Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)
471–480 of 574 posts
Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)
#472BetterTouchTools and Karabiner Elements for macOS. With a swipe of four fingers, I can turn a set of windows into a tiled configuration by "shoving" them where I need to go. When I press Caps Lock, which I've rebound in Karabiner to F16 and then bound F16+various modifiers to Activate/Hide Application in BTT, I can switch between IntelliJ, Chrome, Figma, Slack, Notion, so fast that I feel like I have 3x as many monit…
I used better touch tool for some shortcuts and trackpad gestures, but never fully used it's power. Recently I had a problem that one of my monitors connected somewhat late and all my windows were out of place. Thanks for saving my time mate, the restore window layout thing is truly magical
Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)
#473Did a lot of data wrangling this year. The usual grep, sed, awk, jq and even find has sped up my days significantly. Sed is among my favorites to whip up some quick, ad hoc, transformations. This year I added Miller [0] to my list; a tool to process tabular data, similar to sed, awk, etc. It handles csv, tav, json lines, etc. in a consistent way. I like the delimited key-value pairs format, which allows me to write s…
I second Miller - besides its extensive support for various formats, it is fast . If you ever have to deal with gigabyte-sized files, Miller will give noticeable speed ups versus jq et al.
FYI: https://github.com/BurntSushi/xsv is much faster than mlr (like an order of magnitude), and zsv (https://github.com/liquidaty/zsv) is even faster. But, neither support formulas. Disclaimer: I am one of the zsv authors
Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)
#474LSP. The Language Server Protocol. Entirely changed my life for the better this year, once I took the time to get it integrated into Emacs and get the various backends I needed installed. Easily has saved me hundreds of hours so far, being able to view function prototypes quickly, pull up documentation as an overlay on the code, jumping to the next error, and even down to getting simple things like enumerated 'case'…
Having a consistent IDE-like experience in any editor, for any language is invaluable. It's not on par with a full featured specialized editor but still game changing.
Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)
#475Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
where can I input regex to excel? I really need that, last time I copied table to nopad++ then copy paste it back.
I didn’t. I pasted the output and munged it with Excel’s trusty text functions.
Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)
#476Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I know I should learn it but, I dunno, I just really dislike the PowerShell syntax. I get what they were going for with the Verb-Noun thing but it just reminds me of AppleScript and I can’t stand it.
Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)
#477SmartTubeNext[1]
In installed it on my Android TV instead of the official Youtube app and it saved me literal hours:
- it blocks ads
- it includes SponsorBlock, so sponsored segments, intros, "plz subscribe" are skipped
- it allows me to block Shorts
Anytime I have to use an official Youtube app, I remember how unusable it was. I even gave Youtube premium a try at some point, but SponsorBlock is just too good to ignore.
Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)
#478Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If you can use dig output, the next time you need to do something like this you might find 'jc' helpful: https://github.com/kellyjonbrazil/jc
Government laptop. No can use anything that isn’t whitelisted.
This is the beauty of Excel. It’s a powerful text manipulation tool that everyone has.
Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)
#479I 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…
Gnumeric. I still mourn Ray. One of the kindest people I have met. Almost ten years ago he passed away at age 40. 12 Years of gnumeric and 18 years of Debian contributions. Thank you Ray, where ever you are now.
I didn't know who you were referring to, so looked it up and learnt a little about Ray Dassen [1]. It's nice seeing ppl memorialise a person as you have done here.
[1] http://www.gnumeric.org/announcements/1.12/gnumeric-1.12.3.h...
Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)
#480Earlier quoted context omitted.
So, no
People get so hung up on this, but it's literally the shallowest sort of refactoring. If you're choosing your tools strictly for this you're doing yourself a disservice.
It is also the simplest refactoring, and my point is no command line tricks I have can seen can even reliably do this.
Refactoring support in modern IDEs goes far beyond renaming public fields and methods.