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Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?

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Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?

#312
For Docker stacks: Funkwhale [1]

Their Setup for the Docker stack [2] is not only well documented, but also suitable as a blueprint for any persistent software setup with Docker. They also have a mentality for documentation as a firct class member, which is really important for OSS and self-hosting. You'd have to look hard to find any outdated piece of information or lazy written part in the docs. Lastly, the interface is just beautiful, simple and elegant. I finally enjoy listening to my music library again.

[1]: https://funkwhale.audio/ [2]: https://docs.funkwhale.audio/installation/index.html#availab...

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?

#313

Norton Commander - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norton_Commander . Not sure how elegant on the inside, but it comes from the era when software development was not so fast paced. And the fact that it inspired so many spin-offs (just to mention few that I personally used: Volkov Commander, Midnight Commander, FAR Manager, and my favourite - DOS Navigator (it had spreadsheet!)).

Pretty much everything I can think of as elegant either runs in the shell (k9s, nano) or is the shell (fish).

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?

#314

Monument Valley and Monument Valley 2[0]. They're games, and relatively short/easy, but it's beautiful and elegant. [0] https://www.monumentvalleygame.com/mv2

townscaper is another "game" that i would consider to be very elegant considering all you do it click somewhere and it decides what type of building to add. the only option you have is what colour it will be

https://youtu.be/QtVkteAS15M

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?

#316

Git is the first example that comes to my mind. I'm aware that the concept can be difficult to grasp and that the cli commands seem weird at first. Once it clicks however, it's an absolutely fantastic tool. I'm still often amazed by what is possible with selective resets, diffs, greps, and most impressively interactive rebases. It makes a lot of otherwise difficult tasks much easier, and more elegant. Git is IMO one…

I agree that the concept behind git is powerful and elegant. I very much disagree that the implementation of git is elegant. For example: how many things does `git checkout` do? And I still don't understand what the point is of having a staging area. Or why I need to edit files in order to provide Git with instructions on what to do when it rebases. Or why adding hunks is so much more difficult than adding complete f…

In my over 12 years of experience using git, "how many things git checkout do" is still my go-to example to complain about it.

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?

#317
Elegance for me means a program that's lightning fast, efficient to use, and has a minimal learning curve. The first things that come to mind:

OurGroceries, a lovely little free app to share grocery lists with your family FooBar2000, an early windows-based media player uTorrent (or at least the very early versions, before it became bloatware) Snapchat (again, the early versions when it was 5x quicker than any other mobile photo sharing platform)

Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?

#319
post #149

Notational Velocity Very simple, instant search, and having the same UI for searching and creating notes is genius - way fewer duplicated notes, for one thing.

I used Notational Velocity for a few years for taking notes in school. I was really impressed by the search/create function and have tried using the same paradigm in my own projects. I couldn't find an equivalent on Linux, so I ended up using Emacs which isn't elegant in the same way.
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