Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 531 posts

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

#201

Post by p_l »

zamalek wrote: post #153
saagarjha wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It does something completely its own (and horrible/slow) on Windows (possibly one of the 6534 equally awful Java UI packages), so I can't imagine it does anything better with iOS.

Eclipse uses SWT, which actually piggybacks on native toolkits, though I don't know if it doesn't go through some ancient version of GTK in the process.

AWT/Swing based IntelliJ manages to be much, much faster in comparison.

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

#202

Post by Seb-C »

Using vim as my main editor has incredibly increased my productivity, but learning to use it's macros saved me even a more tremendous amount of time. It takes a while to learn to use it, but after that any kind of repetitive task can be done easily with it. And if combined with some bash and vimscript knowledge, it is even greater.

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

#205

Post by jakear »

pfranz wrote: post #145
hombre_fatal wrote: post #125

1) Any terminal that you can summon/dismiss with a global hotkey. Examples are Guake for Linux and iTerm2 for OSX. I consider this a must-have for all developers. 2) Anything that lets you resize/place windows with hotkeys. For example, Divvy for OSX. Divvy is also nice because if you press the hotkey multiple times, it cycles the application through each of your monitors. No need to ever use your mouse to move/resiz…

> 1) Any terminal that you can summon/dismiss with a global hotkey. Examples are Guake for Linux and iTerm2 for OSX. I consider this a must-have for all developers. Years ago I saw someone using this (I think it was actually Yakuake) and ran it for a bit. I really didn't like that it was a single session. However, I later messed around with tiling window managers (which relates to your #2!) and having a shortcut to p…

It absolutely blows my mind how many developer-centric search UIs don’t have fuzzy search. Developer tools css editors for one (CSS! The language with margin-* naming conventions everywhere!). Also GitHub issue labels.

Browser history too.

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

#206

Post by harel »

When I was maybe 12 or 13, I wrote a program in Amos on my Amiga that did my algebra homework. For a while my homework consisted in typing inputs, and writing the output in my notebook. I suppose that saved me a good amount of time, which was then used for games most likely.

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

#208

Post by lars512 »

Seb-C wrote: post #202

Using vim as my main editor has incredibly increased my productivity, but learning to use it's macros saved me even a more tremendous amount of time. It takes a while to learn to use it, but after that any kind of repetitive task can be done easily with it. And if combined with some bash and vimscript knowledge, it is even greater.

I have to agree wholeheartedly. Learning vim is quite painful, but it keeps paying off for years, even if you choose to use modern editors with vim bindings. The speed of these bindings for navigating and editing code is really unrivalled. I even use the Vimium Chrome plugin, it's a pleasure there too.

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

#209

Post by blaerk »

* pass, the standard unix password manager https://www.passwordstore.org/.

Instead of stopping whatever I'm doing, thinking about what password I used last time something forced me to rotate, pass saves the day!

* AwesomeWM, https://awesomewm.org/.

Maybe not a program per se, anyway using easy-to-remember keyboard shortcuts instead of clicking through a gui probably saved me a few minutes here and there.

* Gentoo Portage, The Gentoo package manager.

Yea, something that compiles packages from scratch may not sound like your typical time-saver, however, back when I had to track down every dependency and compile it myself just to get whatever package working that wasn't in the current distribution package tree, this saved me a lot of time. - This of course goes for every package manager, however back then(tm) portage had the most current releases and a lot of packages not in apt, rpm, etc.

* tmux (and tmux-cssh), https://github.com/zinic/tmux-cssh/

synchronize ssh sessions, like clusterssh, not very elegant but this saved me more than once, fast synchronized change on multiple machines at once \o/

* Ansible https://ansible.com/

Make tedious boring tasks less so, specify stuff in yaml once, execute and forget about them.

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

#210

Post by 978e4721a »

jakear wrote: post #199
greggman3 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use vscode but it's missing some basic code features for me. The biggest for me is probably keyboard macros, something that's been a basic feature of editors since at least the 80s. Keyboard macros in other editors has saved me 100s of hours. https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/4490

Curious, what do you think of multi-cursor as a replacement for macros? (I’m on the team)

Multicurors aren't replacement for macros in the same sense as loops aren't replacement for recursion.
Post reply on HN