Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?

#1

Post by themantri » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 7:29 AM UTC

I am looking for tools that you might have built to scratch an itch or quell a regular annoyance. My main motivation for asking is to looking a different things people may have built and a secondary motivation is to learn how they went about it. I'm also interested in tools which are small scripts or a bunch of commands piped into one another that have boosted your quality of life.

Thank you.

Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?

#2

Post by linkdd » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 9:02 AM UTC

In the category of old unmaintained tools:

  - https://github.com/linkdd/manyssh : Before discovering ansible/puppet/etc...
  - https://github.com/linkdd/i3tools : For when I was using i3wm
  - https://github.com/linkdd/xautostart : Also for when I was using i3wm without a Display Manager

For more recent projects:

  - https://klifter.datapio.co : Easy GitOps
  - https://klander.datapio.co : Kubernetes Compliance as Code

Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?

#3

Post by jjgreen » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 10:34 AM UTC

Sushi: Ruby script which generates a stub for a 1-file C project

https://gitlab.com/jjg/sushi

Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?

#4

Post by spoiler » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 11:37 AM UTC

A basic résumé/CV generator out of JSON resume, it also supports inline SCSS: https://github.com/omninonsense/resume-stylist

I'd generally "print to PDF".it before sending it out. I was in the process of automating PDF generation when 1) I got hired and 2) Chrome was changing up the API in the next release so I just kinda... Lost motivation I guess, especially since I didn't need it anymore either.

https://github.com/omninonsense/spotlight-thief

This saves the windows spotlight images (on lock screen) to a folder that I use for randomised background images. I manually filter out the ones I dislike. It runs automatically on Linux (it's wrapped though).

Interesting that they're both in Ruby. I guess Ruby is my go-to scripting language, even though I usually never write Ruby. Maybe it's the language's ergonomics or something.

Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?

#5

Post by tofukid » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 11:38 AM UTC

I built https://sumi.news so I could read RSS, Twitter, and newsletters peacefully. It started as a local app to fetch RSS, and transitioned to a web app to enable reading newsletters. It’s written in Haskell and hosted on Linode.

I also wrote my own classless UI library. I can drop in a single style sheet and write plain HTML, no classes or anything, and get beautiful cross-platform UI that is accessible and functional out-of-the-box. I use this for a lot of my projects. I plan on polishing it, open-sourcing it, and selling it in the future.

Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?

#6

Post by motyar » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 1:13 PM UTC

https://mark.show so I can present ideas quickly.

Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?

#7

Post by asicsp » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 1:35 PM UTC

https://github.com/learnbyexample/command_help so that I can quickly get documentation for command options. Inspired by http://explainshell.com/ but wanted a cli tool.

Fails for lot of corner cases, but still useful most of the time. Here's an example:

    $ ch ls -Gv
           ls - list directory contents

           -G, --no-group
                  in a long listing, don't print group names

           -v     natural sort of (version) numbers within text

Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?

#8

Post by linehk » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 1:41 PM UTC

gwebp can recursively convert images in the specified directory into webp of the same name. https://github.com/linehk/gwebp

Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?

#9

Post by scriptnull » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 1:47 PM UTC

I wrote a small utility that helps me to kickstart writing blog posts.

https://github.com/scriptnull/sblog

(Been saving me a few minutes ever since)

Re: Ask HN: Tools you have made for yourself?

#10

Post by dcminter » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 1:53 PM UTC

Despite its numerous shortcomings this dictionary bash script was pretty useful to me at a recent abbreviation-heavy gig:

https://github.com/dcminter/define/blob/master/define

I am pleased with the utility:simplicity ratio but slightly ashamed of its limitations.