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Ask HN: What developer tools would you like to see?

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Re: Ask HN: What developer tools would you like to see?

#21
Some kind of vulnerability tracker for dependencies. You type `gradle somecommand` and it will walk the dependency graph, incl all transient ones, and show you which dependencies currently have an active vulnerability affecting them and the version that fixes it.

Re: Ask HN: What developer tools would you like to see?

#22
Find a way with entr[0] and an http server to tell the browser to reload the currently viewed file if it changes.

Today, entr allows you to restart a command when a file changes.

A web server allows you to serve local files to your browser.

If you use npm, lots of libs allow you to serve your web ui, and make the browser reload the page when something has changed.

But this is tied to npm, and even to the framework you use (eg: angular has its own way).

It would be cool if we could have a way to do that for any tool/language. Like, could a tool tell the browser to reload, because that tool was restarted by entr due to a file change?

This would allow live preview on any kind of files, or maybe even program output in the browser without having to press F5 every time.

[0]: https://github.com/clibs/entr

Re: Ask HN: What developer tools would you like to see?

#25
post #3

Log viewer that can prettify JSON structured objects. And for example if you clicked on level = error it can quickly filter all error logs.

While others are replying with ‘this or that already does this’, I totally feel you. All the log viewers I’ve worked with (latest ones being DataSet and Kibana) have some holes in their UX. When that compounds with badly configured log pipeline it’s really painful.

Re: Ask HN: What developer tools would you like to see?

#26

Remember the early web, when people used to look at existing websites to learn how it was done? “View Source” used to be a career-starter for a lot of people, but has become largely useless today due to transpilation, frameworks, and other abstraction layers. I’d love to see a browser extension provide an “Explain Source” context menu item, which sends you to a pane in Developer Tools that shows: - an estimation whic…

That would be great. You could also recommend extensions to be installed if a website uses a certain framework. For example, the react Dev tools extension can be used to view the source of react apps in a more intuitive way compared to the rendered html file.

Re: Ask HN: What developer tools would you like to see?

#27
TypeScript stuff:

1. A tool for debugging TypeScript (in VSCode) that shows the provided and expected types, and how they are different, in a way that is easy to read.

Instead of having a bunch of nested paragraphs in plain text, show it in two columns, each displaying how a normal person would write a type declaration. Maybe even use color (highlighting?) to show which parts are different.

2. A tool for VSCode that lets you expand (into a modal or whatever) types that are abbreviated when you hover them

Re: Ask HN: What developer tools would you like to see?

#28

Remember the early web, when people used to look at existing websites to learn how it was done? “View Source” used to be a career-starter for a lot of people, but has become largely useless today due to transpilation, frameworks, and other abstraction layers. I’d love to see a browser extension provide an “Explain Source” context menu item, which sends you to a pane in Developer Tools that shows: - an estimation whic…

builtwith.com?

Re: Ask HN: What developer tools would you like to see?

#30

I don't know if this exists or not, but it's something I've always wanted. I love and hate unit testing. It's a fantastic idea that I've never seen successfully implemented in practice, mostly because the tests invariably fall by the wayside. At the very least, it's a burden to support them. I'd love a tool that would observe my code during runtime - capturing all inputs and outputs from every function, as well as th…

This sounds like fuzzing. Do you want fuzzing?
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