Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?

I'm thinking unpopular could mean the tech is polarizing or frequently dismissed/overlooked.

  * APL -- I haven't dedicated the time to learning in part because there's little support where I normally work. I'd love for APL to have be adapted like a domain specific language a la perl compatible regular expressions for various languages (april in common lisp, APL.jl in julia).
  * regular expressions. https://xkcd.com/1171/
  * bugs/issue tracking embedded in git https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug/

But I'm more excited for things that fall into the niche/lesser-known side of of unpopular. I love finding the little gems that change how I organize or work with the system.

  * "type efficiently by saying syllables and literal words" https://sr.ht/~geb/numen/
  * I use fasd[0] 'z' alias for jumping to previous directories in shell every day.
  * Alt+. in shell (readline, bash) to get the previous commands last argument is another ergonomic time saver that I think is relatively obscure. I have a bash wrapper to combine that with fzf for quick any-previous-command-argument  fuzzy search and insert [1]
  * zimwiki [2] (and/or a less capable emacs mode[3]) for note taking has served me well for a decade+
  * DokuWiki's XML RPC [4] enables local editor edits to a web wiki. I wish it was picked up by more editor plugin developers. (cf. emacs-dokiwki [5]) 
 * xterm isn't unpopular per say, but I don't see sixel support and title setting escape codes talked about often. I depend on a bash debug trap to update the prompt with escape codes that set the terminal title [6]

* are clipboard managers popular? I get a lot out of using https://github.com/erebe/greenclip

[0] https://github.com/clvv/fasd [1] https://github.com/WillForan/fuzzy_arg [2] https://zim-wiki.org/ [3] https://github.com/WillForan/zim-wiki-mode [4] https://www.dokuwiki.org/xmlrpc [5] https://github.com/flexibeast/emacs-dokuwiki [6] https://github.com/WillForan/dotconf/blob/master/bash/PS1.ba... -- bash debug trap to update prompt with escape codes that set the title to previous run command -- to eg. search windows for the terminal playing music from 'mpv'

Turn your Postgres database into a REST API: https://postgrest.org

Previous discussions on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=postgrest

Take a look at KERI.

Can you elaborate?

Sphinx [1] gets my vote. It's the docs system that powers most sites in the Python ecosystem so it probably looks familiar to you.

I call it a docs system rather than static site generator because the web is just one of many output targets it supports.

To tap into its full power you need to author in a markup that predates Markdown called reStructuredText (reST). It's very similar to Markdown (MD) so it's never bothered me, but I know some people get very annoyed at the "uncanny valley" between reST and MD. reST has some very powerful yet simple features; it perplexes me that these aren't adopted in other docs systems. For example, to cross-link you just do :ref:`target` where `target` is an ID for a section. At "compile-time" the ref is replaced with the section title text. If you remove that ID then the build fails. Always accurate internal links, in other words.

The extension system really works and there is quite a large ecosystem of extensions on PyPI for common tasks, such as generating a sitemap.

The documentation for Sphinx is ironically not great; not terrible but not great either. I eventually accomplish whatever I need to do but the sub-optimal docs make the research take a bit longer than it probably has to.

I have been a technical writer for 11 years and have used many SSGs over the years. There's no perfect SSG but Sphinx strikes the best balance between the common tradeoffs.

[1] https://www.sphinx-doc.org/en/master/index.html