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Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)

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Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)

#321

Post by unsigner »

mastersummoner wrote: post #200

Not a program, but being very familiar with the keyboard shortcuts in SublimeText has saved me countless hours of dev time. Things like Ctrl-D to highlight multiple instances of a word, plus the ability to put on Caps checking in the search bar first so you're only highlighting correctly capitalized versions. Make the same change in multiple locations. Saves so much time. Knowing how to highlight a letter, a word, a…

Came here to post this. The multiple cursors feature combined with the ability to open huge files with gracefully degrading performance turns a lot of what would be one-off programming tasks that would take dozens of minutes to an hour into interactive sessions that take seconds to minutes.

Also the low latency is amazing. Sublime on an old laptop feels batter than VS Code on a fancy new desktop.

Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)

#323

Post by edmundsauto »

samsolomon wrote: post #295

Cleanshot X I'm a product designer. I spend a significant amount of time taking screenshots—dropping them in Figma, slacking them to PMs and annotating them for engineers. The tool keeps screenshots suspended on your desktop until you decide what to do with them—save, annotate or copy it to clipboard. It doesn't save the screenshots if you don't want it to, so it prevents a ton of clutter. Not to mention it has video…

It’s part of the SetApp package, which is only marginally more expensive than just a cleanshot sub. Highly recommend, you get dozens of neat little productivity apps with it.

Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)

#324

Post by tasuki »

heipei wrote: post #122
Bekwnn wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I try to stress this more than anything when talking about the merits of vim/emacs/etc. It's not about speed, it's about how effortless and 2nd nature editing text becomes. Which is really counterintuitive when you look at how complicated the programs are. But I felt that it became better/easier than regular text editing after only 3 weeks of fulltime use. The uninterrupted flow of keyboard use, and reduced mouse nav…

I'm a long-time vim user, and haven't really used anything else over the past 15-20 years. I use a nice color scheme, barely any plugins and a moderate but static vimrc. I feel like this is my happy place, it let's me write with the setup I'm used to, in any terminal, on any machine, and on any codebase (JS, Python, Go, HTML, C, etc). Every now and then I see the magic of modern text-editors (VSCode et al), especiall…

I've been using vim since perhaps 2004.

Switched to IntelliJ in 2018 when writing Scala. IdeaVim is fine, it even lets me switch to normal mode with jk/kj [0]. What more could I want?

I've been using IntelliJ for Scala, Elm, and Python, and still use (neo)vim for editing other languages and random files. I'm prepared to jump ship to vim+LSP on short notice.

[0]: https://github.com/tasuki/dotrc/blob/master/.ideavimrc#L5

Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)

#325

Post by esperent »

superasn wrote: post #227
LVB wrote: post #130

GitHub Copilot As a manager & parent with only occasional bursts of time to code (some work, mostly side/fun stuff), Copilot has turned out to be incredibly useful in smoothing over all of the small things I'm slow at because I don't do them daily. And especially since I have limited time, I just want to get the damn thing working and am quite happy to my way there as quickly as possible.

Yes there has been a lot of hot things in A.I. in 2022 but most of them are mostly novelty value like Dall-E/SD and sometimes worse like SEO spam. Copilot is the only real value I'm getting from the recent A.I revolution and it does save me hundreds of lines of manully typing code all day. And the best part is it's getting better and better each day.

> mostly novelty value like Dall-E/SD

These are not just novelty value. They're great for mocking up ideas and I've also used them for generating backgrounds for advertising, for example:

"A black stage lit from above by two spotlights, very dramatic, stylish"

You can also add keywords like "modern/rustic/nature/futuristic" and it will get tuned to your desired style immediately.

Iterate on that for 5 minutes or so and there's my perfect background for a "coming soon" flyer. Way better than I could have made in Canva. Good enough that multiple people have told me the flyers look amazing, and nobody guessed it was AI until I told them.

Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)

#326

Post by beernutz »

kklemon wrote: post #151

Vimium. Vim-like shortcuts for the browser. I can't name any other tool or extension that gives me anywhere near the productivity boost of Vimium. I spend probably half of my work day plus a few hours a day in my spare time in the browser, and it makes navigating the browser feel like butter. When I'm tired and don't want to be glued to my desk, I can relax and surf with one hand which just feels incredible. I quickl…

If you like Vimium, you should check out SurfingKeys. It is similar but seems to have even more going for it: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/surfingkeys/gfblio...

Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)

#327

Post by tunesmith »

madjam002 wrote: post #309
tunesmith wrote: post #19

Flying Logic Aeon Timeline ObservableHQ - particularly the discovery that I can use most of it locally and privately for free. I've tried with quarto so far, but I think there are other ways too. What I want is a way to instantly switch between dag and tree data structures: graph for visual editing, tree for easy data entry. So something that would analyze/cluster intelligently to minimize links when converting to tr…

Out of interest how do you run most of Observable locally?

I followed the instructions at Quarto.org, integrated with VS Code. So they are text documents stored locally. I didn't realize observable-cli was open source.

I find it can't do nested logic the way observablehq.com can though. For instance, I like having inputs embedded in paragraphs of text, which requires having logic mixed in with a markdown cell. There are certain things that I can do on the web that don't work locally.

There's also https://observablehq.com/@asg017/introducing-dataflow, which I haven't tried yet.

Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)

#328

Post by esperent »

xmonkee wrote: post #6

RedwoodJS https://github.com/redwoodjs/redwood I launched my startup from 0 to first customer in 3 months thanks to this guy. Most of my time saved was because of a solid collection of libraries, brilliantly integrated together (backend to frontend), and I didn't have to suffer analysis paralysis every time I needed something.

I've just been researching this the last few days. There's a couple of other similar tools that I'm also checking out:

Refine.dev

Wasp-lang.dev

I'm quite early into researching these so I don't have anything much to say about them yet.

Wasp is a DSL so it's a bit different.

Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)

#329

Post by hammeiam »

boplicity wrote: post #195
jmcgough wrote: post #149

Anki - I don't know how I'd prep for the MCAT without this. Open source with desktop and mobile clients, syncing via cloud. It's flashcarding but uses gradual intervals so you see things less often once you've retained them. ChatGPT - I use this as a private tutor (it's great for biomedical stuff) to check my understanding and ask it to correct me if I'm wrong.

RE: ChatGTP... How confident are you that it's giving you the correct answers to your queries? I've noticed that it often sounds right, but is sometimes completely wrong, in subtle ways. It always puts together words that are commonly near eachother, and it is always grammatically correct, but it is often absolutely wrong. I've observed that the more specific and technical a question I ask, the more likely it is to b…

You can actually ask ChatGPT to cite its sources. Anecdotally when I tried, it provided me with a valid url to a census.gov site that contained the answer to my question. That doesn't make it better than google, but it does mean that some verification is possible.
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