Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours?

#111

Post by LeifCarrotson » Mon, Apr 13, 2020, 4:34 AM UTC

jkhaui wrote: post #92

dorkwood wrote: post #62

Everything[0] by Voidtools as a Windows search replacement. It makes search practically instant. Now that Windows search often fails to turn up even my most used files (what happened to Windows search? Was it intentionally nerfed?), Everything has become a necessity for me. [0]: https://www.voidtools.com/

Wow, thanks for sharing this. Also, to second your question: what the hell did happen to Windows search? I always just assumed I'd done something to break it (and honestly, could never be bothered trying to "fix" it... even after all these years), but apparently it's inherently broken. I know very little about OS software. Could someone explain at a high-level how something as fundamental as file search can be render…

Search is not an operating system function. It needs read access to every file you want it to find, but other than that it's just another application.

Windows has great engineers, yes, but the problem with Windows search is not an engineering problem, it's a trade-off between different use cases and performance and compatibility and innumerable other factors. Design by committee and circumstances of history made Windows search what it is, the shortcomings aren't caused by a lack of engineers capable of building Everything or Spotlight or grep or Google or whatever your ideal file search tool looks like.

Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours?

#112

Post by dnhz » Mon, Apr 13, 2020, 4:37 AM UTC

wwweston wrote: post #33

Ozlone wrote: post #29

- Emacs (with evil mode) and org-mode. The hours gained far outweigh the hours put in (and the hours put in were fun). - Yabai on mac for not having to think about moving windows around. - Pomodoro (now through org-mode) for helping focus (and saving hours, in a round-about-way.) - Removing as much advertising from my life as possible. (Ublock origin, deleting social networks when possible)

Anyone know what the best way to set up Emacs on macOS is?

I just use this version. https://emacsformacosx.com/ I have a one line shell script that then lets me start Emacs from the cmd line. something like

    open -A [path to applications/emacs startup] $@

This supports emacs —daemon

Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours?

#113

Post by proverbialbunny » Mon, Apr 13, 2020, 4:39 AM UTC

NaOH wrote: post #105

Keyboard Maestro for Mac. Its unlimited customizability and incredible amount of capabilities make me dread ever moving to another platform. https://www.keyboardmaestro.com

Oh man macros. I remember using them in the OS Classic days before aliases/shortcuts were a thing, so you'd have to click into a pile of folders to open an application, but not with macros. Macros would do it for you.

Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours?

#114

Post by sooheon » Mon, Apr 13, 2020, 4:39 AM UTC

Launchbar (https://obdev.at/products/launchbar/index.html)

Spotlight on steroids, along the lines of Alfred and Quicksilver, but the best of the bunch, imo. It's a frecency based fuzzy matching searcher that adheres to subject - verb - (optional) object grammar, and using it feels like a global GUI terminal. A new mac without it feels completely gimped. Things I use it for:

- quick launch/switch apps

- browse filesystem (like https://github.com/ranger/ranger) and do anything with item

- take selected item (file, folder, url, text) -> open with X, send to any search engine, move, copy, rename, start composing email with text, compress, basic text munging, etc.

- calculator

- clipboard and snippets manager (incl. variables like current date/time)

Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours?

#115

Post by gitgud » Mon, Apr 13, 2020, 4:43 AM UTC

Github actions - Automated builds, testing and deployments. Saves tonnes of time and allows me to quickly switch between repos with worrying about deploys and testing.

Docker - Allows reproducible builds and caching, an indespensible and composeable tool for development.

Shell Aliases - just using aliases for common commands in .bashrc saves tonnes of time. Even better version control your aliases in a github repo like this https://github.com/benwinding/dotfiles

Flameshot and Peek - lightweight screenshot and screen recording tools

Linux - It's difficult initially, but Learning and developing in Linux really is just faster, easier, and saves tonnes of time, mainly due to the unix philosophy...

Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours?

#116

Post by saagarjha » Mon, Apr 13, 2020, 4:44 AM UTC

murukesh_s wrote: post #108

opwieurposiu wrote: post #64

VSCode, and/or Sublime Text have probably saved me a hundred hours I would have spent waiting for Eclipse to start.

Couldn't agree more.. People who say Electron (on which VSCode is running) is bloated and is slow probably haven't worked on full fledged IDEs using Java.. they consume memory in Gigabytes, are slower, at least appear to be slower, despite using native UI and takes a lot longer to open.

Eclipse isn't a particularly good user of Cocoa, is it?

Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours?

#117

Post by equasar » Mon, Apr 13, 2020, 4:45 AM UTC

amirathi wrote: post #72

Quill[1] editor has saved me (and many others) 100+ hours. Imagine building a rich text editor from scratch in your product. Also - git, Django REST framework, VueJS [1] https://quilljs.com/

tui.editor is another excellent choice, for me was the best one since the handles Markdown as a source for writing out the content. Take a lot a it!

Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours?

#118

Post by signaru » Mon, Apr 13, 2020, 4:45 AM UTC

Stating the obvious, a web browser with a search engine.

Then custom scripts I made to do specific tasks on hundreds of files. So familiar scripting languages, in general, such as those regularly used at work. I had actually used MatLab for non scientific uses like batch downloading, or batch image/audio format conversion.

And a modern IDE that prevents many errors in the first place. VS Intellisense does it for me, but I guess there are equivalents in other development environments.

Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours?

#119

Post by laurentdc » Mon, Apr 13, 2020, 4:48 AM UTC

    # ci = clipboard in, co = clipboard out
    # xclip so this works in gui apps too
    alias ci="xclip -selection clipboard"
    alias co="xclip -selection clipboard -o"

Also: tig, Text-mode interface for git https://github.com/jonas/tig

Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours?

#120

Post by hombre_fatal » Mon, Apr 13, 2020, 4:48 AM UTC

dceddia wrote: post #100

The Z command line utility has saved me a ton of time. It remembers the directories you’ve visited and lets you jump to them with just a few characters. Almost like Chrome’s autocomplete for recently-visited directories (if you’re used to being able to type “g” to go to gmail or “n” for “news.ycombinator.com”...). For instance I can run “z B” and it’ll jump to my ~/Business directory (and “z ss” would do the same). h…

This is one of those things I set up a decade ago and it's become such a part of how I use my computer that I'm confused for a moment whenever it's not there.

It's one of those rare tools that interacts with my stream of consciousness which is one step away from mind reading.