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.
Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)
151–160 of 574 posts
Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)
#152The 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.
Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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 It's also useful to remove duplicate commands and store infinite history. Add this to ~/.bashrc: export HISTFILESIZE= export HISTSIZE= export HISTCONTROL=ignoredups
Changing HISTFILE by context has been a huge win, keeping commands from generic system administration or different projects from getting in the way as I search back through my history to do a thing again.
Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not the user you replied to, but for me: Open blinds in the morning, shut them at sundown. Turn on porchlights after dark if I'm not home. Turn them off 10m after I'm home. Turn HVAC up/down when I leave the house, revert when I get home. Unlock doors when I arrive home. Make sure they're locked when I leave.
How does home assistant track know if you are home or not? Is it tracking your location?
Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)
#155Beyond Compare, AutoHotKey, the macro functions in Notepad++ and Photoshop, and the user-preset function in Lightroom.
Beyond Compare (file comparison+) is a really useful tool.
Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)
#156vimv
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.
Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)
#157Assuming 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
Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)
#158Microsoft 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 Exce…
100% in agreement on Excel. Even when coding in Python I frequently save an intermediate file as xlsx to explore/debug, or even load into Tableau for viz.
Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)
#159Gotta 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.
Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)
#160Switching 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.