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

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61–70 of 422 posts

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

#61
Fossil SCM (https://fossil-scm.org/home/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki)

It's almost like Git + Gitea, all in a single application. Code + tickets + wiki + notes all version controlled and capable of hosting the server itself. Also, the repo is just a SQLite database, so backup is easy.

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

#64
post #45

Not sure if games count as software but if they do - Factorio. I don't play much these days but I'm still utterly stunned how a relatively small, humble team of developers can build something so robust and performant. Granted, I've never really tried pushing the limits, but not once have I felt like the game is even breaking a sweat while processing thousands of machines, belts, and bots. It's a miracle to me. Their…

If they're made of software, they count

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

#65
Syncthing, by a mile.

As someone who very much enjoys tinkering with Linux and such, but also likes trying to onboard other people who aren't as techy, Syncthing is such a killer example. It's almost depressing because I want other free and open source stuff to be this good, though I know the economics (and proprietary interference, perhaps?) make that tough.

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

#66
post #34

Keyboard Maestro. It’s a tool for automating common tasks on a Mac. A real programming language is certainly more elegant for writing programs. But what I find elegant about Keyboard Maestro is that it lets me add programming logic to any application on my Mac, quick and dirty.

I love Keyboard Maestro's "Click on Found Image" action. Definitely quick and dirty, but it's great for ad-hoc web page automation when I can't be bothered to knock something up in puppeteer etc.

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

#68
Regarding code elegance, OpenBSD[0] surely pride themselves in their code correctness and how they make it clean and understandable.

Another example might be my favorite text editor, vis[1].

[0] https://www.openbsd.org/ [1] https://github.com/martanne/vis

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

#70
post #65

Syncthing, by a mile. As someone who very much enjoys tinkering with Linux and such, but also likes trying to onboard other people who aren't as techy, Syncthing is such a killer example. It's almost depressing because I want other free and open source stuff to be this good, though I know the economics (and proprietary interference, perhaps?) make that tough.

I'm really surprised by that. I feel like Syncthing would really benefit from a simplified user interface for its core use case, which I imagine is "sync one folder across multiple machines". It's really nice that they have all these additional features and detailed information on the default dashboard, but it can be really confusing if you cannot form a mental model of what the software does.
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