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Ask HN: Have you coded any productivity software just for yourself?

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Re: Ask HN: Have you coded any productivity software just for yourself?

#11

Post by mike_hearn »

I have my own shell scripting replacement that I use for all my scripting tasks now. It's based on Kotlin and has a lot of quality-of-life features that bash/zsh/python etc don't have.

I uploaded the docs to share the details with friends and it can be downloaded [1], but at this time it's not productized in any way. The public-facing docs are incomplete (there are more that I have private), it doesn't commit to backwards compatibility, it needs to be faster to compile scripts and I'd need to improve the IntelliJ plugin etc.

Every so often I think about open sourcing it so I can use it in more contexts than just private use, but running open source projects can be a lot of work, it depends on some libraries that would have to go first, and I have customers to attend to so I just end up not getting around to it.

[1] https://hshell.hydraulic.dev/14.1.100/

Re: Ask HN: Have you coded any productivity software just for yourself?

#12

Post by bravetraveler »

I'm not much of a developer, but I found these useful:

1) An auto-start manager for i3/Sway. A script around a structured config... with things I want to run on-login, under certain circumstances.

When a work day, when the weekend, etc. Conditional automatic setup of my apps, windows, and their arrangement

2) A note taker/organizer, run by the first thing. Basically a wrapper around 'vim' with a calendar week per file/tab. I open this week and the previous week by default

Re: Ask HN: Have you coded any productivity software just for yourself?

#14

Post by dexterlagan »

I made a bunch, as far as I know I'm the only one using them:

An advanced TODO list app with calendar and development-oriented features: https://github.com/DexterLagan/todo-master

A MySQL database manager: https://github.com/DexterLagan/database-master

A CSV->SQL tool: https://github.com/DexterLagan/csv-to-sql

A one-click invoicing tool: https://github.com/DexterLagan/invoicer

A photo folder organization tool: https://github.com/DexterLagan/picture-mover

A photo dupe killer (fixes botched Adobe imports from SD cards and cameras): https://github.com/DexterLagan/delete-duplicate-pics

A Hosts file installer for winhelp2002: https://github.com/DexterLagan/hosts-installer

A tax filing helper: https://github.com/DexterLagan/tax-helper

A CSV file analyzer for programmers: https://github.com/DexterLagan/csv-analyzer

A tiny Web browser meant to automatically search for text on the clipboard: https://github.com/DexterLagan/auto-search

A clipboard dashboard-type app: https://github.com/DexterLagan/paster

A Gnome .desktop file generator: https://github.com/DexterLagan/launcher-maker

Re: Ask HN: Have you coded any productivity software just for yourself?

#16

Post by yetihehe »

I've made simple tool to make invocation traces in java. I had to fix errors in BIG project where sometimes invocation goes throught several layers (gui -> local coordinator -> remote coordinator -> remote server and result back again through another round of functions back to gui) and some of the interactions are configurable at runtime. So I've made java agent which can install logger in methods and classes specified by regex (like "com\.company\.project\.class\.method\(.+"), which then logs all calls along with arguments. VERY usable for checking which path was actually taken for invalid executions. Not in releasable state yet, but I will someday release it.

Re: Ask HN: Have you coded any productivity software just for yourself?

#17

Post by jmacc93 »

Yes! Finally something relevant I can post to hacker news

I use this little script https://github.com/jmacc93/paste-to-tmux-script daily. Its for pasting your current clipboard item to a target tmux session, along with very simple dsl for controlling which tmux target to send to, opening the tmux target, killing tmux sessions, etc. It makes a vastly, vastly better and more productive repl for me. The workflow for using it looks like typically is like: use `@sw name_of_target`, `@open`, `name_of_executable`, then move my cursor to something I want to evaluate, use ctrl-c to copy the line, and ctrl-. to send it to tmux

I think I've changed stuff around since I last updated that repo, though, but the general idea and skeleton is there, if anyone wants to use it / hack on it. And I'm gonna do a rewrite of it soon, I think, so that instead of using a dsl (the `@...` forms above) it uses `!...` or some similar form to execute arbitrary shell commands

I'm hoping to (soon hopefully) integrate it with my https://github.com/jmacc93/noca notebook canvas program as well

Re: Ask HN: Have you coded any productivity software just for yourself?

#18

Post by dehugger »

My most used tool is a command line script I made which takes copied text input and applies some formatting to it, with flags that control what exactly is done. The primary use-case is formatting text from Excel documents/csv into SQL lists or table inserts. It's saved me tens of hours at least in the ~year since I completed it, maybe more.

Re: Ask HN: Have you coded any productivity software just for yourself?

#19

Post by tmaly »

I started efforts on a script to take voice recordings from my iPhone and transcribe them into markdown I can load into Obsidian. I still like to take handwritten notes, but it is tedious to always type these out into Obsidian.

This solution lets me just quickly read them in to the default voice recording app on the iPhone.

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