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Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours?

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Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours?

#431
post #22

Here's a couple (albeit macOS focused) favorites of mine: - Deliveries: macOS / iOS package tracking https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/deliveries-a-package-tracker... - Screenotate: OCR all of your screenshots with metadata like program/webpage https://screenotate.com - The Tagger: lightweight macOS utility to tag music / fetch metadata from discogs https://deadbeatsw.com/thetagger/ - youtube-dl: Download any video / s…

I just set up Tessaract for screenshot OCR purposes following below post and gotta say it's super easy and great. https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/354036

Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours?

#432
The golden recipe: neovim, tmux, rg, fzf, i3/other tiling wm on nixos/arch

Fzf all you can, not just inside vim, but also use it to switch between tmux sessions in an instant. I have a tmux manager on top of tmuxp that is able to start / switch to already started sessions via fzf.

Identify patterns you use a lot and make snippets out of them. Create project templates.

Have a folder where you dump reference / things that need to be really easy to find, and set up vim to search into that instantly, no matter where you are.

Keep an inbox file to throw things in, make a wm bind a script to prompt for text and append it there via zenity. Don't throw links into it, it's gonna be a bookmark dump.

Make sure your todo system is a keybind away at all times.

Review your way of working, challenge, and improve it. Be lazy, but only when you afford it.

Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours?

#433
post #92

Everything[0] by Voidtools as a Windows search replacement. It makes search practically instant. Now that Windows search often fails to turn up even my most used files (what happened to Windows search? Was it intentionally nerfed?), Everything has become a necessity for me. [0]: https://www.voidtools.com/

Wow, thanks for sharing this. Also, to second your question: what the hell did happen to Windows search? I always just assumed I'd done something to break it (and honestly, could never be bothered trying to "fix" it... even after all these years), but apparently it's inherently broken. I know very little about OS software. Could someone explain at a high-level how something as fundamental as file search can be render…

I also thought I broke something. Since a couple of months it is absolutely unusable. It sometimes can't even find the calculator or even VSCode which I use every day.

Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours?

#434
post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was looking for Everything for Mac and tbh I can't say Spotlight is even close. Sure Spotlight works great for apps and files in ~/Documents/, but I find it failing when I'm trying to find some obscure file in /Library/ or with-in Xcode SDK's. Is Alfred good in this sense?

I used to use Alfred for this, but it's not really the same as Everything. I'm not sure why - something about the speed, results or maybe just the interface itself.

Some of the Windows tools use the NTFS / USN change journal for very fast access to metadata without traipsing across the rest of the filesystem. I dunno if APFS has such a thing?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USN_Journal

Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours?

#435
post #3

BeyondCompare (cited in the original thread), especially the folder comparison feature. Saved my sanity when our team's shared directory stopped syncing silently on my laptop and I had to figure out which files I needed to sync manually. WizTree ( https://antibody-software.com/web/software/software/wiztree-... ) is a freeware Windows utility (man, typing this took me back to 1997) that lets you quickly see which file…

+inf to BC: http://www.scootersoftware.com/

Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours?

#436
post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a section of people that I belong to, that aren't fans of the GUI clients because it doesn't fit in their workflows but also find the CLI not productive enough. We start writing aliases and custom scripts. We integrate git with FZF. Well for all of these people: I recently found Lazygit ( https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit ) which is a terminal UI for git and that does exactly what I've been looking for…

I think I've used a very similar one called LazyDocker. But after a while I found that it wasn't that useful, and I don't like seeing the "donate" button in my face all day (call me old-fashioned). The true power of CLI apps comes from "alias" commands that you build up yourself. The following commands are great examples of this: alias docker-kill-all='docker kill `docker ps -aq`' alias docker-rm-all='docker rm `dock…

Lazydocker is made by the same guy yes! I don't find it as useful though.

> The true power of CLI apps comes from "alias" commands that you build up yourself

I usually agree. I spent way too many hours making aliases and I'm very proficient at it. But sometimes there's something like lazygit which does everything my aliases did, but slightly better as it gives me, for example, line-by-line staging and vim keybindings.

It is true that it does not compose, but I can still (and do) use the command line. It's just a nice increase of productivity in 90% of the cases (for me!)

Note: I'm not related to the lazygit project in any way, just very satisfied with it

Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours?

#437
post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much dead and replaced by what? (I am curoous as I thought it was a well established standard)

As stated, the poster is talking about OIDC, not the predecessor OpenID.

Ah right, thanks. I read "OpenID" but was thinking "OpenID Connect" and was surprised by the depreciation.

Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours?

#438
post #271

https://fishshell.com/ for sure Just having sensible defaults on a shell works wonders on my day-to-day productivity. Add a couple of aliases for productivity and off you go. abbr --add s "git status" abbr --add gap "git add --patch" abbr --add gco "git checkout" abbr --add gd "git diff" alias recent="git for-each-ref --sort=-committerdate refs/heads/ --format='%(color:yellow)%(refname:short)|%(color:bold green)%(com…

I absolutely love Fish, but it's worth warning anyone who's taking a first look and excited to try it, that some syntax differences from more familiar shells like Bash may cause frustration, both in terms of muscle memory and anytime you need to copypasta. It hasn't been enough of a problem for me to switch back (or to ZSH), the benefits far outweigh the frustration, but I do think it's worth a small warning.

Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours?

#439
post #229

Everything[0] by Voidtools as a Windows search replacement. It makes search practically instant. Now that Windows search often fails to turn up even my most used files (what happened to Windows search? Was it intentionally nerfed?), Everything has become a necessity for me. [0]: https://www.voidtools.com/

Does anyone know of a good Mac version of this?

I'm a long time user of quicksilver. Open source. Long time loyal users swear by its ux for efficiency. Development has slowed down recently, but it still runs great for me.

https://qsapp.com/index.php

Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours?

#440

The golden recipe: neovim, tmux, rg, fzf, i3/other tiling wm on nixos/arch Fzf all you can, not just inside vim, but also use it to switch between tmux sessions in an instant. I have a tmux manager on top of tmuxp that is able to start / switch to already started sessions via fzf. Identify patterns you use a lot and make snippets out of them. Create project templates. Have a folder where you dump reference / things t…

>Make sure your todo system is a keybind away at all times

This point here I think is incredibly useful in general. When accessing your full to-do list feels like its own todo, you're gonna have a bad time

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