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

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

#131

Post by jbverschoor »

Sakos wrote: post #92
sgtnoodle wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use syncthing and appreciate that it exists. It's way too easy to accidentally all your data, though! I've been dragging my feet migrating a hard drive from my old desktop to my new one for 1.5 years. This past weekend I finally got motivated to power the old one up and wait for syncthing to give positive indication that it's in sync with my server. The reason that was even a concern of mine is that the last time I…

I've managed to delete a folder with GBs of important data because Syncthing has non-obvious ways of handling data. Thankfully, I have tons of backups of everything, so it wasn't a big deal, but since then I've been extremely paranoid when using Syncthing to make sure it doesn't happen again.

Syncing is anything but elegant

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

#132

Post by wrnr »

https://github.com/enkimute/ganja.js/

Geometric algebra for any R{p,q,r} dimensional space. Has it own custom JS to JS transpiler so the literal number "1e10" becomes a bivector. The code is just around a thousand lines while it lets you do amazing things like this right in the browser:

https://enkimute.github.io/ganja.js/examples/coffeeshop.html...

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

#135

Post by throwaquestion5 »

kretaceous wrote: post #114

Vary random but these are stuff which impressed me on first try and never let me down: Kitty, the terminal emulator by Kovid Goyal wouter, a minimal JS routing library espanso, a text expansion program KDE Connect Tailscale The last 2 together curl

> Kitty

Could you elaborate on what do you feel is better or makes you more comfortable using kitty against any other random terminal?

I also vouch for KDE Connect. Painless to use after installing. Very convinient for file transfer

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

#139

Post by throw10920 »

Emacs - although there's a lot of accumulated cruft in the form of whacky APIs and elisp functions, the design of Emacs is stunningly effective. The way that minor modes and keymaps are composed to customize the interaction mode for each individual buffer is clever and beautiful, to name just one thing out of many. And, as janky as elisp is, it's one of the few extension languages that's actually good at its job, and the Emacs elisp API allows you complete freedom over virtually every aspect of the editor. Unironically, Emacs is not a text editor - it's a toolkit for creating text-oriented applications.

Forth, Lisp (Scheme, in particular - I love CL but it's the C++ of Lisps), and Lua - three languages that take a small set of elegant primitives and synthesize them to give you incredible power.

Remember the Milk is a task-tracking SaaS that is one of the few pieces of software that I actually like, which is especially impressive given that it's proprietary. Cheap, fast, effective, and with a UI design that continually impresses me with its mix of intuitiveness and ergonomics.

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

#140

Post by jjice »

I guess my definition of elegant would be software that has fantastic UX and just works and works so well it boggles my mind how well it works. I'd also extended that to include a foundational core that all other parts can be built off of. In that case, I'd go with vim. I'm not even a huge Vim guy (use it for notes and remote stuff, but not my primary editor), but the concepts are simple and oh so powerful. It's just building blocks on top of text editing.

Pipes in Unix as a concept are also a great abstraction. A bit dated, but still every powerful today.

Files in Unix as well. Some people have gripes which are fair, but the idea that a device, a file, and a socket are all accessed via the same API is fantastic. Of course there are issues, but it's generally worked really well for me.

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