It sounds like you wish you had the classic unix text file utilities like sed, awk, grep, cut, and so on.
Ask HN: What are some tools you wish you had while doing your day to day work?
31–40 of 106 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are some tools you wish you had while doing your day to day work?
#32An actual real portable executable format, and standardized build tools. I hate having to jump through build system hoops to target the same piece of silicon with an annoying OS in the way.
Re: Ask HN: What are some tools you wish you had while doing your day to day work?
#33I wish I had a way to do knowledge work but also use my body.
Right now, for working purposes (as a software engineer), I'm a disembodied head that can move a pointer, type words, and voice chat. Our bodies were never designed to sit in chairs 8 hours a day for forty years. The very idea of needing to spend free time exercising just to keep your body from falling apart is, well, preposterous.
(It's been a long time since I've watched it, but I think this talks a bit about the idea: https://vimeo.com/115154289 - "The Humane Representation of Thought")
Re: Ask HN: What are some tools you wish you had while doing your day to day work?
#34An 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.
Conceptually yes. I've yet to see one that is built for an end user to make something on a one shot example though, with an output script that you can tweak.
Everything I've seen has been very enterprise-y.
Re: Ask HN: What are some tools you wish you had while doing your day to day work?
#35A standalone hardware mute switch for Zoom/etc calls so you can prominently and reliably see your mic mute status, and quickly and easily flip it on and off.
(I know there are a few do-it-yourself options for these, but I'd much rather throw a bit of money at it rather than time).
Re: Ask HN: What are some tools you wish you had while doing your day to day work?
#36It sounds like you wish you had the classic unix text file utilities like sed, awk, grep, cut, and so on.
Yea, more often than not if you wish there was a tool to do something that seems trivial, someone already thought of it and solved it well.
Re: Ask HN: What are some tools you wish you had while doing your day to day work?
#37Better Google Docs.
It's hella slow.
Re: Ask HN: What are some tools you wish you had while doing your day to day work?
#38When working with React and Redux and Redux Sagas, I wish I could more easily figure out causal chains for what happens. When I previously did work as a game programmer, for most things (except, say, debugging why things rendered a certain way), you could just go to where the thing happened, put in a breakpoint, and you'd get a beautiful call stack making it easy to reason about how you got to where you are.
In my current web development work, using the aforementioned tools, where it isn't just one thing calling the next, but there's a huge amount of indirection and message passing, I have to spend a ton of time figuring out what set of events occurred, and where, and why, to figure out why I got the result I got.
Re: Ask HN: What are some tools you wish you had while doing your day to day work?
#39Better Google Docs. It's hella slow.
Our support and marketing teams wont switch to Google Docs from quip because they hate Google Docs organization. But the engineers hate quip.
Re: Ask HN: What are some tools you wish you had while doing your day to day work?
#401)Hassle free Copy Paste between workstations on different networks.
2)Generated Ansible from pristine OS to current state.