Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours? (2022 edition)

1

Ditto

Ditto Clipboard Manager for Windows. Yes, I know W10/11 have it native now, but it's not as good as Ditto. https://ditto-cp.sourceforge.io/ AutoHotKey https://www.autohotkey.com/ And if deleting TikTok from my phone were an app, it would be nominated, because that saved me <i>hundreds</i> of hours I'm sure :D.

#Note Taking #Bookmarks #Clipboard Manager 60 social mentions

2

Ninite

Ninite's automated installers [1]. This one tool has saved me hundreds of hours back in my support days (both at previous sidejobs and family members' houses) in downloading, installing, and _updating_ basic applications. I could leave the tiny Ninite executable on their desktop with the instruction to just run it once a month and it would keep all their stuff up to date. [1] https://ninite.com/ Install or Update Multiple Apps at Once.

#Windows Tools #Package Manager #SSH 447 social mentions

3

changedetection.io

#Website Monitoring #Web Content Management #Data Extraction 50 social mentions

4

Eternal Terminal

I used Mosh for a long time, but I've switched to Eternal Terminal (https://eternalterminal.dev) because of its excellent native scrolling support.

#SSH #Server Management #Terminal Tools 14 social mentions

Sioyek: https://sioyek.info It's a PDF viewer that automatically finds and previews references in documents, even when the PDF doesn't have links. Makes reading some math books a very enjoyable experience instead of a chore.

#PDF Tools #PDF Editor #iPhone 18 social mentions

If you use Ansible at any larger amount, then you're doing a disservice to yourself if you're not using Mitogen[1][2]. The amount of waiting it has spared me is innumerable at this point. --- [1]: https://scribe.rip/@einarum/speed-up-ansible-with-mitogen-b3a9bf40bc93 [2]: https://mitogen.networkgenomics.com/ansible_detailed.html.

#Blogging #CMS #Digital Publishing 34 social mentions

7

Starship (Shell Prompt)

Fish + Starship (https://starship.rs/) + z (<a href="https://github.com/jethrokuan/z">https://github.com/jethrokuan/z</a>). For me it is a really nice configuration, fast do do stuff & visually pleasant (it influences my comfort & motivation).

#Developer Tools #Programming #Terminal 188 social mentions

8

espanso

Espanso [0] - such a useful text expander with easy inclusion of shell commands and many other features. I love this thing so much as someone in the medical field that I made my first ever open source contribution to it. 0: https://espanso.org.

#Writing Tools #Personal Productivity #Automation 96 social mentions

9

fzf

Add fzf to get fuzzy search for your history. I reuse long complicated commands all the time by pressing Ctrl+R and then typing the first letters of a few words I remember using. <a href="https://github.com/junegunn/fzf">https://github.com/junegunn/fzf</a> It's also useful to remove duplicate commands and store infinite history. Add this to ~/.bashrc: <pre><code> export HISTFILESIZE=.

#Note Taking #Productivity #LMS 214 social mentions

10

Hacker News

#Social Networks #Social News #Startups 498 social mentions

11

grep.app

Https://grep.app/ and https://cht.sh/ for quick reference.

#Git #Code Collaboration #SCM 11 social mentions

12

SlickRun

Https://bayden.com/slickrun/ Total Commander, still the best file manager on Windows.

#App Launcher #Windows Tools #Productivity 2 social mentions

13

GoAccess

GoAccess: https://goaccess.io/. I don't miss Google Analytics at all. Loom. It's not open source I don't think but I'm digging it and excited when a public domain competitor comes out. Our https://scroll.pub/. It's far beyond markdown at this point. I am able to not only write better but also maintain thousands of pages of content by hand (well, most of the credit for that belongs to Apple M1s, Sublime Text, git, MacOS, and Github). The stuff we are doing with it now would just not be possible with anything else, and what we're coming out with next year is super exciting. It's all public domain.

#Analytics #Web Analytics #Monitoring Tools 52 social mentions

14

Freedom.to

Http://freedom.to Block websites so you can focus on work. Different blocklists and different sessions makes it easy for me to stay focused during the week. Best investment in myself I ever made.

#Time Tracking #Tool #Time Management 184 social mentions

15

Things

Things - its a light weight todo app with just enough features to make it useful. I tend to use it for a dev log to keep track of what I'm working on, keep notes, and finally mark something as complete https://culturedcode.com/things/.

#Project Management #Task Management #Todos 54 social mentions

16

Maccy

A quick Googling found this, and it looks similar: https://maccy.app/.

#Clipboard Manager #Mac #Productivity 49 social mentions

17

Tridactyl

There's also Tridactyl, which is a similar project, but more customizable. <a href="https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl">https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl</a>.

#Web Browsers #Text Editors #Web Development Tools 33 social mentions

18

CleanShot X

Cleanshot X I'm a product designer. I spend a significant amount of time taking screenshots—dropping them in Figma, slacking them to PMs and annotating them for engineers. The tool keeps screenshots suspended on your desktop until you decide what to do with them—save, annotate or copy it to clipboard. It doesn't save the screenshots if you don't want it to, so it prevents a ton of clutter. Not to mention it has video recording that I frequently use to create video walkthroughs for features I'm working on. The tool is a pretty expensive Mac App, but worth every penny. https://cleanshot.com/.

#Screenshot Annotation #Screenshots #Image Annotation 74 social mentions

19

DSQ

#Application And Data #Languages & Frameworks #Shell Utilities 11 social mentions

20

fish shell

The fish shell (https://fishshell.com/) and its fantastic auto-completion. It now replaces bash as the default shell on all my machine and is the first program I install when connecting to a fresh cloud instance.

#Developer Tools #Cryptocurrencies #Blockchain 124 social mentions

21

Surfingkeys

#Web Browsers #Text Editors #Web Development Tools 1 social mentions

22

Observable

I followed the instructions at Quarto.org, integrated with VS Code. So they are text documents stored locally. I didn't realize observable-cli was open source. I find it can't do nested logic the way observablehq.com can though. For instance, I like having inputs embedded in paragraphs of text, which requires having logic mixed in with a markdown cell. There are certain things that I can do on the web that don't work locally. There's also https://observablehq.com/@asg017/introducing-dataflow, which I haven't tried yet.

#Data Visualization #Data Dashboard #Data Science Notebooks 280 social mentions

23

Text Blaze

Text Blaze (YC W21) has saved me about 50 hours over the past 18 months. They reduce repetitive typing across websites. For example if you have a common format for bugs you're filing, or LinkedIn messages or emails that you're sending, you can use Text Blaze to write most of the text for you. If you've used Superhuman snippets, this is similar but more powerful, and it works across the entire web instead of just email. Time savings screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/KjFhWRH (Disclosure: I liked the product so much that my fund ended up investing.) Website: http://blaze.today/.

#Chrome Extensions #Productivity #Customer Communications 49 social mentions

24

Steampipe

Excited to see Steampipe shared here - thanks zJayv! I'm a lead on the project, so sharing some quick info below and happy to answer any questions. Steampipe [1] is open source and uses Postgres foreign data wrappers under the hood [2]. We have 90+ plugins to SQL query AWS, GitHub, Slack, Kubernetes, etc [3]. Mods (written in HCL) provide dashboards as code and automated security & compliance benchmarks [3]. We'd love your help & feedback! 1 - https://steampipe.io.

#Big Data #Databases #Big Data Analytics 39 social mentions

25

Evernote

No video recording but Skitch https://evernote.com/products/skitch is still my screenshot tool for Mac. Just don't login with any Evernote account (I don't use Evernote) and you are fine. Free.

#Note Taking #Todos #Personal Productivity 63 social mentions

26

ClipX

I am still using http://bluemars.org/clipx/ old but works.

#Clipboard Manager #Bookmarks #Note Taking 8 social mentions

27

Copy'em Paste

I don’t know if I’m the only one, but when I used ditto I turned off the auto cleanup stuff. Basically I had it keep everything. I’d go cleanup manually every now and then (especially images), but having a very long term way to look up past code snippets was invaluable. So then when I got my first Mac I felt lost without a clipboard manager with unlimited storage. I finally found Copy’em and my life has been complete again. :) https://apprywhere.com/ce-mac.html.

#Clipboard Manager #Mac #Productivity 17 social mentions

28

Fluent Search

Windows: Fluent Search. Blown away it's not a part of Windows - https://fluentsearch.net/.

#Productivity #App Launcher #Workflow Automation 10 social mentions

29

Kanmail

#Email Clients #Kanban #Productivity 4 social mentions

30

Chocolatey

I don't use Windows that much, have used Ninite in the past, but these days I tend to use Chocolatey along with their GUI. https://chocolatey.org/ https://community.chocolatey.org/packages/ChocolateyGUI.

#Windows Tools #Package Manager #Front End Package Manager 251 social mentions