me. https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/using-product-as-the-vim-editor.html#vimrc https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/using-product-as-the-vim...
• actinium226 4y ago
  Not a program, but the concept of functional programming and pure functions. It makes it a lot easier to think about code, and also makes it easier to test and parallelize code. Although be warned, it can also have the "side-effect" (functional programming pun!) of making you somewhat insufferable as you try to convince everyone around you that functional programming is amazing.
  • hedora 4y ago
    You should check out rust. The compiler reasons about side effects + parallelization, and testing for you, but you get (nearly) complete low-level control. As a bonus, you'll be able to write insufferable comments like these in HN threads.
    • Quekid5 4y ago
      Not to put too fine a point on it, but "side effects" != mutation. Also: The level of control offered by Rust comes at a steep cost compared to GC'd languages.
      • adamzen 4y ago
        I am relatively new to rust, but motivated to learn it right now. Could you elaborate on what the cost compared to garbage collected languages is?
        • actinium226 4y ago
          I think he means two things, mind you I'm not very familiar with Rust, but I've done a lot of safety-critical C/C++, which is sort of like Rust 1. There's a mental cost on the programmer. You have to learn all the ins and outs of things like the "borrow checker" (a Rust concept) and it's on you to understand the rules and how to use them 2. It can slow down compile time. As your program gets bigger, the compiler is doing more work to check that it's valid code, so that will slow you down.
        • Quekid5 4y ago
• hedora 4y ago
  Each of the following is in the 1000 hours saved club (in no particular order): jq, perl, grep, gnu textutils, gnu parallel, bash, xargs, gkrellm, nload. Make deserves a special shout out. If you think it's only useful for building software, you've completely missed the point (similarly, if you think some language-specific tool is superior, you're doing things completely wrong): Anyway, this document saved me at least 10,000 hours: https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/html_node/index.html https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/html_node/index.htm... Other peoples' python has the distinction of being the only software in my -1000 hours saved category. (And if you consider maintaining code written in the above "write only" languages, you'll realize how big of a feat that is!)
  • jodrellblank 4y ago
    > "If you think it's only useful for building software, you've completely missed the point" I clicked on your link with 16 pages of just contents links to find what the point is, and found "the make utility automatically determines which pieces of a large program need to be recompiled, and issues commands to recompile them". What's the point you see?
    • hedora 4y ago
      It automatically parallelizes any large scale data processing pipeline (assuming that your data set is already broken into files). People use it for things like documentation generation. I've used it to process the results of web scrapers, large scale data cleaning tasks, etc, etc. It takes about an afternoon to set up NFS + SSH primitives that automatically distribute the computation across clusters of machines. Since it is restartable, it automatically tolerates hardware faults (up to dozens of machines, in practice). Basically, you get Map Reduce, but for arbitrary data processing DAGs, and it supports any language that works well on Unix-style operating systems.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      • rebelos 4y ago
• z3ugma 4y ago
  Gong.ai - transcribes Zoom and Google Meet calls with very high fidelity, and identifies which callers are talking and suggest tips to your sales, customer success, and demo staff on how to improve their presence in online meetings and phone calls. https://www.gong.io/product/ https://www.gong.io/product/ This is the SaaS I'm most excited about this year.
  • gomox 4y ago
    Very useful yet very expensive. Someone will build the personal/SMB version at some point.
  • qxxx 4y ago
    I sometimes use whisper to transcribe videos or audio to text. Works good and it is free.
• shortlived 4y ago
  Greenshot - free, lightweight and just the right set of features for marking up screenshots and making new UI mockups based on existing screenshots of apps. I've tried a lot of other alternatives but they were either too complicated to use or lack a key feature.
  • AH4oFVbPT4f8 4y ago
    Do you find greenshot better than say ShareX ?
    • shortlived 4y ago
      IMO yes. ShareX had too many options, and too many layers to navigate to get something done.
      • lolive 4y ago
        Greenshot is my friend everyday. But I now want a tool as simple as it, but for animated GIF. [Any piece of advice is welcome]
        • wearyghost 4y ago
          ScreenToGif is pretty simple! I often use it at work, and find that it serves the purpose of sharing short snippets perfectly
• stared 4y ago
  GitHub Actions. While it is not the only CI tool, its low barrier to entry does magic. I use it for tests & deployment (of anything, including the smallest personal projects), taking periodic screenshots of my websites, and building PDF files from its LaTeX source.
• Blank-field 4y ago
  AutoHotkey https://www.autohotkey.com/ https://www.autohotkey.com/
• chriswarbo 4y ago
  Careful with moto: it uses Python's context managers to set-up and tear-down the mocking. If you haven't got the right mixture of nesting, yields, etc. then you may end up running tests against real AWS resources (using your default credentials). For this reason, I don't have any default AWS credentials configured: I always specify an AWS_PROFILE manually when it's needed ;)
• stared 4y ago
  Fish + Starship (https://starship.rs/ https://starship.rs/) + z (https://github.com/jethrokuan/z https://github.com/jethrokuan/z). For me it is a really nice configuration, fast do do stuff & visually pleasant (it influences my comfort & motivation).
• elchief 4y ago
  The Singer spec https://www.singer.io/#what-it-is https://www.singer.io/#what-it-is, for data ingestion and loading 1. open source 2. hundreds of pre-built taps and targets (for apis and databases) 3. supports incremental and full refresh 4. don't need to write any SQL and it creates and loads tables for you Stitch, Meltano, and (sort of) Airbyte also use it
• bitcurious 4y ago
  Airtable has allowed my team to save 100s of hours. Excellent tool for adding a little structure and automation to adhoc workflows.
• amelius 4y ago
  GCC saved me from thousands of hours writing assembly code ...
  • hedora 4y ago
    If you're OK with cloud services, you might consider using godbolt for your assembly-generating needs. It's polyglot, and you can easily copy paste its output into ed or notepad.
• konfusinomicon 4y ago
  the moonlander keyboard and its customization software have been my biggest time saver this year. it's worth the hype, the price and the time investment learning to use it effectively. 100 hours maybe... but I bet I've saved 100 miles of finger travel distance and half a million key presses by now
• gorjusborg 4y ago
  vi and friends (vim/neovim) Being able to edit text by piping it through shell commands and back into the buffer is pretty darn useful. In this case, it's not vi alone that provides the benefit, but whatever. Macros and registers can be super handy when you have to do the same thing over and over in a big file. Sure, I could write a script, but sometimes it's just easier to do it by hand once and repeat the macro thousands of times. Once you are able to commit certain operations to muscle memory, you can really whip around. For instance 'vapgq' selects around the current paragraph and formats it.
  • synergy20 4y ago
    second this, vim has been my biggest time saver
• akira2501 4y ago
  LSP. The Language Server Protocol. Entirely changed my life for the better this year, once I took the time to get it integrated into Emacs and get the various backends I needed installed. Easily has saved me hundreds of hours so far, being able to view function prototypes quickly, pull up documentation as an overlay on the code, jumping to the next error, and even down to getting simple things like enumerated 'case' labels inside of a switch statement.
  • truncate 4y ago
    I was going to say the same. Before LSP it was constant effort to keep up with changing tools/scripts/hacks to keep all the code navigation/completion working, and it was still never as good as its now. And once in a while I'd randomly have to look at some code that is not my primary work language, but everything will just work out of the box. Working with Emacs has never been better. Huge shoutout to Magit mode, which I dearly love and definitely saved me bunch of time otherwise spent context switching to command line or another UI. 100hr = 6000min, I've been using Magit for 8 years at-least. Assuming I'm doing some coding at-least 4 days a week, 4days * 4weeks * 12months * 8years = 1536 days of work. Let say it saves me 30 second on average by not switching window, selecting hunk individually that I love doing, doing arbitrary VCS operations (I love looking at diffs and just hitting enter to go to the source), I just need to open it 8 times per day to make it 100 hours so far. Definitely have used more than that I think. But even if this calculation is way off, and I'm not really saving time, its a very pleasant experience that is unmatched if you use Emacs IMO.
    • quanticle 4y ago
      The only mystifying thing to me about Emacs' LSP support has been the fact that they chose to bring Eglot into Emacs core, instead of the (in my opinion) superior LSP-mode.
  • whoisburbansky 4y ago
    What language(s) do you do most of your work in?
• geocrasher 4y ago
  Ditto Clipboard Manager for Windows. Yes, I know W10/11 have it native now, but it's not as good as Ditto. https://ditto-cp.sourceforge.io/ https://ditto-cp.sourceforge.io/ AutoHotKey https://www.autohotkey.com/ https://www.autohotkey.com/ And if deleting TikTok from my phone were an app, it would be nominated, because that saved me hundreds of hours I'm sure :D
  • amrtn 4y ago
    I loved ditto when I used windows. Do you know a good ditto alternative for mac?
    • geocrasher 4y ago
      A quick Googling found this, and it looks similar: https://maccy.app/ https://maccy.app/
    • mmmburrito 4y ago
      I haven't used ditto myself, but pastepal seems like what you want https://onmyway133.com/pastepal/ https://onmyway133.com/pastepal/
    • swcm 4y ago
      I don’t know if I’m the only one, but when I used ditto I turned off the auto cleanup stuff. Basically I had it keep everything. I’d go cleanup manually every now and then (especially images), but having a very long term way to look up past code snippets was invaluable. So then when I got my first Mac I felt lost without a clipboard manager with unlimited storage. I finally found Copy’em and my life has been complete again. :) https://apprywhere.com/ce-mac.html https://apprywhere.com/ce-mac.html
    • r14n 4y ago
      I have been using https://github.com/Clipy/Clipy https://github.com/Clipy/Clipy
  • PikachuEXE 4y ago
    I am still using http://bluemars.org/clipx/ http://bluemars.org/clipx/ old but works
• teknopaul 4y ago
  bash_completion: I can imagine life without it. It's got a pretty nasty api to set it up if you have to but most things are done for you. If you create your own clis in the format appname mainoperation flags args/files writing bash_completion scripts is easier. I believe git, yum, apt clis are popular for this reason. I can't imagine the amount of time wasted if bash_completion didn't exist. I would have probably wasted 10000 hours writing guis.
• zanfaruqui 4y ago
  Coherence https://docs.withcoherence.com/ https://docs.withcoherence.com/ we're saving our customers (and ourselves) hundreds if not thousands of hours by not having to write and maintain glue code for their dev tools
• FigurativeVoid 4y ago
  McFly[1] is a terminal history search replacement that is more context aware. The only downside is I am probably not memorizing the commands I use as much as I should. Flycut[2] has certainly saved me a lot of time and changed the way I write code. Have a good clipboard history has really changed my flow. [1]: https://github.com/cantino/mcfly https://github.com/cantino/mcfly [2]: https://github.com/TermiT/Flycut https://github.com/TermiT/Flycut
• mainedotpy 4y ago
  Espanso [0] - such a useful text expander with easy inclusion of shell commands and many other features. I love this thing so much as someone in the medical field that I made my first ever open source contribution to it. 0: https://espanso.org https://espanso.org
  • sarlalian 4y ago
    Love espanso... I need to get my work to start sending the dev money because we are starting to use it in a lot of places.
  • tinodb 4y ago
    I really enjoy espanso too! I only have a handful of expansions that I use (date, reverse date, may email address, our domain) but it is already so nice. I should add some things :)
• Stevvo 4y ago
  Ministry of Flat. http://www.quelsolaar.com/ministry_of_flat/ http://www.quelsolaar.com/ministry_of_flat/ Automatic UV unwrapping.
• betolink 4y ago
  miniforge, no need to deal with conda environments anymore. https://github.com/conda-forge/miniforge https://github.com/conda-forge/miniforge
• jasone 4y ago
  Dune (https://dune.build/ https://dune.build/) is the preeminent build tool for OCaml development. I don't love its input syntax (s-expressions), and I sometimes miss the ability to write high-level functions to reduce boilerplate (especially for unit tests), but it always gets the dependencies right, and it's fast. This is in stark contrast to some of my experiences with various other build systems, and I am super happy that the default option for OCaml build systems is so good.
• placatedmayhem 4y ago
  gron https://github.com/tomnomnom/gron https://github.com/tomnomnom/gron It takes JSON input and produces flat, key-value output based on the path to the value. Usage with grep was obviously the original intention, but I've used it to help me better understand a given JSON's structure, too, which I then usually reflect back into a program that's consuming that JSON. It also supports "ungron" too, so, for example, `gron some.json | grep -v "thing I don't want" | gron -u > filtered.json" makes for quick filtering of a JSON. I find it more user friendly than jq's language.
• samwillis 4y ago
  The combination of TypeScript, VSCode and GitHub Copilot is just a joy to work with. The are valid criticisms of Coplilot around copyright but I'm not using it to generate whole algorithms. It just knows your code and what you are trying to do.
  • Kiro 4y ago
    Exactly. Anyone who has worked with Copilot seriously knows that generating whole algorithms is not what you actually use it for. The things Copilot generate and autocomplete for me are unique and tailored to what I'm trying to do, completely based on the context of the code. Sure, you can bait it into reproducing stuff but why bother? Considering how convoluted it is to trick it you might just as well copypaste the algorithm straight from the repo. I almost find the discussion irrelevant because of how detached from reality it is.
• planb 4y ago
  Docker. Shipping every single script along with all dependencies saved me from hundreds of hours of fixing stuff after updates. And I don't mean production stuff, just helper scripts and programs that I'd normally use a few times a year and which don't need the latest security (let alone feature) updates.
• residualmind 4y ago
  To generate some stats for insight on a legacy project: Grepping logs with ag/rg, piping into sed/awk/cut, and then into wc
  • mmcgaha 4y ago
    I came in looking for awk in the list to upvote. By far awk has saved me the most time. I have used it for everything from parsing EDI documents to making simple shells for managing processes. I just used it to create a bit over 2000 data transformations and wrote another awk script to tie them all together. Yeah I did in hours what would have taken a week in the GUI and changes will be able to be made in minutes instead of days. Plus it saved my wrist from the pain of clicking a mouse thousands of times. To be fair you can do the same thing with any programming language but awk just has the least friction for me.
• Wistar 4y ago
  Beyond Compare, AutoHotKey, the macro functions in Notepad++ and Photoshop, and the user-preset function in Lightroom.
  • hermitcrab 4y ago
    Beyond Compare (file comparison+) is a really useful tool.
• logicallee 4y ago
  I've easily saved 100 hours already using ChatGPT. If you haven't heard of it already, this is, in my personal opinion, superhuman general AI with almost no limitations except that it might not be free forever and it likes to stay SFW. For example, if you ask it to list "What pieces of software that most users don't use is most likely to save me 100 hours - keep your answer brief and specific" you get the response at the bottom. Interesting answer that opens the door to more specific questions. If you want to achieve a task quickly, just ask ChatGPT how to do it. Give plenty of instructions on the kind of response you're looking for. Here's a specific example of how ChatGPT has saved me time: I asked it to make some text I wrote shorter and more likely to succeed, and it suggested eliminating the entire second half of it as it takes away from my point and isn't likely to achieve the result I want. That actually ended up saving me the work associated with the entire second half of my proposal. Others have had it make recipes and meal plans, by just listing what they had at home and asking it to list recipes using those ingredients. It is superhuman in many of its abilities. I would write a caveat but don't feel like it. I'll just ask ChatGPT: "I consider you almost superhuman but in no more than 15 words summarize the caveats or ways in which it would be wrong to consider you superhuman. Be extremely brief and specific, get right to the point." it's answer: "I am a machine learning model and not a human." So, there's your caveat. It's a machine learning model and not a human. --- * [Prompt: What pieces of software that most users don't use is most likely to save me 100 hours - keep your answer brief and specific.] It's difficult to determine what specific software may save you 100 hours without knowing more about your specific needs and workflows. However, here are a few suggestions for software that may be helpful in increasing efficiency and saving time: Task management and productivity software: Tools like Trello, Asana, and Todoist can help you organize and prioritize your tasks, set deadlines, and track progress. These tools can help you stay on top of your work and reduce the time you spend on tasks that don't align with your goals. Text expansion and automation software: Applications like TextExpander and Alfred allow you to create custom abbreviations that expand into longer phrases or blocks of text. This can save you a significant amount of time if you frequently type out the same phrases or long emails. Text and code editors: Advanced text and code editors like Sublime Text, Atom, or Visual Studio Code can save you time by providing features such as syntax highlighting, code completion, and project management. These tools can help you write and edit code more efficiently and make it easier to navigate large codebases. File management software: Applications like Hazel and Dropbox can help you automate file management tasks, such as organizing and renaming files, and keeping your files synced and backed up. This can save you time and reduce the risk of data loss. It's important to keep in mind that the software that will be most helpful in saving you time will depend on your specific needs and workflows. It may be helpful to spend some time identifying the tasks that take up the most time in your work and looking for tools that can help you streamline those processes.
• porridgeandrice 4y ago
  Autohotkey There is simply no better automation program on any OS. I even run a fully fledged tiling wm written in autohotkey. ( For reference, here's when I tricked r/unixporn into thinking it was bspwm https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/nhzz3b/confession_time/ https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/nhzz3b/confession... ) Fluent search Spotlight on steroids, for windows. Apart from being a search/launcher, it has a bunch of atrociously good features. It lets you use a custom search indexing backend, which brings me to... Everything A search indexer backend for windows. Really great search.
  • robk 4y ago
    Can you point me to some good examples? I use it for text replacement but their own site is fairly sparse for creative uses.
    • majkinetor 4y ago
      Use official forum, it has tone of good examples. Here is something I did long time ago: https://github.com/majkinetor/mm-autohotkey https://github.com/majkinetor/mm-autohotkey
    • davebrny 4y ago
      this one saved me a lot of time over the years. not a 100 hours but its definitely something i could use maybe a hundred times a day. https://github.com/davebrny/kiwis https://github.com/davebrny/kiwis basically when you want to search something, just highlight the word(s), press a hotkey then select a site from the list and it will open up the page directly
    • denolfe 4y ago
      I used to be a very heavy AHK user and developed a rather extensive config. Here is my config along with a boilerplate to help you start one that is similar: - https://github.com/denolfe/AutoHotkey https://github.com/denolfe/AutoHotkey - https://github.com/denolfe/AutoHotkeyBoilerplate https://github.com/denolfe/AutoHotkeyBoilerplate
  • deleted 4y ago
• ss48 4y ago
  Mailstore. It's an email archiving program, and saves a ton of time in searching for emails at our company by allowing you to search all emails in every email address for what you're looking for.
• zX41ZdbW 4y ago
  clickhouse-local[1] saved me countless hours. I'm using it for format conversion, data processing, querying external data, as a calculator, etc... clickhouse-local --input-format Parquet --output-format JSONEachRow --query "SELECT * FROM table" < data.parquet > data.jsonl cat books.ndjson | clickhouse-local --query "SELECT author, avg(rating) FROM table GROUP BY author" clickhouse-local --query "SELECT * FROM url('https://datasets.clickhouse.com/hackernews.native.zst') LIMIT 10" $ clickhouse-local ClickHouse local version 22.13.1.1. milovidov-desktop :) SELECT extractTextFromHTML(*) FROM url('https://news.ycombinator.com/', RawBLOB) [1]: https://clickhouse.com/docs/en/operations/utilities/clickhouse-local/ https://clickhouse.com/docs/en/operations/utilities/clickhou...
• LVB 4y ago
  GitHub Copilot As a manager & parent with only occasional bursts of time to code (some work, mostly side/fun stuff), Copilot has turned out to be incredibly useful in smoothing over all of the small things I'm slow at because I don't do them daily. And especially since I have limited time, I just want to get the damn thing working and am quite happy to <Tab> my way there as quickly as possible.
  • boplicity 4y ago
    I'm in a similar position -- I only code because I enjoy it, but I also just don't have the time to actually finish the coding projects that I'd like to. Plus, I'm a pretty bad coder because I only have a few hours every couple of weeks to focus on it, outside of the occasional bigger project. I'm going to look into Copilot to see if it can help me actually do what I want.
  • superasn 4y ago
    Yes there has been a lot of hot things in A.I. in 2022 but most of them are mostly novelty value like Dall-E/SD and sometimes worse like SEO spam. Copilot is the only real value I'm getting from the recent A.I revolution and it does save me hundreds of lines of manully typing code all day. And the best part is it's getting better and better each day.
    • esperent 4y ago
      > mostly novelty value like Dall-E/SD These are not just novelty value. They're great for mocking up ideas and I've also used them for generating backgrounds for advertising, for example: "A black stage lit from above by two spotlights, very dramatic, stylish" You can also add keywords like "modern/rustic/nature/futuristic" and it will get tuned to your desired style immediately. Iterate on that for 5 minutes or so and there's my perfect background for a "coming soon" flyer. Way better than I could have made in Canva. Good enough that multiple people have told me the flyers look amazing, and nobody guessed it was AI until I told them.
      • superasn 4y ago
• bilater 4y ago
  Not 100 hours yet but I've been pleasantly surprised how effective ChatGPT is at giving me code that is 90-100% good to work with. Never used Copilot but now I'm warming up to this idea.
  • timjver 4y ago
    Give Copilot a try, it has been way more reliable for me in terms of giving good code suggestions than ChatGPT so far.
  • tluyben2 4y ago
    Copilot has been great the past year and longer. I am so used to it , I don’t even remember how it was not having it.
• avogar 4y ago
  clickhouse-local is a really good tool for analyzing local data, as it supports a wide range of data formats and it's really fast. It can save you a lot of time, because there is no need to install a batch of packages to use it or setup a database server. Just download a binary/install one package and enjoy. It has developed rapidly in recent years and continues to improve. https://clickhouse.com/docs/en/operations/utilities/clickhouse-local/ https://clickhouse.com/docs/en/operations/utilities/clickhou...
• towawy 4y ago
  Microsoft Excel. Manipulating tens or hundreds of thousands of rows, including cross-referencing across tables, is just so satisfying and much faster than doing it with a DB or code. Alternative spreadsheet software do some things better, but they don't come close as a complete package, I don't regret paying for it myself for the first time in my life. It such a life saver in a pinch. Obligatory Spolsky intro to Excel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c
  • manv1 4y ago
    Excel gets my vote for one of the top 10 software programs ever. It's crazy how useful it is.
    • hermitcrab 4y ago
      Excel, the second best program for any task. ;0)
      • grecy 4y ago
        The really impressive part is that it’s Actually the second best program for every task.
  • huijzer 4y ago
    As a Linux user, using Excel via the web interface or via a virtual machine is not so satisfying nor much faster than alternatives.
    • npteljes 4y ago
      Yeah, as someone who doesn't pay for MS, I'm basically using a combination of Calc and Gnumeric, because G can open larger files (handled larger files than Excel in fact), but Calc has more features, and it's more similar to Excel which I was used to. ONLYOFFICE's sheets can also be handy, if MS Excel compatibility is wanted.
• mnks 4y ago
  Looking at your list you may like VisiData (https://www.visidata.org/ https://www.visidata.org/). See the demo from 2018: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1CBDTgGtOU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1CBDTgGtOU
  • zJayv 4y ago
    100%. Visidata is great. Easy to pick up, rewarding to power users.
• numlock86 4y ago
  systemd-nspawn, f that hype train around over engineered container solutions. Also WireGuard. Who has the mental stability to setup OpenVPN or similar these days, even with things like Openswan? Yuck.
• abakker 4y ago
  Q research software. Best survey analysis tool I’ve used by far. Saved way more than 100 hrs vs spss.
• birdman3131 4y ago
  https://ninite.com https://ninite.com has saved me well over that over the years.
• mywacaday 4y ago
  One note, dump info once and search later, never fails
• manv1 4y ago
  bourne shell (now bash) has saved me tons of time. It's ridiculously easy to glue stuff together...like migrating 10k videos from one video CMS to another, with custom fields etc. How do you drive that? bash scripts driving node, curl, and a few other programs.
• jmcgough 4y ago
  Anki - I don't know how I'd prep for the MCAT without this. Open source with desktop and mobile clients, syncing via cloud. It's flashcarding but uses gradual intervals so you see things less often once you've retained them. ChatGPT - I use this as a private tutor (it's great for biomedical stuff) to check my understanding and ask it to correct me if I'm wrong.
  • boplicity 4y ago
    RE: ChatGTP... How confident are you that it's giving you the correct answers to your queries? I've noticed that it often sounds right, but is sometimes completely wrong, in subtle ways. It always puts together words that are commonly near eachother, and it is always grammatically correct, but it is often absolutely wrong. I've observed that the more specific and technical a question I ask, the more likely it is to be wrong.
    • cooperaustinj 4y ago
      How often are you confident that you find the right answer on Google? As with anything, you need to reason about it yourself and verify.
      • ornornor 4y ago
        Parent is using chatgpt as a tutor though, not as a google search. I’d expect a tutor to give the right answer, but I wouldn’t expect google to. Chatgpt is often wrong. It’s a problem if you’re trying to learn something and using it as your tutor/truth.
      • ironrabbit 4y ago
        Anecdotally, chatgpt seems much worse to me than Google for getting correct answers. Like orders of magnitude worse. Tells me the wrong timezone for a city kind of bad. No doubt it will be much better in the future, and they've definitely found PMF with the interface, but I would not trust it right now with anything even slightly important to me.
      • 4y ago
• kklemon 4y ago
  Vimium. Vim-like shortcuts for the browser. I can't name any other tool or extension that gives me anywhere near the productivity boost of Vimium. I spend probably half of my work day plus a few hours a day in my spare time in the browser, and it makes navigating the browser feel like butter. When I'm tired and don't want to be glued to my desk, I can relax and surf with one hand which just feels incredible. I quickly got so used to it that I instinctively try to use Vimium shortcuts when I'm on other computes and feel withdrawal symptoms if I realize that it isn't installed.
  • kondor6c 4y ago
    There also is quite browser, which is similar (not an extension though) it has some very cool features like domain conditional proxies and other settings
    • flobosg 4y ago
      Do you mean qutebrowser? https://qutebrowser.org/ https://qutebrowser.org/
      • kondor6c 4y ago
        yup
  • PufPufPuf 4y ago
    There's also Tridactyl, which is a similar project, but more customizable. https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl
  • beernutz 4y ago
    If you like Vimium, you should check out SurfingKeys. It is similar but seems to have even more going for it: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/surfingkeys/gfbliohnnapiefjpjlpjnehglfpaknnc https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/surfingkeys/gfblio...
    • 4y ago
• dec0de 4y ago
  The jetbrains IDEs for various languages, but especially CLion and PyCharm. Beyond Compare, to compare differing versions of large codebases, which - for reasons I won’t go into, are just stored in filesystems, rather than accessed via some version control platform like git. Sublime Text, because multicursor, and fast searching of large codebases, the ability to edit everything, the plugin api, and just blazing performance on massive codebases.
• rsync 4y ago
  vimv You invoke 'vimv' in a directory and the resulting editor is a directory list for your pwd ... and you can edit it as a text document. When you save and exit, all of your file (re)naming is committed to the directory.
  • zJayv 4y ago
    https://github.com/ivanmaeder/vimv https://github.com/ivanmaeder/vimv 100%. I use this every day, esp. when editing my music library.
    • rsync 4y ago
      Yes! My music library is, indeed, where I use this the most.
  • I_complete_me 4y ago
    How does this differ from vidir? Anyone know?
• kristopolous 4y ago
  Assuming python sqlite is being dumb with regards to transactions and functions and that simple optimizations aren't just futile efforts from ignorance and narcissism has saved me 100s of hours in runtime alone. Also the commonality of fast networks really hit me this year. I was using free wifi at a small coffee shop in Tokyo and was transferring files to my apartment in Los Angeles at ~20MB/s. That's faster than my local LAN was 15 years ago over 5,000 miles of ocean, so cheap that they give it out for free if you buy a coffee. Absurd
• dougdonohoe 4y ago
  Gotta say IntelliJ, which isn't just for Java. It's a great coding platform and I used it for Scala, Go, Python, Bash, Java, PHP, Perl, you name it. I know many people like to hate on IDEs, but IntelliJ (and/or its language-specific variants like PyCharm or GoLand) has great support for all the debuggers in the above languages. It has awesome search/replace. Being able to "drill down" in to code, including 3rd party libraries with barely any configuration is like magic. The git integration is phenomenal - I rarely get stumped doing anything in git and dealing with merge conflicts are a breeze.
  • dougdonohoe 4y ago
    Plus it's awareness of proper idioms in each language and syntax checking makes me much smarter/productive in a new language. Also, it's spell checker keeps me honest. Go for that "green check mark" in the upper right corner and you know you avoided most common mistakes.
  • ivanjermakov 4y ago
    I've tried to migrate to something more lightweight like (neo)?vim, Helix, emacs; but regardless of how good their syntax awareness/LSP support is, it's always inferior to JetBrains IDEs. Simple example: (any language, e.g. Rust) rename a function across multiple files and undo it. Let me know how you'd do it in your editor of choice.
    • nx7487 4y ago
      sed -i "s/function_name/function_name2/g" $FILES && git restore $FILES Edit: Not claiming this is better, just saying what I get by with. I have never used an IDE in my career so far, or any autocomplete or code modification features.
      • geysersam 4y ago
        Sure, but if function_name is a subword of another_function_name, this would break things :/
      • 4y ago
• faebi 4y ago
  Switching to Vscode saved me a lot of time, especially the multi cursor behavior. I was using VIM, Tmux and iTerm before. Remote development is a breeze, connections and sessions are never lost. Many extensions get better and better, even a hated maintenance task is easier if you have a nice and easy language integration. Docker, but these days I take it as granted.
• ThomasMidgley 4y ago
  Windows. I used Mac OS X a few years. But in my opinion Mac OS X is (or was, back in this time) PITA. Switching back to Windows has definitively saved me hundreds of hours!
  • tqwhite 4y ago
    That is so strange. I worked in a mixed shop and all of us OSX people laughed our butts off when we did zoom and screen share with Windows guys as they took forever to do stuff we did almost instantly. I used Windows side-by-side with OSX for years and had nothing like your experience. But, good on you. It's nice that you found your niche. If you ever are forced to switch back reach out. I have a lot of good techniques for fast and pleasant OSX.
  • Shorel 4y ago
    That sounds so strange... I use Windows every day, and I know shortcuts and tools for many things. But for work I use Ubuntu, and for writing code it is a much more efficient environment. So it is actually hard to imagine an environment less productive than Windows. Now, if your work is done in Office (which I only use to write emails), or Photoshop, then I understand. But I am still intrigued.
• npteljes 4y ago
  I find good use of my skill in the following: DBeaver: use a consistent interface for practically any data store. Wanna SELECT and JOIN CSVs? It can do that too. https://www.mail-tester.com/ https://www.mail-tester.com/ - Fantastic email server settings troubleshooter. Excel / Calc / Gnumeric: I don't even know macros, just the functions, sorting, filtering, and pivot tables enable good productivity. And sometimes fun, I chose my current video card, and optimized my Factorio gameplay with Calc. BASH, jq, sed, grep, tr, cut, Geany, regexes: it's fantastic to be able to work with text. Log parsing and other text tasks turn into a puzzle game, where I win fast, and it's usually faster than to use anything else, especially for one-offs.
  • bdcravens 4y ago
    I've long been a DataGrip user, but Dbeaver impressed me when it was the first to enable Aurora Babelfish support.
    • npteljes 4y ago
      Wow, DataGrip also looks very nice. I find it funny that how first we had Eclipse vs IntelliJ, and now DBeaver vs DataGrip - each built on the respective platform, DBeaver on Eclipse, and DataGrip on IntelliJ.
      • sad-vscode-user 4y ago
        Yeah, DataGrip is extremely awesome. From all the Jetbrains Tools I miss this most. (I'm an unhappy Ex-Jetbrains user ...)
  • micvbang 4y ago
    Oh my lord, I love DBeaver so much! One thing that blew my mind the first time I saw it, was that when you look at geospatial data, they let you view your geometries on a map. It's so simple and so awesome!
  • squintychino 4y ago
    Speaking of DBeaver - does anyone have any good themes that they might share? I really like the interface but the stock look is lacking.
• PicassoCTs 4y ago
  https://github.com/git-time-metric/gtm https://github.com/git-time-metric/gtm
• thomasswift 4y ago
  NameMangler (OS X) - renames files in all sorts of ways!
• pwenzel 4y ago
  I used Dynobase for roughing out a DynamoDB project this year. It's the best and only real GUI for DynamoDB at this point. Many, many hours saved.
• moozeek 4y ago
  My most time saving programs didn't change in several years: Slickrun, floating command line for Windows https://bayden.com/slickrun/ https://bayden.com/slickrun/ Autohotkey - shortcuts, text expander and scripting for everything https://www.autohotkey.com/ https://www.autohotkey.com/ Total Commander, still the best file manager on Windows https://www.ghisler.com/ https://www.ghisler.com/ CyberChef - The "Cyber Swiss Army Knife" - single file web app for all kinds of conversions, encryption, encoding, compression and data analysis https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/ https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/ Adminer - lighweigt database manager https://www.adminer.org/ https://www.adminer.org/
  • beernutz 4y ago
    I use Total Commander and Autohotkey, and CyberChef as well. I would add ClipMate as the absolute BEST clipboard manager: http://www.thornsoft.com/clipmate7.htm http://www.thornsoft.com/clipmate7.htm Display Fusion Pro for managing window layout with multi monitors https://www.displayfusion.com/ https://www.displayfusion.com/ Misc programs I use daily that are easily google-able: Evernote Belvedere Bitwarden Snagit
    • BrandoElFollito 4y ago
      > I would add ClipMate as the absolute BEST clipboard manager Give a try to Ditto (https://ditto-cp.sourceforge.io/ https://ditto-cp.sourceforge.io/) - it rocks!
  • 2809 4y ago
    Laughs in DirectoryOPUS.
• breck 4y ago
  GoAccess: https://goaccess.io/ https://goaccess.io/. I don't miss Google Analytics at all. Loom. It's not open source I don't think but I'm digging it and excited when a public domain competitor comes out. Our https://scroll.pub/ https://scroll.pub/. It's far beyond markdown at this point. I am able to not only write better but also maintain thousands of pages of content by hand (well, most of the credit for that belongs to Apple M1s, Sublime Text, git, MacOS, and Github). The stuff we are doing with it now would just not be possible with anything else, and what we're coming out with next year is super exciting. It's all public domain.
• 23B1 4y ago
  http://freedom.to http://freedom.to Block websites so you can focus on work. Different blocklists and different sessions makes it easy for me to stay focused during the week. Best investment in myself I ever made.
  • songzme 4y ago
    good idea. FYI you can also `sudo vim /etc/hosts` and map any websites to 127.0.0.1, effectively blocking them. Your comment inspired me to do that thank you!
• baby 4y ago
  rust-analyzer, if that counts
• mastersummoner 4y ago
  Not a program, but being very familiar with the keyboard shortcuts in SublimeText has saved me countless hours of dev time. Things like Ctrl-D to highlight multiple instances of a word, plus the ability to put on Caps checking in the search bar first so you're only highlighting correctly capitalized versions. Make the same change in multiple locations. Saves so much time. Knowing how to highlight a letter, a word, a line at a time. Ctrl-shift-down to make your cursor span multiple lines at the same point, and have copy/paste respect the copied text from the respective lines. So many things add up to hours upon hours of time saved, and frustration avoided.
  • Shorel 4y ago
    I would say Sublime Text is in fact a program. It has also saved me over 100 hours or more. And this includes its instantaneous speed and the ability to open huge files!
    • mastersummoner 4y ago
      Fair point! I'd say what I'm most aware of having saved me the most time is knowledge of the shortcuts and features available _in_ SublimeText though.
  • unsigner 4y ago
    Came here to post this. The multiple cursors feature combined with the ability to open huge files with gracefully degrading performance turns a lot of what would be one-off programming tasks that would take dozens of minutes to an hour into interactive sessions that take seconds to minutes. Also the low latency is amazing. Sublime on an old laptop feels batter than VS Code on a fancy new desktop.
  • foxandmouse 4y ago
    when switching to vscode, I thought it would be a good idea to use the VScode shortcuts, I wish I took the time to customize it to match sublime. They are so much more intuitive. It just feels right, if that makes any sense.
• KiranRao0 4y ago
  I feel like I have a unique one here. The chrome extension: "Replace Youtube's Home with Subscriptions" It has easily saved me over 100 hours by preventing me from continuously scrolling through youtube recommendations. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/replace-youtubes-home-wit/nfffnooajndeeejgejfkbphjocpkblog?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/replace-youtubes-h...
  • mtwshngtn 4y ago
    can you not just click 'subscriptions' in the left sidebar on the homepage? Or direct?: https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions
    • joshmlewis 4y ago
      The extension redirects the home path to the subscriptions path so that is what it's doing, just automatically.
    • xz18r 4y ago
      I have that link bookmarked as my "YouTube bookmark". I have never since visited the homepage. Don't really understand what the fuss is about.
    • KiranRao0 4y ago
      The time saved is not the time required to click 'subscriptions'. The time saved is the time not spent mindlessly scrolling through endless recommendations designed to keep me hooked.
  • DavidPiper 4y ago
    Thank you for saving me 100 hours in 2023. Installing for Firefox right now.
  • punkspider 4y ago
    I use Pocket Tube [1] and I absolutely love it. I started using it 1 month ago so can't really estimate how much time it's saved me. Before that I always found YT frustrating and never cared about subscriptions because, and correct me if I'm wrong, the subscription system is disorganized. It doesn't make sense to me. I found myself having a hundred subscriptions that I didn't know how to follow in an organized manner. With this extension now I've organized subscriptions into groups, which get integrated into the UI in the sidebar, and you can set notifications for whichever group you'd like. It has more features - like the "Deck" feature, where you add a few columns of either playlists/groups/channels. You can also view all the latest vids from each subscription group, or all your subscriptions and filter them by groups. I'm quite happy that I suddenly noticed I had this pain point and quickly found the perfect solution. It's one of my favorite extensions. [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pockettube-youtube-subscr/kdmnjgijlmjgmimahnillepgcgeemffb
• jviotti 4y ago
  Vim, and it probably saved me way more than 100 hours. I use for coding (C++/JavaScript), for writing academic publications (dissertation/papers) and for writing e-mail (through mutt). I've used it so much that it is second nature at this point, and moving to any other editor without my ever growing set of macros, etc would significantly impact my productivity.
• locusofself 4y ago
  Password managers, specifically Bitwarden (because it's free) and previously used Lastpass.
  • ckvjdonee 4y ago
• eitland 4y ago
  VSCode / IntelliJ / Netbeans / Eclipse - it is crazy how much time a decent IDE with refactoring support can save. (And still many on HN hate on them. I am fairly sure that for most people that spend lots of time on vim had spent as much time as they spend to get good at vim at learning and customizing a normal, good IDE, they'd have much better return on investment.) Git / SVN / CVS - never having to worry about if I can undo my way back to the last combination of files that worked its a superpower that we mostly take for granted, but I was over 20 when I learned it. JUnit - again, being able to experiment fearlessly.
• justindeguzman 4y ago
  I've been using clickhouse-local (the CLI tool, not the database) a lot recently to do data analysis work. It's simpler/better developer experience when using local files for quick data analysis compared to writing python scripts. As someone who does a lot of data science and is not a software engineer, it feels more natural to write SQL vs. having to write actual code–and it's super fast...
• geocrasher 4y ago
  I just wanted to thank OP for this thread. I'm discovering some excellent tools. GoLinks may be the coolest thing I've seen in a while!
• yakshaving_jgt 4y ago
  I'm sure both vim and the Glasgow Haskell Compiler have saved me hundreds of hours. One puts the text in the file, and the other makes sure the text makes sense.
• the-alchemist 4y ago
  Clojure. Some many Clojure libs, and state-of-the-art Java libraries available through interop.
• quickthrower2 4y ago
  Git. Github. VSCode. ASP.NET. Vercel/Netlify. The CPanel thing that comes with free hosting. Wordpress.
• ianzakalwe 4y ago
  github copilot
• cjvirtucio 4y ago
  good ole find, grep, sed, and jq.
• chucky_z 4y ago
  fzf!!!
• kiernanmcgowan 4y ago
  Things - its a light weight todo app with just enough features to make it useful. I tend to use it for a dev log to keep track of what I'm working on, keep notes, and finally mark something as complete https://culturedcode.com/things/ https://culturedcode.com/things/
  • ironrabbit 4y ago
    This looks very nice but no android support is unfortunately a dealbreaker
• jntnctrs 4y ago
  AHK - Auto HotKey https://www.autohotkey.com/ https://www.autohotkey.com/ It’s really a time saver as a launcher, running little scripts, asking input and doing whatever after works, calling native DLL Windows functions…. It’s a big helper of your own workflows
• nurettin 4y ago
  ddterm (a quake terminal for gnome) is my favorite time saver. f1 dropdown, open a bunch of tabs and run mosh terminals for managing remote servers, name them appropriately and the spaceship is ready. Any time I need to access a remote, I press f1 and switch to its tab within seconds.
• terminal_d 4y ago
  Emacs (use it for everything important) QMK (keyboard's firmware, helps me do things an order of magnitude faster)
• jansan 4y ago
  JASC Paint Shop Pro 7.04 from 2001. Still by bitmap editor of choice. Unfortunately all versions after that were crap and the 7.04 lacks alpha channel support when copying to or pasting from the clipboard. But man, am I fast with that tool.
• qxxx 4y ago
  - Listary: a launcher (double press crtl to open) - silversearcher ag - total commander - Obsidian - chrome extension: "I don't care about cookies" will remove all the annoying gdpr cookie popups. - espanso : highly customizable text expander (eg type :myip to replace it with your current ip using your fav scripting language) - sqlyog : sql client with awesome power features I never seen before: eg schema and data comparision between 2 db sources. - manictime: a time tracking software which also takes screenshots. You can then go back and see what you did and how long.
• toddm 4y ago
  make, dbx, vi, sed, awk, cut, paste, (s)diff, (f/e)grep, comm, sort, col, column, bash, csh, ksh, man, find, cvs, svn, date, f77/xlf, cc/xlc, bcc, TeX, ghostview
• synthc 4y ago
  Shell productivity tools like fish, fzf and z. Feels like doing parkour on the command line!
• brailsafe 4y ago
  Dash for Mac and Vs code
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• wycy 4y ago
  tmux. I only discovered it in the last several weeks so it hasn't saved me 100 hours yet, but it very clearly will. It has completely changed the way I work. Now I mostly work with just one large terminal window and I hardly ever touch the mouse anymore.
• wingmanjd 4y ago
  Ninite's automated installers [1]. This one tool has saved me hundreds of hours back in my support days (both at previous sidejobs and family members' houses) in downloading, installing, and _updating_ basic applications. I could leave the tiny Ninite executable on their desktop with the instruction to just run it once a month and it would keep all their stuff up to date. [1] https://ninite.com/ https://ninite.com/ Install or Update Multiple Apps at Once
  • tasuki 4y ago
    I've been using APT for this with great success for the past 17 years! I guess it's also saved me quite a few hundreds of hours.
  • anotherevan 4y ago
    I don't use Windows that much, have used Ninite in the past, but these days I tend to use Chocolatey along with their GUI. https://chocolatey.org/ https://chocolatey.org/ https://community.chocolatey.org/packages/ChocolateyGUI https://community.chocolatey.org/packages/ChocolateyGUI
• icoder 4y ago
  Not at 100 hrs yet but fastlane is getting there. I set it up for making screenshots, building, sending to slack & submitting an app to App and Play Store. Saves time by minimising boring work, double win.
• pfoof 4y ago
  macOS and its integration with mac touchpad. I used Windows and Linux on several laptops and none was so well designed to switch between desktops and searching for windows. Ah and M1 speeds (unless you count updates and installing Xcode but you can't have everything).
• samsolomon 4y ago
  Cleanshot X I'm a product designer. I spend a significant amount of time taking screenshots—dropping them in Figma, slacking them to PMs and annotating them for engineers. The tool keeps screenshots suspended on your desktop until you decide what to do with them—save, annotate or copy it to clipboard. It doesn't save the screenshots if you don't want it to, so it prevents a ton of clutter. Not to mention it has video recording that I frequently use to create video walkthroughs for features I'm working on. The tool is a pretty expensive Mac App, but worth every penny. https://cleanshot.com/ https://cleanshot.com/
  • edmundsauto 4y ago
    It’s part of the SetApp package, which is only marginally more expensive than just a cleanshot sub. Highly recommend, you get dozens of neat little productivity apps with it.
  • therealmarv 4y ago
    No video recording but Skitch https://evernote.com/products/skitch https://evernote.com/products/skitch is still my screenshot tool for Mac. Just don't login with any Evernote account (I don't use Evernote) and you are fine. Free
• simonswords82 4y ago
  Workflowy for task management. Made me more efficient, must have net saved me 100 hours.
• tqwhite 4y ago
  I'll join those who benefit from personal workflow automation. I use BASH Alfred Applescript NodeJS bbedit in a zillion combinations to make things fast and easy. I have a bad memory so I have tons of BASH aliases and .bashrc terminal reminder files. I use Alfred, for example, to record 'time clientA 1 do an hour of work' in a tenth of a second. I use Alfred and AppleScript to shuffle windows around as I focus attention or finish things. bbedit's find/replace/regex stuff is better than anything I have ever seen. I use it to munge files in crazy ways. I have a set of files that act as a NodeJS ad hoc workspace. (Need to change the GUID on the records in a tsv file? Not a problem.) And when I do something that has ongoing value, Alfred and/or bbedit give me a way to add them to the toolkit.
• eloff 4y ago
  For me it’s github copilot. It produces bad code frequently and often code that looks good at a glance, but is bad. So I treat the output with extreme prejudice. However, I think it saves me a few hours a month on average. Maybe not 100 in a year, but in two or three years, certainly. It saves me much more time than my IDE does (JetBrains + vscode).
  • llanowarelves 4y ago
    JetBrain's rename functionality might save you that much, when it needs to touch lots of places, compared to a more naive rename.
    • eloff 4y ago
      Their rename functionality definitely saves me time, but I’d guess maybe only about half an hour per month on average. It saves you more in stronger typed languages and if you rename things across files a lot. I work on smaller code bases.
• nonameking2026 4y ago
  All of these programs are so interesting they will cost you 200 more hours than you saved. Call it carvkings law.
• p4l4g4 4y ago
  Did a lot of data wrangling this year. The usual grep, sed, awk, jq and even find has sped up my days significantly. Sed is among my favorites to whip up some quick, ad hoc, transformations. This year I added Miller [0] to my list; a tool to process tabular data, similar to sed, awk, etc. It handles csv, tav, json lines, etc. in a consistent way. I like the delimited key-value pairs format, which allows me to write simple oneliners in bash to collect some data (e.g. "ip=x.x.x.x,endpoint=/api/x") and use Miller to crunch the results. Not sure it saved me 100h, but it was one of the biggest time savers this year! [0] https://miller.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ https://miller.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
  • qazxcvbnm 4y ago
    I second Miller - besides its extensive support for various formats, it is fast. If you ever have to deal with gigabyte-sized files, Miller will give noticeable speed ups versus jq et al.
    • mattewong 4y ago
      FYI: https://github.com/BurntSushi/xsv https://github.com/BurntSushi/xsv is much faster than mlr (like an order of magnitude), and zsv (https://github.com/liquidaty/zsv https://github.com/liquidaty/zsv) is even faster. But, neither support formulas. Disclaimer: I am one of the zsv authors
• pinkcan 4y ago
  iOS "focus" and "screen time" features
• brihter 4y ago
  dsq [0] [0] - https://github.com/multiprocessio/dsq https://github.com/multiprocessio/dsq
• Gazoche 4y ago
  The fish shell (https://fishshell.com/ https://fishshell.com/) and its fantastic auto-completion. It now replaces bash as the default shell on all my machine and is the first program I install when connecting to a fresh cloud instance.
• nb_key 4y ago
  Tableau Data Prep. It is a powerful tool that can save many hours of tedious data preparation work. It has a nice interface and comparatively fast.
• phist_mcgee 4y ago
  Throwing my hat in the ring for Justfile. It's basically a streamlined make. https://github.com/casey/just https://github.com/casey/just Where it really shines are in places like monorepos where you may have many inter-related setup scripts, build commands or helper utilities. You define all of your commands in one file (or multiple if you want a hierarchy) and can run commands from any subdirectory. eg. You have a monorepo with a web server, and also a react-native app in separate directories, you can call `just build-app` in the web directory, or call just `start-server` when your terminal's current directory is 7 diretories deep in the mobile directory. The amount of time I have saved cd'ing around has honestly been amazing. It's worth it's weight in gold, especially on large projects.
• tezza 4y ago
  Sorry to talk shop: * All time King keeps on giving: MS Excel * MS Visio… last good Sequence Diagrams etc * Adobe Illustrator… keep visual scrapboards * Perl one liners with cygwin getclip/putclip * DBeaver SQL gui * StreamDeck with Autohotkey custom actions * SimpleNote - your notes everywhere when you need them for creation, reference and search
• pinkcan 4y ago
  docker compose is like using cheat codes
• mcs_ 4y ago
  Excalidraw (paid edition) Autopilot
• boyter 4y ago
  Going to say my own https://github.com/boyter/scc/ https://github.com/boyter/scc/ which I have used to turn down projects of "Oh we just need to do X" It allows me to evaluate the code-base quickly and see where potential issues are, and find hidden complexity in the code. I have said no a lot due to it. The only reason it exists was because I got caught out from another project, which wasted months of my time. Otherwise IntelliJ and the JetBrains IDE's in general.
  • masukomi 4y ago
    a) cool b) thanks for explaining how it saved you time c) holy CRAP the description wasn't joking about "fastest"
  • philomath_mn 4y ago
    Are the COCOMO estimates useful at all for you? That always comes up when I look at code metrics but I have a hard time believing they mean anything
    • boyter 4y ago
      Not really. It’s just another datapoint. People like seeing it though.
• lpolovets 4y ago
  Text Blaze (YC W21) has saved me about 50 hours over the past 18 months. They reduce repetitive typing across websites. For example if you have a common format for bugs you're filing, or LinkedIn messages or emails that you're sending, you can use Text Blaze to write most of the text for you. If you've used Superhuman snippets, this is similar but more powerful, and it works across the entire web instead of just email. Time savings screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/KjFhWRH https://imgur.com/a/KjFhWRH (Disclosure: I liked the product so much that my fund ended up investing.) Website: http://blaze.today/ http://blaze.today/ Chrome extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/text-blaze/idgadaccgipmpannjkmfddolnnhmeklj https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/text-blaze/idgadac...
• smusamashah 4y ago
  RipGrep has been a huge time saver. I work in huge legacy code base. Lots of modules, lots of content, lots of scripts. Sometimes I can just go to parent directory with all repos and search with RipGrep if ever needed.
• Myrannas 4y ago
  I’ve found Wallaby (https://wallabyjs.com/ https://wallabyjs.com/) to be a great addition to my tool chain over the last year. It is an automated test runner for JS / TS code with a great integration with ides. It has made writing tests and refactoring so much more productive.
• waymon 4y ago
  termius - new terminal app. I can save hosts, chain together hosts and then easily connect. sftp built right into it. honestly, it feels like cheating in terminal.
• nathanwallace 4y ago
  Excited to see Steampipe shared here - thanks zJayv! I'm a lead on the project, so sharing some quick info below and happy to answer any questions. Steampipe [1] is open source and uses Postgres foreign data wrappers under the hood [2]. We have 90+ plugins to SQL query AWS, GitHub, Slack, Kubernetes, etc [3]. Mods (written in HCL) provide dashboards as code and automated security & compliance benchmarks [3]. We'd love your help & feedback! 1 - https://steampipe.io https://steampipe.io 2 - https://steampipe.io/docs/develop/overview https://steampipe.io/docs/develop/overview 3 - https://hub.steampipe.io/ https://hub.steampipe.io/
• bondolo 4y ago
  Flexelint. The compilers have gotten better over the years but I wouldn’t consider doing C/C++ development without it. It has saved me hundreds of hours of debugging since I first started using it in 1990. The very first day it found a ‘write past end of array’ in some code written by a Pascal programmer which was doing a[sizeof(a)] = ‘\0’; that would have stymied us for days.
• Alifatisk 4y ago
  cheat.sh
• scotty79 4y ago
  Short chrome browser extension I wrote some time ago that rewrites normal urls to videos like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvPPXbo87ds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvPPXbo87ds into embedded video urls like this https://www.youtube.com/embed/jvPPXbo87ds?autoplay=1 https://www.youtube.com/embed/jvPPXbo87ds?autoplay=1 bypassing ads and running video in full browser window. Since I watch a lot of youtube I think it might have saved me 100 hours of waiting so I can press Skip Ad button. I probably should just use AdBlock but where's the fun in that.
• yawnxyz 4y ago
  CUE Lang (https://cuelang.org/ https://cuelang.org/) for me. I had to build this massive clinical data collection system in REDCap and it's kind of a nightmare system to use. So I wrote a script in CUE to programmatically build my REDCap data dictionary to support flexible inputs.
• kristianp 4y ago
  Conversely, what has cost you at least 100 hours? Hacker news is software that definitely took at least that for me!
  • yawnxyz 4y ago
    It gives and takes — I learned about CUE and Svelte through HN which have probably saved me hundreds to maybe even thousands of hours, so it's a net win for me!
• andrew_jef 4y ago
  Automa [0] is just another no-code extension to automate web browser. I used it to scrape excel files from the website of an open-end fund, which does not expose public API for its daily NAV historical data. This extension not only saved me time to manually point and click 1000s of url, but also give me a reason to procrastinate teaching myself selenium. [0] https://www.automa.site/ https://www.automa.site/
• leyka 4y ago
  I would say NetNewsWire or any RSS reader. The idea of having all news (Youtube, Twitter, blogs etc.) centralized in one app saved me a bunch of seconds every day looking for new content.
• btown 4y ago
  BetterTouchTools and Karabiner Elements for macOS. With a swipe of four fingers, I can turn a set of windows into a tiled configuration by "shoving" them where I need to go. When I press Caps Lock, which I've rebound in Karabiner to F16 and then bound F16+various modifiers to Activate/Hide Application in BTT, I can switch between IntelliJ, Chrome, Figma, Slack, Notion, so fast that I feel like I have 3x as many monitors as I do - which, whether paired with actual monitors or on the road, is absolutely game-changing. Knowing that I can context-switch immediately and get everything I need on screen, just so, lets me wear a lot more hats than I otherwise could have. There's an argument that I'm able to deliver results at a level as if I had 100 more hours every month!
  • jadamczyk 4y ago
    I used better touch tool for some shortcuts and trackpad gestures, but never fully used it's power. Recently I had a problem that one of my monitors connected somewhat late and all my windows were out of place. Thanks for saving my time mate, the restore window layout thing is truly magical
• torial 4y ago
  I have used this software for almost 2 decades. I find it incredibly helpful on Windows computers as an alternative to Windows Search. I think of it as Grep with a UI. https://www.mythicsoft.com/agentransack/ https://www.mythicsoft.com/agentransack/
• surds 4y ago
  A good Password Manager - doesn’t matter which. Helps avoid password resets and makes logins in apps much easier.
• analog31 4y ago
  Years have passed, but so have many 100's of hours. Looking back, Borland Sidekick was a major productivity booster for MS-DOS.
• hd99 4y ago
  xdotool, definitely program that required me 10000²² hours : firefox, thund' and gimp+blender
• galkk 4y ago
  On my work there is a utility that sends my shell history from all my terminal sessions and pcs to centralized database as I run commands, enabling search and cross reference. That saves tons of time. I haven’t bothered to set similar things for my personal use but I’m sure they do exist too. Tmux + tmux continuum is another utility that saves many hours. I use it only on remote machines though. Ffmpeg cli for fast lossless cutting of video. (Apparently there is nice gui for that, never tried though)
• rzach 4y ago
  During my freshman year of college, I was in a general chemistry class. Halfway through the semester I wrote a little Python script that encoded mass of a whole bunch of (not all of) elements and wrote some functions to calculate mass of compounds plus a few other useful quantities. Homework was online so I didn't have to show work - I would just type in the compound and whatever I wanted to calculate. If not 100 hours, it saved quite a bit of time!
• jiaaro 4y ago
  K9s - https://k9scli.io/ https://k9scli.io/ Terminal (ncurses?) Kubernetes client Bash “wait” command to do multiple things in parallel without extra _stuff_. Eg ( dothing.sh & slow_stuff.sh & more.sh & wait )
• fattybob 4y ago
  I have an extremely useful (for a very specific need) vba module collection for excel spreadsheets - I have often considered rewriting in an app, but the graphing outputs always kill my interest. I use it whenever I’m working after 20 + yrs , there are now a few proprietary packages that do the same, but are very easily misused, so even I use them for clients I still work from my own rather archaic vba assisted spreadsheet. I used vba because the calculations I was doing simply exceeded the abilities of spreadsheets - too many lines, it’s was an unusual discovery when I realised that my spreadsheet wasn’t fully evaluating the data set - handling just numbers and a vba module has never presented a problem.
• kamaal 4y ago
  sed(100+ hours), vim(1000+ hours), perl(10,000+ hours), emacs, jq, XML::Simple(Perl library), javascript console in browser, Ctrl-R(bash command) If you know Perl you get instant access to many many powers which you otherwise have to use 10s to 100s of tools to get it done.
• madduci 4y ago
  For me, Docker and Terraform. Packaging software easily and swapping it without too much hassle has saved me hours of pain. Same with Terraform. The provider ecosystem is so extended that you can just grab them and make infrastructure rapidly, instead of using some cloud-specific language and syntax
• ckvjdonee 4y ago
• samsaga2 4y ago
  Emacs (with evil). Macros save my life. Pressing some keys, I can modify large blocks of code in complex ways. Other way, I would need to write some python script.
• egberts1 4y ago
  Wut? Bind9 named daemon should rank at #1. I don't know of a better, easier, and faster productivity tool.
• flarg 4y ago
  Autohotkey beats them all (IMHO)! Hundreds of hours saved per year.
• lysp 4y ago
  ZTreeWin - http://www.ztree.com http://www.ztree.com This is a updated win32 version of XTreeGold if anyone ever used that back in the day. Allows many file system operations (view, copy, sort, tag) based on keyboard shortcuts in a text-console view.
• cheri9 4y ago
  [dead]
• cyneox 4y ago
  For me it was definitely Emacs and ORG mode. I use this combo to create presentations (pdf + reveal.js), write notes (org-roam style), do project management (ORG mode at its best), collect small code snippets (literal programming in ORG mode), almost everything... As for a large code base I found ripgrep + rg.el (the interface in Emacs) to be pure gold!
• mattewong 4y ago
  https://github.com/liquidaty/zsv https://github.com/liquidaty/zsv
• thiht 4y ago
  SmartTubeNext[1] In installed it on my Android TV instead of the official Youtube app and it saved me literal hours: - it blocks ads - it includes SponsorBlock, so sponsored segments, intros, "plz subscribe" are skipped - it allows me to block Shorts Anytime I have to use an official Youtube app, I remember how unusable it was. I even gave Youtube premium a try at some point, but SponsorBlock is just too good to ignore. [1]: https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTubeNext https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTubeNext
  • gregnavis 4y ago
    I'm using NewPipe [1] but it's TV support is rather poor. For example, full screen is broken and some operations are accessible only via a swipe gesture. If you've used NewPipe, how does it compare to SmartTubeNext? [1] https://newpipe.net/ https://newpipe.net/
    • thiht 4y ago
      I haven't used NewPipe on Android TV so cannot compare, but the user experience of SmartTubeNext is top notch. Everything works (you can even use Chromecast from the official Youtube app on your phone directly to SmartTubeNext), you can customize it enough (show/hide relevant sections, default section on launch, shod hide shorts, color theme, SponsorBlock) and the features that I care about are supported. It's basically an improved version of the official app. The only thing missing I can think of is the lack of comments, that might be a negative point for some people. Also I didn't personally interact with the developer but he seems like a very nice person, very invested in his project, even if some of the feedback he gets is thankless. SmartTubeNext is one of the few projects I'm actually considering donating money to. I tried using NewPipe on an Android phone for a while, and concluded I wasn't in their target demographic. I understand, but don't like their choice of not supporting Youtube accounts. Also wasn't a fan of the UX or the settings, everything felt more complicated than needed.
  • gala8y 4y ago
    No root required? I thought TV's didn't allow side loading anything. TIL.
• schappim 4y ago
  macOCR, a tool to get any text on your screen into your clipboard. It could be an image, some app or website that has disabled text selection, a pdf, image based email signature etc. I made this for myself, copying text out of everything, it turns out a few other people also like it... https://github.com/schappim/macOCR https://github.com/schappim/macOCR
• d4rkp4ttern 4y ago
  Don’t know if this has been mentioned yet — for those dealing with tabular data I highly recommend visidata— you can just “vd file.csv” and it shows you a table view in your terminal, with lots of super useful keyboard actions to sort, move, filter etc.
  • nowahe 4y ago
    Highly recommend this as well, it has been a godsend for me for digging into multi-GB Cloudfront log files and extracting stats and patterns. There is a good (albeit a bit old now, as the interface has been overhauled since) quick demo video from VD's creator : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1CBDTgGtOU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1CBDTgGtOU
• geekraver 4y ago
  Dual-pane file managers like Midnight Commander. Been using these since the days of Norton Commander on DOS; I even wrote my own for Unix/DOS in those days before Midnight Commander came out and I got lazy (https://github.com/gramster/gc3 https://github.com/gramster/gc3). I would live in Midnight Commander if not for the constant “the shell is already running a command” bugs.
• SuperSandro2000 4y ago
  fzf
• aabbcc1241 4y ago
  * text-based ERD diagram: https://quick-erd.surge.sh https://quick-erd.surge.sh with cli to auto generate incremental knex migrations * array-like proxy-based ORM: https://www.npmjs.com/package/better-sqlite3-proxy https://www.npmjs.com/package/better-sqlite3-proxy the schema and typescript definition can be generated from erd text in above format * a composible and typescript-friendly json parser for data validation: https://www.npmjs.com/package/cast.ts https://www.npmjs.com/package/cast.ts I'm not sure if they save 100 hours but they're definitely timer savers for me as an educator that need to create lots of web projects frequently.
• thomasswilliams 4y ago
  Great question, have enjoyed reading answers. For me, a clipboard manager has easily saved me 100+ hours of work time (I use CLCL and Clipy). A close second was upgrading my hardware - image editing which previously took minutes on my 2014-era machine now takes seconds.
• lolive 4y ago
  Obsidian! My new job is a matter of surviving a TON of information sent by a ton of different people each day. And Obsidian has been the tool to organize that information deluge.
• lolive 4y ago
  warpd avoided me spending a lot of time going from the keyboard to the mouse,for simple point and clicks. Honestly it is super useful. https://github.com/rvaiya/warpd https://github.com/rvaiya/warpd
• aagha 4y ago
  Windows: Fluent Search. Blown away it's not a part of Windows - https://fluentsearch.net/ https://fluentsearch.net/
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• ineedausername 4y ago
  FSearch is a fast file search utility, inspired by Everything Search Engine. https://github.com/cboxdoerfer/fsearch https://github.com/cboxdoerfer/fsearch
• spurgu 4y ago
  Alfred on MacOS. https://www.alfredapp.com/ https://www.alfredapp.com/
• denolfe 4y ago
  Karabiner for key remapping has been instrumental for me. I use it for a "hyper key" on CapsLock to provide Vim-like movement keys, text selection, app-specific bind overrides, etc. There is also a library out there for configuring it with TypeScript (Deno). Hammerspoon for window management is also amazing, though I recently switched to Phoenix because it can be configured in TypeScript. It allows me to have hotkeys to swap to specific apps or toggle between groups of apps. https://github.com/esamattis/deno_karabiner https://github.com/esamattis/deno_karabiner https://kasper.github.io/phoenix/ https://kasper.github.io/phoenix/
• sasakrsmanovic2 4y ago
  I am going to go with https://github.com/unoplatform/uno https://github.com/unoplatform/uno (cross-platform UI for anything from Linux/Windows/Mac on desktop, iOS/Android, or Web. Kind of like Flutter, just for C# devs.
• krembo 4y ago
  Kanmail.io for managing your Gmail in kanban board style https://kanmail.io/ https://kanmail.io/