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Ask HN: What was the best software that you used during 2022?

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Re: Ask HN: What was the best software that you used during 2022?

#41

Post by srinathkrishna »

The best new software that I picked up and used this year was Alfred, the spotlight replacement on macOS.

I spent a few hours spread across the initial few weeks focusing on defining workflows and it has been such a breeze. It has been a huge productivity boost overall.

Another software I’d add is syncthing for syncing files between my devices. 2022 was also the year I completely removed my reliance on Dropbox for inter-syncing between all my devices and syncthing has been instrumental for that.

Re: Ask HN: What was the best software that you used during 2022?

#42

Post by DIVx0 »

Stable Diffusion and its derivatives by far.

I have always thought that our digital world should service humanity, meaning I want software that augments my human abilities, I extract value from it vs how things are now where services only exist to monetize human activities.

For example: I want an AI mind that helps me discover and use information while factoring in my personal biases, morals and needs.

I know that reeks of idealism but it is what it is.

Meanwhile, we have stable diffusion which hits close to the mark. One of my hobbies is drawing and painting. I don't have a lot of time to commit to it so I try to be sure of the concept before I work on it. I find this to limit my creativity a lot, I get stymied on an idea "is this worth 40 hours of precious free time?"

With SD I am able to quickly iterate on concepts. Of course, its not giving me exactly what I have in mind but it gets close enough that I either renew inspiration or I see my concept in a new light and move on.

The fact that I can self host, tune and even retrain SD gives is super attractive. I sincerely hope more open source models like SD get released so I can build an personal AI ecosystem that meets my needs.

Re: Ask HN: What was the best software that you used during 2022?

#43

Post by snide »

- WSL: I had to do some work on windows boxes this years and was pretty impressed I could get Arch running with my usual setup and have extremely easy communication between Windows and the Linux env.

- Buku: Continues to be a fantastic little library for bookmarks in your terminal.

- NNN: A very extendable file browser in the terminal. It's become an easy way to wire up actions to files (like upload this file to a static bucket...etc)

- Pop Shell + Gnome: The perfect balance of "i need configuration" and "i want things to mostly just work well together". It's amazing how far the GNOME ecosystem has improved in the past two years.

- Mastodon: At the end of the day I'm pretty impressed that Mastodon has weathered the migration as well as it has. I can question some of the tech choices, but honestly, it only took me a weekend to learn how to set up and host my own instance on a cloud provider. There was years of work in the background that I just sort of walked into.

- Neovim: Continues to improve past Vim is good ways. It's been fun watching the ecosystem move and get so active over the past couple years.

- Alacritty: A very simple, configurable terminal. It provides everything I need, and nothing I don't.

Re: Ask HN: What was the best software that you used during 2022?

#46

Post by bramblerose »

vodou wrote: post #28
codetrotter wrote: post #13

JetBrains CLion every year and every day Operating systems: macOS and FreeBSD. Also every year and every day

I have been curious on CLion for some time. What holds me back is the price and the fact that it is written in Java (I know, the last one is a really bad reason). What are the main pros compared to VSCode?

It's a full IDE rather than a text editor with some IDE-like functionality. Most importantly (to me): much better refactoring tools and much better debugging tools.

No need to immediately hand over money, there's both a free 30-day trial, and you can regularly get an early access (i.e., beta) version of the new version for free.

Re: Ask HN: What was the best software that you used during 2022?

#47

Post by isaacaggrey »

rr808 wrote: post #12

Windows Terminal has completely changed how I view Windows. Open a console and ssh to anywhere. Open a WSL console and use Linux on the desktop. Hard to believe.

Are you just saying that Windows users longer need to use PuTTY or similar?

That sounds convenient but leaves me wondering what particularly about that quality of life improvement changes how you view Windows.

Re: Ask HN: What was the best software that you used during 2022?

#48

Post by escapedmoose »

ushercakes wrote: post #35

Not especially extraordinary, and I'm sure there are tools that are better for other people, but, for my workflow, apple notes has been fantastic. Any time I think of something cool, see something cool, whatever - I add it / paste it into a long running note I have labeled "Cool stuff." Whenever I'm bored, I just read through it and usually find something I didn't have time to dig into more thoroughly before. Or, if…

Seconded. Many of my random thoughts in Notes have become full-blown projects with great results. The best part is that I never even think about it, so it’s analogous to carrying a notebook around at all times. I’ve tried PKM apps like Obsidian and a few others, but none are quite as effortless or support drawing as well. I do wish the Pencil was supported on phones.

Re: Ask HN: What was the best software that you used during 2022?

#49

Post by metadat »

Home Assistant for self-hosted home automation.

https://www.home-assistant.io/

Jellyfin as a FOSS Plex alternative

https://jellyfin.org

rclone for encrypted cloud storage network mounts.

https://rclone.org

Script-server for self-hosted script execution, including live-editing from mobile devices.

https://github.com/bugy/script-server

Add Tailscale and it all makes for a sweet setup.

Re: Ask HN: What was the best software that you used during 2022?

#50

Post by andrei_says_ »

Figma

Davinci Resolve

Retouch4me photoshop plugins - finally acceptable skin auto retouching

Lightroom

Ruby

Ruby on Rails, stimulusJS, Hotwired

html5, contemporary css, scss, slim-lang (once you go slim you won’t go back)

SublimeText, acejump, text pastry

iOS, MacOS, Notes

Alfred - everything at the tips of your fingers

CraftCMS, Twig

GoodReader, ProCreate on iPad

iTerm2, zsh

Basecamp - collaboration, everything find-able and accounted for

Obsidian

dbdiagram.io - quickly imagine your database

DataGrip - database ide from jetbrains

Postgresql

Heroku

Middlemanapp - static site generator

Git, GitHub, sublimemerge

1password

Dropbox

Pocket - save articles for later, open them on your eink e-reader.

Overdrive - borrow library books and transfer them to your ereader.

Logitech vertical mouse, Wacom intuos, Apple iPad with pencil, 2022 MacBook Pro, appletv, boox nova ereader.

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