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Ask HN: What dev tools do you rely on that nobody talks about?

• rep_movsd 6mo ago
  gitk and git gui
• verdverm 6mo ago
  CUE and Dagger, though they are talked about by more than nobody They are central to my personal dev tool https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof
• strict9 6mo ago
  I've been using ack for a very long time, maybe 15 years. It's like grep but faster and easier to use. I still use it all the time, even in the era of Claude. https://beyondgrep.com/ https://beyondgrep.com/
  • fragmede 6mo ago
    and then ag (silver surfer) and then rg (ripgrep).
• kentich 6mo ago
  A VS Code/Visual Studio extension for creating mind maps with nodes linked to code called Code Mind Map.
• markus_zhang 6mo ago
  Tilix + shell scripts to create a Tilix session, open windows inside Tilix and run commands, so that I can immediately create a session to debug say Linux kernel development -- 3 windows, one for gdb, one for compiling and running, and one for minicom. I'm sure Tmux can do it, but I really hate the Ctrl+B thing. Alt + Arrow keys are way more intuitive.
• s3micolon0 6mo ago
  I love deepwiki for understanding deep code architectures: https://deepwiki.com/ https://deepwiki.com/
  • n0um3n4 6mo ago
    wow...!
• HawkApps 6mo ago
  [dead]
• dhuan_ 6mo ago
  For me it has to be mock. With it I can create and automate APIs easily. https://dhuan.github.io/mock/latest/examples.html https://dhuan.github.io/mock/latest/examples.html
• artakulov 6mo ago
  [flagged]
  • Zizizizz 6mo ago
    You may like https://httpie.io/ https://httpie.io/ if you've not memorised all the curl flags already. The CLI tools way of making requests with headers and post bodies is really nice in my opinion `http PUT pie.dev/put X-API-Token:123 name=John`
    • skydhash 6mo ago
      I use restclient inside emacs. You edit a .http file to add the endpoints and you can quickly execute them.
• efortis 6mo ago
  HTTP mock servers I’m working on mockaton, which is mainly a filename convention based router. https://github.com/ericfortis/mockaton https://github.com/ericfortis/mockaton
• 4oo4 6mo ago
  code-server, instead of VSCode. I can build my own podman image on top of it with whatever dev tools I need for whatever languages I'm working with, and if I have to install something weird or something breaks I can just restart the container. Especially on my work machine that isn't Linux, I have this running in a VM and can just use in my browser and don't have to jump through hoops to get the dev environment I want. On my personal instance I also use it for automating building stuff from source. Before I had this, I just had build tools on pretty much every single machine I was building for and it was a hot mess. https://github.com/coder/code-server https://github.com/coder/code-server
  • Antitoxic6185 6mo ago
    so... devcontainers but in a different way? Why not just devcontainers? I know its a PITA to setup on podman.
    • 4oo4 6mo ago
      Yes and no, in this case you don't need a local vscode instance to connect to your vscode container, just a browser. It's more similar to self-hosted Github Codespaces, and but I believe code-server was actually released first. Personally I've fiddled enough with podman that that part of it doesn't bother me, and I don't like Docker/Podman desktop (which I think is what devcontainers assume the setup is) and just want to use the docker/podman daemon/cli, so that's something I also don't want to have to mess with. I know you can also point devcontainers at a remote or local docker daemon, but that means giving it full control of the daemon, which is a nonstarter and too risky for me from a security standpoint. I really like to have my podman containers really locked down in terms of capabilities, userns, gvisor, etc. and given that it just wants full control of docker I'm guessing it takes none of that into consideration (or, painful to try and graft on). I also really don't trust VSCode's remoting protocols (especially remote tunnels, which is basically just a reverse shell). So for me it's a matter of having more control over container runtime security (the docker/podman ecosystem usually treats it as an afterthought in favor of convenience, and devcontainers appears to be no different), and it doesn't depend on anything on my machine I'm accessing it from. Since VSCode just a becomes another self-hosted web app this way, it's pretty much the exact same experience no matter where I'm connecting from.
• Peacetoes 6mo ago
  This resonates. I actually ended up building a tool last year (CapSize) because I needed to churn out screenshots at a specific frame size for my day job and couldn't find anything that would just "lock" to 800x600 without a fight. I'm not a dev by trade, so I did use AI as a power-tool to wrestle with the C++ and Electron parts. It turned into a bit of a rabbit hole—I ended up obsessed with keeping it entirely local/offline (no cloud APIs or telemetry) just to see if I could do things like local OCR in RAM. I ended up building two more tools to help me with making the one tool so it kind of spiraled into a small suite, but the main goal was just a no-frills utility that didn't require a login or a subscription just to crop an image.
• gbibas 6mo ago
  [dead]
• Zizizizz 6mo ago
  https://github.com/atuinsh/atuin https://github.com/atuinsh/atuin for fuzzy shell history (ctrl+r) https://github.com/sharkdp/bat https://github.com/sharkdp/bat (nice coloured cat replacement) https://github.com/abiosoft/colima https://github.com/abiosoft/colima (so I don't need docker desktop) https://github.com/duckdb/duckdb https://github.com/duckdb/duckdb (performant database that lets you directly query JSON, parquet, csv files with SQL queries and convert one to the other. https://github.com/eradman/entr https://github.com/eradman/entr (rerun commands automatically when provided files change) (useful for rerunning test commands automatically once you save the file you're editing. https://github.com/martinvonz/jj https://github.com/martinvonz/jj and https://github.com/idursun/jjui https://github.com/idursun/jjui (Jujutsu VCS, been using it for three months and I really enjoy it) https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazydocker https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazydocker (managing containers, images, volumes easily) https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit (best tui for git and outside niche git commands, the fastest way to use git.) https://github.com/jdx/mise https://github.com/jdx/mise (fast asdf, direnv, and task runner replacement) (install pretty much version of tool, language, env vars in a per directory level. (Or global if you want)) https://github.com/ajeetdsouza/zoxide https://github.com/ajeetdsouza/zoxide (intelligent cd to move between directories incredibly quickly)
  • digikata 6mo ago
    You might be interested in: https://github.com/cantino/mcfly https://github.com/cantino/mcfly - fuzzy shell history (feels lighter than atuin to me, in rust) https://github.com/watchexec/watchexec https://github.com/watchexec/watchexec - rerun on file change, knows about .gitignore/.ignore etc (in rust) https://github.com/jonas/tig https://github.com/jonas/tig - instead of lazygit, mostly for easier git log viewing for me as I use straight git most of the time Otherwise a lot of crossover in what I use too.
    • KomoD 6mo ago
      "feels lighter"? is it or is it not lighter?
      • 6mo ago
• 8note 6mo ago
  multitouch+stylus screen, plus the windows ink demo app https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/garage/profiles/sketch-pal/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/garage/profiles/sketch-pal/ its low latency, can do multiple layers, and its easy to pick out a standard set of colours to draw with. It lets me make good rhetorical diagrams, and I've also used it for drawing quick mockups to get genai to make webpages also, Quip as a design document/review tool. Its fantastic having a design review where you get comment threads going along different parts of the requirements and design, that you can then focus on in discussion time. it also lowers the barrier to giving feedback, so newer devs can ask questions without feeling like theyre taking up valuable meeting time
• linesofcode 6mo ago
  cat some-file | pbcopy Copies it to your clipboard on osx. I use this a lot.
  • vlod 6mo ago
    on linux: alias pbcopy='xclip -selection clipboard' alias pbpaste='xclip -selection clipboard -o'
• asxndu 6mo ago
  It's amazing, how rarely people talk about fish (https://fishshell.com/ https://fishshell.com/) I love it so much that I pity people that use Bash, Zsh.
• stockyarddev 6mo ago
  [dead]
• weiyong1024 6mo ago
  [flagged]
• mbrezu 6mo ago
  `gdu`, which is like `du` with a TUI.
• simquat 6mo ago
  Use TextMate[0] as my daily driver. [0] https://macromates.com/ https://macromates.com/
• sunilkumarai 6mo ago
  Ragas for anyone building RAG pipelines. It evaluates your retrieval quality before you've written a single line of product code. Faithfulness, answer relevance, context recall are all measurable and automatable. Most teams I've seen find out their retrieval is broken in production. Ragas tells you in Week 0. Completely changes how you scope the build.
• pdyc 6mo ago
  high on my own supply :-) i use https://easyanalytica.com/tools/html-playground https://easyanalytica.com/tools/html-playground frequently as it allows me to open html in new window and use dev tools like any other page.
• microbuilderco 6mo ago
  [dead]
• microbuilderco 6mo ago
  [dead]
• KellyCriterion 6mo ago
  Notepad++ :)
  • downboots 6mo ago
    nppexec https://github.com/d0vgan/nppexec https://github.com/d0vgan/nppexec
• FreelancerKitAI 6mo ago
  [flagged]
• FreelancerKitAI 6mo ago
  [flagged]
• John23832 6mo ago
  Tmux
• volume_tech 6mo ago
  [dead]
• gtirloni 6mo ago
  I think people are missing the "hidden gems" part of the question here.
• fogzen 6mo ago
  Efficiency is doing more with less. I'm not sure more tools is the path to productivity. I'm not sure it counts as a dev tool, but I use Nushell and I'm always surprised at how few devs know about it.
• microbuilderco 6mo ago
  [dead]
• shivang2607 6mo ago
  https://github.com/devlensio/devlensOSS https://github.com/devlensio/devlensOSS -> its helpful for me to check the blast radius of my changes. (built by me but not a promotion)
• qave 6mo ago
  Having been running so many claude terminals in parallel, now switching to https://lanes.sh https://lanes.sh
• mmarian 6mo ago
  CapRover for self hosted PaaS Dozzle for self hosted logs DuckDB was a life savior for some data analysis I needed to do Rollbar for app error alerting - v generous free tier
  • jamiemallers 6mo ago
    [dead]
  • satvikpendem 6mo ago
    I use Dokploy instead but the rest are good
• borakostem 6mo ago
  [flagged]
• Serhii-Set 6mo ago
  [dead]
• caprios 6mo ago
  [dead]
• oumua_don17 6mo ago
  Why should I tell if it's supposed to be hidden? :-) But here we go, Common Lisp for rapid prototyping at my FAANG job, so I'm actually paid to do that!!! edit: minor typo
  • rootnod3 6mo ago
    Now I'm jealous
• mcevoypeter 6mo ago
  1. https://github.com/junegunn/fzf https://github.com/junegunn/fzf for fuzzy search. Great for easily searching and selecting git branches + tags + commits, commands from shell history, files, shell jobs, processes, etc. 2. https://github.com/casey/just https://github.com/casey/just for more structured scripting.