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Software I’m thankful for (2021)

crawshaw.io

171–180 of 530 posts

Re: Software I’m thankful for (2021)

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to mention nano when you just wanna edit things quick and only need to remember a few commands. just wish it came standard with most distros.

nano is such a lifesaver. It's pure Unix – does one job really well, doesn't try to be half an IDE like vi and friends, just a friendly little text editor that pretty much everyone can use within minutes. Nothing better for quick edits on remote systems beside never having to do quick edits on remote systems.

I used joe, pico, nano since 1994 and someday I will finally change the key bindings so that I have this in mline with my vscode.

This is by far the biggest drawback of switching editors and being lazy at the same time.

Re: Software I’m thankful for (2021)

#172

The fish shell, makes using the shell feel almost painless. Hammerspoon, I use it to automatically switch audio devices based on context, so every call uses the best microphone currently available, window management via keystrokes, limiting media keys to Spotify, tons of other things. Indispensable. Arduino, I don't think I would be able to tinker with microcontrollers as much if I had to write C and use obscure tool…

If you like SolveSpace but want something more powerful, you should try FreeCAD.

Yes, it's harder to get started, and it's less fun to use, but it is more powerful. I wrote a comparison of the two earlier this year[0].

[0] https://incoherency.co.uk/blog/stories/freecad-vs-solvespace...

Re: Software I’m thankful for (2021)

#173
post #20

Strangely enough: Windows. Yes, I fucking hate Windows 10/11 for several laundry lists' worth of reasons, but you know what? At the end of the day, Windows is the only desktop OS that enables me to use my computer to do the shit I need or want to do. So long as that fundamental principle as a tool is not violated, I will forever be thankful for Windows regardless what criticism I might have for it.

All Microsoft products are free of charge if you know where to look for them. Basically you have the big Fortune 500 companies subsidizing pirates who download from TPBay...and of course the pirate CD copies being sold in street markets all over Sub-Saharan Africa. Microsoft with Windows, Azure, Office, Outlook and PowerPoint is the backbone of the economy. Come noon you have already used half a dozen of different fl…

>All Microsoft products are free of charge if you know where to look for them.

God no. I draw a hard line at pirating executable code. I forget where I read it but a not insignificant percentage of pirated software contains malware, and I don't know about you, but having my bank or brokerage account compromised would cost exponential orders of magnitude more than any software licence.

Hell, I'm concerned enough about malware that even window's larger attack surface gives me pause even though I know things have gotten better since I left it. I still feel much more secure on linux.

Re: Software I’m thankful for (2021)

#175
I saw software I later found out was called Circus Ponies Notebook in the mid-90s, in use by a guy who was too cool for me to understand.

Years and years later I got Notebook running on NeXT, then on OS X, and couldn't see the point, by then I had sites online that were saving my notes, links, and images. Everything grows to eventually send email, and anything that is software is already online somewhere already.

Re: Software I’m thankful for (2021)

#177

VS Code It took me awhile to switch over. But really, I can’t go back to anything else. The customization and UX is unbeatable.

Same here. I use to use Jetbrain editors that are nice but slow and extremely specific to languages.

I forced myself to use vscode for two weeks and it is mostly fine. I do miss a lot of well-done things from Jetbrain (today for instance I had to build and run a Dockerfile and it was painful. Not impossible, had to look up all the commands but it was still painful).

Re: Software I’m thankful for (2021)

#178
> JSON is the worst form of encoding — except for all the others that have been tried.

Edgy pessimism is tiring, we get it everything sucks but this is the best we got, even though you still hate it.

> It’s not easily read by humans, but it can be read by humans.

What does this even mean, why, how? It’s so easy to complain about something without admitting you don’t have a better solution.

Maybe I’m bitter from my ERP dev ops role where I’m constantly enduring little thorns throughout the pipeline and overall codebase. But this way of thinking isn’t practical, you won’t get far if they’re what you deal with day to day.

Re: Software I’m thankful for (2021)

#180
Outside of OS & text editor (vim), there is one tool that I use countless times every, single, day:

fzf (https://github.com/junegunn/fzf)

I can only wonder how much time fzf has saved me in the long term.

In terms of "software that I don't use for writing software", iA Writer is probably what I am most grateful for.

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