Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition) • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)

#81

Post by gorjusborg » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 6:50 PM UTC

vi and friends (vim/neovim)

Being able to edit text by piping it through shell commands and back into the buffer is pretty darn useful. In this case, it's not vi alone that provides the benefit, but whatever.

Macros and registers can be super handy when you have to do the same thing over and over in a big file. Sure, I could write a script, but sometimes it's just easier to do it by hand once and repeat the macro thousands of times.

Once you are able to commit certain operations to muscle memory, you can really whip around. For instance 'vapgq' selects around the current paragraph and formats it.

Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)

#82

Post by fotta » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 6:51 PM UTC

MH15 wrote: post #66

fotta wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I probably shouldn't admit this but the fzf fish shell integration is basically how I remember useful commands instead of writing them in a note, because I'm too damn lazy

Haha yes- and then when I open a new machine or somehow lose shell history it takes me a bunch of time to get back up to speed. IMO worth it for me but it can be a speed bump.

I recently moved to a new machine and copied the history file over, definitely helped me immensely

Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)

#83

Post by akira2501 » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 6:51 PM UTC

LSP. 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' labels inside of a switch statement.

Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)

#84

Post by hedora » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 6:52 PM UTC

mtmail wrote: post #2

Not 100h yet but I've been replacing custom Linux command output parsing with https://kellyjonbrazil.github.io/jc/ ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33448204 ) lately.

That actually looks nice! (I've written at least 10,000 perl one-liners.)

Will definitely check it out.

Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)

#85

Post by geocrasher » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 6:52 PM UTC

Ditto Clipboard Manager for Windows. Yes, I know W10/11 have it native now, but it's not as good as Ditto.

https://ditto-cp.sourceforge.io/

AutoHotKey

https://www.autohotkey.com/

And if deleting TikTok from my phone were an app, it would be nominated, because that saved me hundreds of hours I'm sure :D

Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)

#86

Post by teknopaul » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 6:52 PM UTC

bash_completion: I can imagine life without it. It's got a pretty nasty api to set it up if you have to but most things are done for you.

If you create your own clis in the format

    appname mainoperation flags args/files

writing bash_completion scripts is easier.

I believe git, yum, apt clis are popular for this reason.

I can't imagine the amount of time wasted if bash_completion didn't exist. I would have probably wasted 10000 hours writing guis.

Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)

#87

Post by zanfaruqui » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 6:52 PM UTC

Coherence https://docs.withcoherence.com/

we're saving our customers (and ourselves) hundreds if not thousands of hours by not having to write and maintain glue code for their dev tools

Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)

#88

Post by hprotagonist » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 6:52 PM UTC

robertcarter wrote: post #23

hprotagonist wrote: post #12

The pure power of ripgrep + emacs to speed up refactoring _probably_ offsets the lots of game time i've spend diddling with my editor. at least that's what i tell myself.

care to share your .init etc, I still having figured how I want to couple the two

for big edits and refactors, i've been using rg.el: https://rgel.readthedocs.io/en/2.1.0/usage.html?highlight=ed... as such:

    (use-package rg
    :straight (rg :type git :host github :repo "dajva/rg.el")
    :config
    (rg-enable-menu)
    )

and for short stuff/searching around, etc, i bound consult-ripgrep to M-s r.

Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)

#89

Post by forgotpwd16 » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 6:54 PM UTC

teknopaul wrote: post #51

Apreche wrote: post #16

Of all the software I can think of quickly, the one I think may have saved the most time in my life is Google Maps.

How come it saves 100 hours for you? In the old days we had paper maps and I checked routes before I left: not doing that anymore has cost me time rather than saved me time. Many a time Google maps has sent me to the wrong place. Once to the middle of a mustard field in France which was a destination it changed to mid-route to a house called La Mutardier. 5 hours wrong lost there. Less than useless on a motorbike due…

>Many a time Google maps has sent me to the wrong place.

Have used it for years and have never seen this happen. Neither has send me the wrong way in a lane.

Re: Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)

#90

Post by hedora » Tue, Dec 20, 2022, 6:55 PM UTC

amelius wrote: post #77

GCC saved me from thousands of hours writing assembly code ...

If you're OK with cloud services, you might consider using godbolt for your assembly-generating needs. It's polyglot, and you can easily copy paste its output into ed or notepad.