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Ask HN: What are some tools you wish you had while doing your day to day work?

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Re: Ask HN: What are some tools you wish you had while doing your day to day work?

#61

Post by happybday »

I would like a tool which allows me to examine Git histories of multiple files in a repo, with some notion of 'distance' between files. So if source file A includes classes or functions which are defined in source file B, then A and B are distance 1 apart (neighbors). B's other neighbors are distance 2 from A and so on.

As an example, I'm looking into a bug which I know is related to file X. I would like to see the most recent change which affects files within distance 5 from X. Or, of all the commits between point 1 and point 2 in the git history, I would like to see the ones which changed files the closest to X.

In another context, for every commit in a release, I want to see how big the n-neighbourhood of the commit is for different values of n, in the same way I can currently see how many files were changed by that commit (the 0-neighbourhood). In all these cases I would want to look at the path of connections between files and what symbols it is based on.

In an ideal world, the 'change distance' and 'change neighborhood' concepts would actually reflect the semantics of what was changed and how it could affect other classes etc. So a whitespace change would have empty neighborhoods since the code in no other file could have been affected. But even with a naive interpretation that any change to a file affects all the linked files would be very useful.

Re: Ask HN: What are some tools you wish you had while doing your day to day work?

#62

Post by afiori »

fwsgonzo wrote: post #45

Automatically saving and restoring terminals with tabs and separate histories, per workspace. I have found nothing yet that does this, or even just one of those things. It would be the killer feature of a new terminal emulator - and I see there are lots of them being developed, but none of them have this! And I can guess why: It's because of the maintenance work required to have this feature, and also trying to be mu…

Once upon a time someone here was explaining how to set bash to use the first history file in the ancestor folder of the current working directory. I do not remember how, but it sound similar to what you are asking.

Re: Ask HN: What are some tools you wish you had while doing your day to day work?

#63

Post by Jtsummers »

globular-toast wrote: post #41
armagon wrote: post #33

I wish I had a way to do knowledge work but also use my body. Right now, for working purposes (as a software engineer), I'm a disembodied head that can move a pointer, type words, and voice chat. Our bodies were never designed to sit in chairs 8 hours a day for forty years. The very idea of needing to spend free time exercising just to keep your body from falling apart is, well, preposterous. (It's been a long time s…

There is such a thing as a walking desk. Linus Torvalds uses one. Never used it myself, though. Couldn't imagine doing any serious programming like that.

If you can use a standing desk to program, you can probably get used to a walking desk. In the worst case you'd just need to stop walking when you start getting deep into some parts of your work. If you can't use a standing desk to program, then a walking desk is almost certainly out of the question.

Personally, I just accept that for 5-10 minutes of every hour I will not be at my desk and will instead be near my desk doing calisthenics.

Re: Ask HN: What are some tools you wish you had while doing your day to day work?

#64

Post by alpaca128 »

Better documentation. And with better I mean documentation that does not rely on as many assumptions about the reader, and docs that include enough examples. I don't care about that one example which only covers the most trivial use-case that you included so there's an example in the docs. Examples should be like unit tests, I don't want to play the archeologist and dig through pages of outdated info just to figure out how to set that one weird flag.

One example for docs I enjoy is the reference for the Rust standard library. It still could use a few more examples here and there but overall it's among the best I know, together with tailwindCSS' website which is also great.

Don't be like the devs of that one JS animation library which locked further examples behind the registration form for another web platform, failing to mention those hidden examples are more or less a copy-pasted variation with slightly different numbers.

And I haven't thought about it very deeply yet but I'd like a tool or maybe lightweight processing language that lets me quickly visualise debug output and similar data. Often it feels like the main time sink at chasing certain bugs is how I either have to look at the raw data and numbers and try to see a pattern, or more or less start a whole side project to properly process and visualise it. Possibly I'm just missing something obvious or overlooked the usefulness of a neat tool at first glance.

Re: Ask HN: What are some tools you wish you had while doing your day to day work?

#65

Post by km3r »

Probably wouldn't be too hard to do myself, but it love to be able to use the touch bar as a clipboard. Basically have a button that stores whatever on your clipboard at the moment onto the bar making a growing list of tiles, tap on the tile to load it back on to the clipboard, and hold the tile to remove it.

Re: Ask HN: What are some tools you wish you had while doing your day to day work?

#66

Post by wcarss »

izolate wrote: post #23
wcarss wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a longtime vim user, I don't see how vim makes going to the Nth logical column (for several values of N in different rows) in a large "CSV-like" file much easier. Navigating in general is easier, sure, but... do you have a trick to share perhaps?

58G 63f, 1. Go down to line 58 2. Jump to the 63rd comma 3. Edit

Fascinating, thanks!

I had never seen/used `f` to navigate within a line like this -- I'm usually just typing / and hitting enter to scan forward.

Re: Ask HN: What are some tools you wish you had while doing your day to day work?

#67

Post by afiori »

armagon wrote: post #38

When working with React and Redux and Redux Sagas, I wish I could more easily figure out causal chains for what happens. When I previously did work as a game programmer, for most things (except, say, debugging why things rendered a certain way), you could just go to where the thing happened, put in a breakpoint, and you'd get a beautiful call stack making it easy to reason about how you got to where you are. In my cu…

Is there a reason why the browser debugger is not useful in your case? (or in any other case?) I found it useful for debugging simple jquery websites but I imagine a dozen things can go wrong between the debugger and webpack/next/react/jsx/redux/hot-reload

Re: Ask HN: What are some tools you wish you had while doing your day to day work?

#68

Post by mrjay42 »

alpaca128 wrote: post #64

Better documentation. And with better I mean documentation that does not rely on as many assumptions about the reader, and docs that include enough examples. I don't care about that one example which only covers the most trivial use-case that you included so there's an example in the docs. Examples should be like unit tests, I don't want to play the archeologist and dig through pages of outdated info just to figure o…

Thank you for this! I completely agree.

Just a recent example (it's just AN example, there are probably way better examples than this one): I started recently to code a website after years without putting my hands in web development.

I went through some documentations of multiple lightweight frameworks for server side coding:

100% relies on the reader to know how to use the latest fancy-cool-kids-choice packet manager for the given language. If you do know by heart your brew-npm-composer-pacman-I-dont-know-what, good for you dear documentation writer -> not everybody does!! Which means that if, for some reasons, there is the slightest issue with any of the versions of the hundreds of dependencies your "basic application" requires, it means that the newcomer for your framework must found his.her way into a stack of tools and dependencies that is galactic in size.

More than half of the documentation said that if you don't want to use the packet manager you can use a virtual machine or a container manager (Docker)

100% of the documentation I read started showing code to configure the project WITHOUT mentioning in WHICH files the code should go into -> it was implied!!! -> searching about the topic online made me realize I was not the only one, and the response from the helpers were actually very efficient and correct and were not part of the documentation!

100% of the documentation included non-self sufficient information to have something working and running -> proof is, search for one the problems on whatever search engine -> led to hundreds if not thousands of results of people asking their ways into having the "Getting Started tutorial" to actually work!!!

Re: Ask HN: What are some tools you wish you had while doing your day to day work?

#69

Post by sgarrity »

fwsgonzo wrote: post #48
sgarrity wrote: post #35

A standalone hardware mute switch for Zoom/etc calls so you can prominently and reliably see your mic mute status, and quickly and easily flip it on and off. (I know there are a few do-it-yourself options for these, but I'd much rather throw a bit of money at it rather than time).

Sennheiser headsets tend to have a mechanical switch on the microphone arm that turns it on and off when you swing it. I like that part enough that I only buy those headsets now. I'm not sure if they continue the practice these days.

I'm wearing one right now. I agree this is a handy feature.

It has two down-sides:

1. Muting the mic involves touching/moving the mic, so you make some noise when trying to discretely mute/unmute.

2. It mutes, but doesn't tell Zoom that it's muted, so you can appear to be unmuted to others on the call. I'd rather die than be falsely accused of having a dog bark interrupt a call from MY mic!

Re: Ask HN: What are some tools you wish you had while doing your day to day work?

#70

Post by tra3 »

armagon wrote: post #33

I wish I had a way to do knowledge work but also use my body. Right now, for working purposes (as a software engineer), I'm a disembodied head that can move a pointer, type words, and voice chat. Our bodies were never designed to sit in chairs 8 hours a day for forty years. The very idea of needing to spend free time exercising just to keep your body from falling apart is, well, preposterous. (It's been a long time s…

Stephen Wolfram (of the Wolframalpha.com fame) has a treadmill attached to one of his workstations [0]. I've read claims that walking 1-2mph takes no mental effort. Lets say 4 hours of walking would net you about 5 miles. That's a decent effort for the day and you could still sit the other 4 hours out of your 8 hour day.

[0]: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2019/02/seeking-the-prod...

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