I have an extremely useful (for a very specific need) vba module collection for excel spreadsheets - I have often considered rewriting in an app, but the graphing outputs always kill my interest. I use it whenever I’m working after 20 + yrs , there are now a few proprietary packages that do the same, but are very easily misused, so even I use them for clients I still work from my own rather archaic vba assisted spreadsheet. I used vba because the calculations I was doing simply exceeded the abilities of spreadsheets - too many lines, it’s was an unusual discovery when I realised that my spreadsheet wasn’t fully evaluating the data set - handling just numbers and a vba module has never presented a problem.
Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)
431–440 of 574 posts
Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)
#432sed(100+ hours), vim(1000+ hours), perl(10,000+ hours), emacs, jq, XML::Simple(Perl library), javascript console in browser, Ctrl-R(bash command)
If you know Perl you get instant access to many many powers which you otherwise have to use 10s to 100s of tools to get it done.
Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)
#433I find good use of my skill in the following: DBeaver: use a consistent interface for practically any data store. Wanna SELECT and JOIN CSVs? It can do that too. https://www.mail-tester.com/ - Fantastic email server settings troubleshooter. Excel / Calc / Gnumeric: I don't even know macros, just the functions, sorting, filtering, and pivot tables enable good productivity. And sometimes fun, I chose my current video c…
Speaking of DBeaver - does anyone have any good themes that they might share? I really like the interface but the stock look is lacking.
Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)
#434Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would say that’s a fairly trivial example. How about renaming a method? Or, moving a class to a different file?
Or reordering parameters.
gofmt can do that! What I’m still looking for is an easy way to bubble up go contexts, adding as first pagans. Perhaps IntelliJ is useful here?
Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)
#435My most time saving programs didn't change in several years: Slickrun, floating command line for Windows https://bayden.com/slickrun/ Autohotkey - shortcuts, text expander and scripting for everything https://www.autohotkey.com/ Total Commander, still the best file manager on Windows https://www.ghisler.com/ CyberChef - The "Cyber Swiss Army Knife" - single file web app for all kinds of conversions, encryption, encod…
Laughs in DirectoryOPUS.
Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)
#436Each of the following is in the 1000 hours saved club (in no particular order): jq, perl, grep, gnu textutils, gnu parallel, bash, xargs, gkrellm, nload. Make deserves a special shout out. If you think it's only useful for building software, you've completely missed the point (similarly, if you think some language-specific tool is superior, you're doing things completely wrong): Anyway, this document saved me at leas…
> jq
Add xmlstarlet for anything that has to do with xml.
Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)
#437Gotta 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…
My anecdote is just about the opposite. I was a happy Jetbrains customer for more than 10 years and all was fine (very fine, actually) on Windows for developing Angular on the frontend. Goland is a treasure. Kotlin with IntellliJ can't get any better.
But then I needed proper support for Vue 3, Tailwind and Svelte. VSCode was (is) light-years ahead but what drew me away was how Jetbrains handled the issues. Endless hours writing tickets, creating examples, ... for nothing. Finally, after switching to Linux it turned out that US int. keyboard layouts don't work properly. There's a workaround, but again, the way the support handled the issue was not what I expect from such an expensive service. I was basically told to read through years old long issues to find out how to manually fix it.
That was the day I canceled my subscription.
VSCode is totally up to the job. But somehow I'm still not happy.
Maybe time to try Neovim or Helix (multi LSP needed).
Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)
#438mpv, mpvacious [1], and anki I've been learning spanish, and since hitting the intermediate stage outside of talking I mainly watch spanish shows or dubbed shows (Star trek TNG). I can create flash cards of difficult to understand phrases, or new words in seconds. I usually still edit them slightly depending on my purpose for the flashcard, but having > 2000 cards right now, I can't imagine what doing this by hand, o…
My biggest problem with anki is that the isn't a nice way to make cards. There's a vscode plug-in that lets you do markdown but it's too limited and clunky last time I used it.
Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)
#439Earlier 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?
> I’ve never used the standalone apps. Do they provide a better experience?
In my experience there is no difference in terms of slowness, no. The standalone apps are usually just bundled with more features for the specific use case by default and in some cases they have features you can't readily get in just IDEA.
Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)
#440Each of the following is in the 1000 hours saved club (in no particular order): jq, perl, grep, gnu textutils, gnu parallel, bash, xargs, gkrellm, nload. Make deserves a special shout out. If you think it's only useful for building software, you've completely missed the point (similarly, if you think some language-specific tool is superior, you're doing things completely wrong): Anyway, this document saved me at leas…
jq + parallel is a godsend. Take some command output, run another json-producing command in parallel on each line, and pipe it back into jq -s
Can you elaborate with a fake example?