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Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
321–330 of 422 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#322Not a specific piece of software, but a characteristic of a limited percentage of anonymous internal systems--one of the most beautiful things to witness in the realm of design is a system undergoing catastrophic stress when the designers anticipated and planned for such events, and in usually a very short period of time you see the results of extensive planning spool out, design features hidden from view and unappre…
any examples?
I’m on my phone so I can’t find a better source, but Mercedes plays a sound to prevent hearing loss during a car crash.
https://nowiknow.com/the-special-sound-a-mercedes-benz-makes...
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#323Sublime Text introduced multiple cursors to the world. A single incredibly versatile and elegant feature. That feature has empowered my ability to use other pieces of software faster, and programming languages I was unfamiliar with... Better.
I've used it to:
- batch edit columns copied from excel files.
- wget/rename/run cli commands on dozens of inputs without having to worry about how for loops are written in bash/bat/powershell by just typing commands on a hundred lines and concatenating them with &&
- extract data from various text files without writing parsers or even thinking about regexes
This is one keyboard shortcut, with one of the smoothest learning curves ever. Pure elegance.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#324After 50 years it doesn't seem like it, but C has managed to survive this long because it's a solid all-round player from the bare metal to web servers. It's simple enough that you could probably implement a fairly capable C compiler in assembler.
C has managed to survive this long because of: - Unix and its inertia - Licensing of Unix allowing it to proliferate to the masses and being used for education - because it is simple enough that a compiler can be quickly brought up for any new ISA that appears, as long as it looks enough like a 70's-80's CPU architecture enough for pointers to work. Elegant? No. - Making pointers and arrays synonymous is elegant only…
No, Rust sucks
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#325bbedit
Does exactly what it promises
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#326Git 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 disagree with this. I think the basic concept of Git is beautiful, but the implementation of some of the derivative operations are distinctly inelegant. For example, I hate the use of "ours" and "theirs" in merges and rebases. I understand the theory of why it works the way it does and why it's different when merging versus rebasing, but I just think it's downright confusing, and I still have to double check every…
One thing that confuses me about Git (but I guess isn't unique to it) is what happens when you merge and "git show" the merge commit. It seems the classes of changes are:
- things that were the same on both sides so aren't in the diff
- things that were different but auto merged, and aren't in the diff
- things that were different, were auto merged, and are in the diff
- merge conflicts
But how did it distinguish the last 3? And how does it get so confident about #2 that it doesn't show them and there isn't a single command to show them?
When hg was more popular I knew someone working on Google Code who told me it was better because it didn't have rebases, but I'm pretty rebases and linear history are safer than this.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#327I'm surprised nobody has mentioned windows 11
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#328Git 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…
The staging area is so you can get your upcoming commit pretty enough (by adding/removing hunks etc) ahead of time before creating it. If you were previously on SVN where there was no intermediate step between creating a commit and putting it in official server history, I think you'd appreciate all the safety you could get.
It does seem like it'd work without it, since there's commit --amend.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#329Vary random but these are stuff which impressed me on first try and never let me down: Kitty, the terminal emulator by Kovid Goyal wouter, a minimal JS routing library espanso, a text expansion program KDE Connect Tailscale The last 2 together curl
> Kitty Could you elaborate on what do you feel is better or makes you more comfortable using kitty against any other random terminal? I also vouch for KDE Connect. Painless to use after installing. Very convinient for file transfer
Native tabs, panes. And the keyboard shortcuts for handling them is super intuitive.
Some innovative keyboard functionalities. E.g., highlighting all the URLs in the current buffer, so I can open it in the browser with just keyboard shortcuts, same for file paths. One keyboard shortcut let's you open the last output in a pager. So I don't have to `previous-cmd | less` again. There are a lot of small stuff like this.
Configurable to its core.
Broadcast feature which lets you print output to multiple panes.
Plugins (called kittens!) which can extend the functionality a lot. Like ctrl+f in the terminal.
And as the sibling mentioned, well maintained. Kitty is one of the softwares on my "donate-to-when-financially-stable" list.
Re: Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?
#330Emacs - although there's a lot of accumulated cruft in the form of whacky APIs and elisp functions, the design of Emacs is stunningly effective. The way that minor modes and keymaps are composed to customize the interaction mode for each individual buffer is clever and beautiful, to name just one thing out of many. And, as janky as elisp is, it's one of the few extension languages that's actually good at its job, and…
Writing Scheme (Guile Scheme on Guix) has been the only time I've actually felt a "eureka moment" and feeling like I understood fully what my code was doing.