Ask HN: What are your favorite examples of elegant software?

design or otherwise

NixOS (although yes it could be even more elegant than it is)

Turbo Vision/Turbo Pascal for MS-DOS. Borland put together one of the best instances of an object oriented library that just worked. The follow up with Delphi for Windows was the most productive environment I have ever experienced, until I was priced out of it in their pivot to "Enterprise" customers.

Nothing since is anywhere near as productive. Lazarus is ok, but the documentation is horrible, (almost non-existent, only doc-strings in many cases) which makes the system far less useful.

JonesFORTH

Although one might argue it to be a case of really elegant documentation and literate programming.

I love utilities that quietly work, and just accept whatever workflow I throw at them.

OwnTracks is an app that logs your position and sends it somewhere else. It has been running on my phone for like 2 years without issues, and talks to a server I wrote myself.

FolderSync syncs folders on my phone to remote storage. It's super flexible and generally just works. The conditions for syncing are highly configurable. I lament the lack of a similar utility on Mac - basically an rsync+cron UI.