Looking at your list you may like VisiData ( https://www.visidata.org/ ). See the demo from 2018: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1CBDTgGtOU
100%. Visidata is great. Easy to pick up, rewarding to power users.
Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)
411–420 of 574 posts
Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)
#412For me it’s github copilot. It produces bad code frequently and often code that looks good at a glance, but is bad. So I treat the output with extreme prejudice. However, I think it saves me a few hours a month on average. Maybe not 100 in a year, but in two or three years, certainly. It saves me much more time than my IDE does (JetBrains + vscode).
JetBrain's rename functionality might save you that much, when it needs to touch lots of places, compared to a more naive rename.
Their rename functionality definitely saves me time, but I’d guess maybe only about half an hour per month on average.
It saves you more in stronger typed languages and if you rename things across files a lot. I work on smaller code bases.
Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)
#413vimv You invoke 'vimv' in a directory and the resulting editor is a directory list for your pwd ... and you can edit it as a text document. When you save and exit, all of your file (re)naming is committed to the directory.
https://github.com/ivanmaeder/vimv
100%. I use this every day, esp. when editing my music library.
Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)
#414Gotta say IntelliJ, which isn't just for Java. It's a great coding platform and I used it for Scala, Go, Python, Bash, Java, PHP, Perl, you name it. I know many people like to hate on IDEs, but IntelliJ (and/or its language-specific variants like PyCharm or GoLand) has great support for all the debuggers in the above languages. It has awesome search/replace. Being able to "drill down" in to code, including 3rd party…
“dealing with merge conflicts are a breeze” is an understatement. I don’t use IntelliJ typically in my day to day anymore, but the merge conflict resolution UI offered in IntelliJ is so far and above alternatives that I would still reach for it in a particularly complex scenario. VSCode’s UI does not even remotely approach how good IntelliJ’s is. I’m not aware of any UI that does merge conflicts as well as IntelliJ currently.
Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)
#415Microsoft Excel. Manipulating tens or hundreds of thousands of rows, including cross-referencing across tables, is just so satisfying and much faster than doing it with a DB or code. Alternative spreadsheet software do some things better, but they don't come close as a complete package, I don't regret paying for it myself for the first time in my life. It such a life saver in a pinch. Obligatory Spolsky intro to Exce…
Yeah, just yesterday. Hacky output from `nslookup`, not ideal but it’s all we had. Tens of thousands of rows. No IDE with regex capabilities available. Excel to the rescue! Took me about five minutes to extract exactly what I needed.
> "No IDE with regex capabilities available."
If it's Windows there should be PowerShell ISE installed.
Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)
#416Ditto Clipboard Manager for Windows. Yes, I know W10/11 have it native now, but it's not as good as Ditto. https://ditto-cp.sourceforge.io/ AutoHotKey https://www.autohotkey.com/ And if deleting TikTok from my phone were an app, it would be nominated, because that saved me hundreds of hours I'm sure :D
I am still using http://bluemars.org/clipx/ old but works
Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)
#417Ditto Clipboard Manager for Windows. Yes, I know W10/11 have it native now, but it's not as good as Ditto. https://ditto-cp.sourceforge.io/ AutoHotKey https://www.autohotkey.com/ And if deleting TikTok from my phone were an app, it would be nominated, because that saved me hundreds of hours I'm sure :D
I loved ditto when I used windows. Do you know a good ditto alternative for mac?
I haven't used ditto myself, but pastepal seems like what you want
Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)
#418Earlier quoted context omitted.
slow? i use both pycharm and webstorm and their are definitely neither kludgy nor slow...
Curious, why not just used IntelliJ with the plugins for python? I’ve never used the standalone apps. Do they provide a better experience?
Intellij IDEA only has the barest support for C/C++, whereas CLion is a full-featured IDE with similar feature to IDEA.
Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)
#419Microsoft Excel. Manipulating tens or hundreds of thousands of rows, including cross-referencing across tables, is just so satisfying and much faster than doing it with a DB or code. Alternative spreadsheet software do some things better, but they don't come close as a complete package, I don't regret paying for it myself for the first time in my life. It such a life saver in a pinch. Obligatory Spolsky intro to Exce…
100% in agreement on Excel. Even when coding in Python I frequently save an intermediate file as xlsx to explore/debug, or even load into Tableau for viz.
I got to play around with Tableau when I was helping my wife in a collage programming course and though I don't have a current use to justify the significant cost, I must say that the tool was amazingly flexible and easy to use. I'd highly recommend it.
Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)
#420Ditto Clipboard Manager for Windows. Yes, I know W10/11 have it native now, but it's not as good as Ditto. https://ditto-cp.sourceforge.io/ AutoHotKey https://www.autohotkey.com/ And if deleting TikTok from my phone were an app, it would be nominated, because that saved me hundreds of hours I'm sure :D
I loved ditto when I used windows. Do you know a good ditto alternative for mac?
I don’t know if I’m the only one, but when I used ditto I turned off the auto cleanup stuff. Basically I had it keep everything. I’d go cleanup manually every now and then (especially images), but having a very long term way to look up past code snippets was invaluable.
So then when I got my first Mac I felt lost without a clipboard manager with unlimited storage. I finally found Copy’em and my life has been complete again. :)