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Ask HN: What are some tools you wish you had while doing your day to day work?

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Re: Ask HN: What are some tools you wish you had while doing your day to day work?

#21

Post by nscalf »

piinbinary wrote: post #18

I wish I had tools that were just a little smarter at working with code. There are some things that I find I have to manually track down in a large codebase, but the things I do could be automated. I'm thinking of operations like the following: * Tell me where in package (or module) X it calls functions that can eventually reach function Y in package Z (that is, there is a possible stack trace starting in X that lead…

The stack trace comment is 100% what I wish I had built into my IDE, and from my time mentoring more junior devs, I can tell you this is one of the hardest things for them. All of these are great suggestions, but the first one really has been a pain point for me.

Re: Ask HN: What are some tools you wish you had while doing your day to day work?

#22

Post by juancampa »

wcarss wrote: post #19
izolate wrote: post #15

> And it was most frustrating when they had like 100 columns or so. Having to change column 63 at line 58 is not something you do easily in Notepad++. Import to Excel was my way to go, but since the file was not a standard CSV file (e.g. also had sections like an .INI file) it was time consuming: first just select a subsection from the file, save to a different file, import to Excel, modify, paste back, etc. Suggesti…

As a longtime vim user, I don't see how vim makes going to the Nth logical column (for several values of N in different rows) in a large "CSV-like" file much easier. Navigating in general is easier, sure, but... do you have a trick to share perhaps?

Something like this works as long as there are no commas within a cell.

  58G63f,
Takes you to cell at 58:63 (might have off-by-1 errors, don't know)

Re: Ask HN: What are some tools you wish you had while doing your day to day work?

#23

Post by izolate »

wcarss wrote: post #19
izolate wrote: post #15

> And it was most frustrating when they had like 100 columns or so. Having to change column 63 at line 58 is not something you do easily in Notepad++. Import to Excel was my way to go, but since the file was not a standard CSV file (e.g. also had sections like an .INI file) it was time consuming: first just select a subsection from the file, save to a different file, import to Excel, modify, paste back, etc. Suggesti…

As a longtime vim user, I don't see how vim makes going to the Nth logical column (for several values of N in different rows) in a large "CSV-like" file much easier. Navigating in general is easier, sure, but... do you have a trick to share perhaps?

    58G 63f,
1. Go down to line 58

2. Jump to the 63rd comma

3. Edit

Re: Ask HN: What are some tools you wish you had while doing your day to day work?

#24

Post by nwienert »

- A monorepo build tool that handles having a "base" Dockerfile that builds the monorepo dependencies (npm install + npm build) but that then lets sub-images use a subset of the repo easily without needing to re-install/re-build.

- A really nice TypeScript shell scripting setup. I'd like to see Duktape or JavascriptCore used, combine with esbuild/swc, Actually Potable Executable, and ShellJS. Basically, give me a single binary that runs cross platform, so I can write my scripts using TS. Anything to save me from having to continue googling weird bash edge-cases constantly.

Re: Ask HN: What are some tools you wish you had while doing your day to day work?

#26

Post by pluies »

izolate wrote: post #23
wcarss wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a longtime vim user, I don't see how vim makes going to the Nth logical column (for several values of N in different rows) in a large "CSV-like" file much easier. Navigating in general is easier, sure, but... do you have a trick to share perhaps?

58G 63f, 1. Go down to line 58 2. Jump to the 63rd comma 3. Edit

This could lead you to the wrong place if, for example, some quoted values on this row contains commas, no?

Re: Ask HN: What are some tools you wish you had while doing your day to day work?

#27

Post by craftydev »

izolate wrote: post #15

> And it was most frustrating when they had like 100 columns or so. Having to change column 63 at line 58 is not something you do easily in Notepad++. Import to Excel was my way to go, but since the file was not a standard CSV file (e.g. also had sections like an .INI file) it was time consuming: first just select a subsection from the file, save to a different file, import to Excel, modify, paste back, etc. Suggesti…

Visidata is great for this kind of thing, exploring and editing csv. https://www.visidata.org/ https://www.visidata.org/docs/edit/

Re: Ask HN: What are some tools you wish you had while doing your day to day work?

#28

Post by screye »

1. A reliable python env manager. Some sort of framework to visualize changes to my env as a visual graph with each update/clone viewable in a git-tree like format.

2. Jupyter lab, but that's as good as VSCode/Pycharm (VS code's jupyter extension is still very lacking. Something like Spyder that's not really a notebook would also work fine)

3. A real Inking->Structure app. Come on. There is money in this. Someone do this. Something that is exportable to any of draw.io/Visio/etc.

Re: Ask HN: What are some tools you wish you had while doing your day to day work?

#29

Post by jayant_kaushik »

klmadfejno wrote: post #7

An equivalent to excel's record macro functionality, but at the os level, based on what's on the screen using ocr. Sikuli got close, but something with a little more AI behind it to get a sort of "fuzzy" macro recording.

Do you mean Robotic Process Automation? It’s OS level and ticks all the blocks.

Re: Ask HN: What are some tools you wish you had while doing your day to day work?

#30

Post by DanielDe »

klmadfejno wrote: post #7

An equivalent to excel's record macro functionality, but at the os level, based on what's on the screen using ocr. Sikuli got close, but something with a little more AI behind it to get a sort of "fuzzy" macro recording.

An app I built, Keysmith [1], does something pretty close to what you're describing. It's macros anywhere on your Mac, but instead of using OCR we use accessibility APIs to identify UI elements by name. There's also a browser extension to do the same on the web.

And you can save macros for later use or just create a one-off "Scratch" macro as described here [2].

[1] https://www.keysmith.app/ [2] https://www.keysmith.app/guides/creating-and-running-macros

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