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Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?

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Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?

#21

Post by destructionator »

I wrote my own terminal emulator stack. I was annoyed that the colors were often unreadable on others and that shift+page up wouldn't work to scroll from inside gnu screen that I used to use. So I rewrote the whole thing from scratch, my own terminal emulator and my own replacement for gnu screen. The terminal has both a custom palette and refuses to display certain combinations (if you ask it to do white on white, for example, it will do grey on white instead) and forwards various things like the shift+page up keys all the way down (and on the other side, commands like clipboard paste request all the way too), so when I ssh to the desktop and attach the session, all my habits still work.

I know it sounds like overkill but it just really bugged me to strain my eyes and have to hit different weird keys depending on where I was.

Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?

#22

Post by mxstbr »

I write Raycast[0] scripts to automate small, common tasks I do daily, for example:

- Connect my AirPods to my Mac - Count the characters in some text - Create a new text expansion shortcut with Espanso[1] - Start/stop a Focus[2] session - etc.

Because they're in Raycast, they're super accessible to me — I simply hit CMD + Space, type the first word of what I need and hit Enter. Loving it!

[0]: https://raycast.com [1]: https://espanso.org/ [2]: https://heyfocus.com/

Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?

#23

Post by lostintangent »

I wrote a GitHub Gist management experience for VS Code, since I wanted an extremely easy way to capture notes, docs and code snippets throughout the day: http://aka.ms/gistpad.

It completely transformed my behavior of writing and sharing, and I ended up expanding the experience to support GitHub repos as well, so that I could access and edit any of my “knowledge bases”, regardless how they’re stored in GitHub.

Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?

#24

Post by Jiro »

The Perry Rhodan series was translated into English in the 1970s, but the series is very long and the translation stopped very soon. I can find Perry Rhodan ebooks and upload to Google Translate. However, converting the ebooks to text does not put them in a format useful for translating--the sentences are broken by newlines and there are specific problems like page numbers and the letter M embedded at a page break.

Thus, wrote a tool to convert such converted ebooks to have full sentences and to do a couple of other odd things so Google Translate and the particular ebook reader I am using handle them better.

Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?

#26

Post by raggi »

A lot of the tools now in fuchsias fx started life as personal standalone scripts later exported to the team. Nowadays contrib contains tons more, some of which also started similarly. These all now have a long history from many contributors. You may be able to glean the historical process stuff from the git history.

https://cs.opensource.google/fuchsia/fuchsia/+/main:tools/de...

Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?

#28

Post by k2enemy »

Probably not the kind of tool you are asking about, but I made a pair of woodworking planes that cut a quarter inch wide, quarter inch deep groove a quarter of an inch from the edge of a board. This operation is commonly needed for drawer bottoms and raised paneling. Two symmetric planes are needed so that you can always work with the rising grain of the wood.

You can buy adjustable grooving planes and old molding planes that will do this, but it was fun (and much cheaper) to make my own pair.

Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?

#29

Post by LazyGrizzly »

- Emacs mode for compilation bookmarks - A rss2maildir python script, that one never worked satisfactory due to atom/rss being shitty standards - A discord bot that gives daily reddit updates - Concerning bash a bookmark system for common directories, so I can do 'j dir' to jump to said dir.
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