Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours?

There's a name I haven't heard in a loooong time.

I’ve been looking at Devon Think but finding it a little hard to understand how best to leverage it. Would you mind sharing how you use it?

1) Probably not 100 hours but, terminator is very, very good: https://blog.al4.co.nz/2011/05/getting-the-most-out-of-termi...

The saving layouts feature is an absolute gem.

2) dmenu (https://tools.suckless.org/dmenu/) is a lifesaver. I use it even on Ubuntu to launch custom scripts. The autocomplete is good because unlike when I use alt-F2 I can actually tell if a command is type correctly or not. Also it's a little known fact but you can type full commands into it, complete with pipes, and it will execute it. For ages I had a bind against notify send so I could examine data by doing `Meta-P foo | show` which would dump it to a notification. Just really useful for getting data without needing to wait for a terminal to start, just to show you one thing or value you need for 2 seconds.

3) Also I'll go ahead and plug my filesystem tagger - koios (https://gitlab.com/finnoleary/koios). It has a feature where it will autodetect (using libmagic) the type of a file.

So you can do something like: "tag all the files that have the mime type 'png' files in the directory with the tag 'png'":

    koios auto image/png +png .

and then "give me all the files tagged with png that do not have the .png extension":

    koios show +png | grep -v '.png$'

It binds tags to files so there's no background processes or databases needed (aside from the actual 'tag name' database, which was done to save space), and you can move them, copy them, whatever, without worrying and the tags stay bound to the file.

Forest https://www.forestapp.cc/ I've tried a bunch of distraction blockers, but this is the one I've found most pleasant to use.

Mosh https://mosh.org/ I'm a fairly recent user so it hasn't been 100 hours yet, but it will be.

Not a program per se, but a few years ago I set up a cron job to back up my shell history every night to a file named based on the date, and then aliased 'h' to grep them all and pipe to tail. This allows me to see the last dozen times I used any string in a shell command. It comes in handy many times per day.

NimbleText https://nimbletext.com/ has saved me so much time. I use it to generate sql from spreadsheets and other one-off code generation from data.