Ask HN: Examples of reliable software you enjoy using

> Vim is also worth learning, it makes editing much more... relaxed I guess. No longer have to move your mouse to the arrow keys or even the mouse/touchpad to scroll or select. It also helps that it exists on nearly every Unix system you'll ever connect to.

People often talk about the speed of use, but this is (IMO) a result of its efficiency. I liked your use of the word 'relaxed', I'd add: slow down your actions so you have time to think about what you're doing, almost like narrating your actions.

Vim has a grammar that works well when spoken. Learn Vim's way of saying the action you're performing, then learn the relevant keys, adding them to your vocabulary. If a sentence makes sense in your head, try it and it'll probably work as expected. Say you started with:

"delete 3 words" == d3w

"yank to the end of the line" == y$

From this you could assume these valid:

"delete to the end of the line" == d$

"yank 5 words" == y5w

It takes time, but it builds up when you add a word to your vocab here and there, when you have a concrete use for it. (often one you'll remember from the 'wow, that was cool' moment when you first see it in action)

whats is the good fork?

There have been lots of Windows and Mac OS replies to this thread, so here's a few Linux ones for a change:

i3wm. I've experimented with many tiling window managers over the years but none of them got me to switch. i3, however, is something else. It's extremely simple, intuitive and easy to configure, and it might give you a small productivity boost depending on your workflow. For me this is tiling WMs done right.

Sublime Text 2 and 3. It's rare to find multi-platform desktop software that works reliably on Linux, and ST does it exceedingly well.

Valgrind. It's a game changer for certain kinds of development.

Ruby. I rarely write scripts, because most of the time I can just run irb and do everything with an one-liner.

The apt package management tools, or just Linux package management in general. Whenever I'm forced to use Windows or Mac I realize how fortunate it is that in Linux we're able to apt-get pretty much anything.

SQuirrel (agnostic SQL client). It's not very well known but it's a solid client for anything that has a JDBC driver.

Transmission. I find it has the perfect balance of features and simplicity for a Bittorrent application. It does what it needs to do reliably and doesn't get in your way.

mplayer/mpv. This has been my media player of choice for what, 15 years? Back when my PC wasn't fast enough to play some video formats reliably, mplayer could do it if I killed everything else and used the vesa driver. No other software could do this.

Comix. This is probably the best software I've ever used for browsing images sequentially in a folder (not just comic books). The interface is so simple but has all the features one would need (automatically uncompressing files, fast thumbnail generation, fit-to-width zooming, etc).

youtube-dl. Give it an URL, it will download media from it, no questions asked. It's hard to find software that does the right thing as often as youtube-dl does.

curl. For the same reason as above.

ffmpeg. It can get quite advanced with the command line options but with just `ffmpeg -i format_in. format_out.` you can do any video conversion you can imagine.

And of course, the favorites that have been mentioned here and I couldn't live without (git, ssh, bash, vim, python, sqlite, postgres, nginx, redis).

StumpWM: despite being Emacs-inspired, you can get going with very few keystrokes (just like in ratpoison) and despite I would like to switch to i3 (many friends have super cool setups) I cannot manage to stop using StumpWM.

It just like vim: you learn those 4 things and you can do 90% of the things you usually do. For the remaining 10%.... there is the manual.

Anything from djb. Juxtaposed against the usual autoconf/Makefile insanity, his more recent make-free build system is a work of art. Part of the reliability equation to me is highly portable, quick, easy compiling. I've not come across anyone who does it better.