Ask HN: Programs that saved you 100 hours?

https://github.com/rupa/z

Now that Windows search often fails to turn up even my most used files (what happened to Windows search? Was it intentionally nerfed?), Everything has become a necessity for me.

[0]: https://www.voidtools.com/

2) Anything that lets you resize/place windows with hotkeys. For example, Divvy for OSX. Divvy is also nice because if you press the hotkey multiple times, it cycles the application through each of your monitors. No need to ever use your mouse to move/resize a window ever again.

3) Fuzzy file search in your editor. You know you want to open src/components/user.js so you type "cu<enter>" and it appears.

Any tools like this that become so ingrained in your muscle memory that you just kind of think things ("move this window and then summon my terminal") and the computer responds.

A lot of good editors have the issue that they are quite rigid when it comes to operating between multiple languages. So while your editor may shine at JavaScript, it won't understand vuejs templates or when you put Javascript code inside a php file.

This is where PhpStorm really shines. It can even complete your SQL statements inside php strings or go to a .vue file from a Html tag. I've never seen this type of understanding from an editor ever.

P.S. My only issue with it is that writing plugins for it is kinda hard. Since it is so extendable it's only expected that programmers would want to extend it with their own plugins. And while I have been able to write one plugin for it I found the documentation and tutorial for writing plugins all over the place and sometimes very outdated. It is my request if anyone from jetbrains read it to please make plugin docs more accessible and easier to understand, esp the testing quickly part.

- Yabai on mac for not having to think about moving windows around.

- Pomodoro (now through org-mode) for helping focus (and saving hours, in a round-about-way.)

- Removing as much advertising from my life as possible. (Ublock origin, deleting social networks when possible)

WizTree (https://antibody-software.com/web/software/software/wiztree-...) is a freeware Windows utility (man, typing this took me back to 1997) that lets you quickly see which files are hogging your disk space. Think "df GUI for Windows". Especially useful to track down large application files hidden in the depths of system folders.

- Deliveries: macOS / iOS package tracking https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/deliveries-a-package-tracker...

- Screenotate: OCR all of your screenshots with metadata like program/webpage https://screenotate.com

- The Tagger: lightweight macOS utility to tag music / fetch metadata from discogs https://deadbeatsw.com/thetagger/

- youtube-dl: Download any video / song online https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/

It was fun thinking of these, I actually put together a blog post a while back listing my favorite software. Would love to revisit it soon: https://lukemil.es/blog/software-i-like

Keycloak [https://www.keycloak.org] OpenID Auth Server

nREPL + Cider [https://github.com/clojure-emacs/cider] Clojure's Network Repl and Emacs integration for live coding Clojure

Company Mode [https://company-mode.github.io] Emacs autocomplete mode

> git config --global help.autocorrect 1

Based on bash history data, I've also added a simple alias to my bash config:

> alias gti="git"

[1]: https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Customizing-Git-Git-Configura...

Fzf all you can, not just inside vim, but also use it to switch between tmux sessions in an instant. I have a tmux manager on top of tmuxp that is able to start / switch to already started sessions via fzf.

Identify patterns you use a lot and make snippets out of them. Create project templates.

Have a folder where you dump reference / things that need to be really easy to find, and set up vim to search into that instantly, no matter where you are.

Keep an inbox file to throw things in, make a wm bind a script to prompt for text and append it there via zenity. Don't throw links into it, it's gonna be a bookmark dump.

Make sure your todo system is a keybind away at all times.

Review your way of working, challenge, and improve it. Be lazy, but only when you afford it.

Just having sensible defaults on a shell works wonders on my day-to-day productivity.

Add a couple of aliases for productivity and off you go.

  abbr --add s "git status"
  abbr --add gap "git add --patch"
  abbr --add gco "git checkout"
  abbr --add gd "git diff"

  alias recent="git for-each-ref --sort=-committerdate refs/heads/ --format='%(color:yellow)%(refname:short)|%(color:bold green)%(committerdate:relative)|%(color:blue)%(subject)%(color:reset)' | column -ts'|' | tac"
  alias r="recent"

Sure, you can use your IDE to achieve some of this, but this is where the 80/20 rule really breaks down: since each IDE differs in the details, at some point auto-formatting the code is going to waste more time than it saves by having to undo or work around mutually incompatible formatting rules. You can't reasonably expect everyone to use the same IDE, but you can expect them to use the same Makefile targets and CI pipeline.

Learning the YouTube APIs saved me thousands of hours on editing video metadata, organizing playlists, etc (https://github.com/cgranier/pytube).

Everything (https://www.voidtools.com/) is a wonderful file search tool for Windows.

Thanks for all the links and ideas... new things to try this week.

- setting up a personal vpn with a reserved IP if you connect to services that require your IP to be whitelisted and you move often

- for git cli: dashes take you back to your previous location (eg `git checkout -` will take you back to the previous branch). On zsh: `cd -n` will take you to n directories ago

Mac only:

- the Paste clipboard manager has been a most delightful tool, though I don’t know if I’ll ever upgrade to the new subscription version: https://pasteapp.io/

- the workflows feature in Alfred.app as a convenient place to keep utility applescripts / other kinds of little scripts that you want to invoke through global shortcuts or through Alfred

- Listary (windows) Not sure if its 100 hours, but I love its search in any context of explorer. Default explorer search is terrible IMO. For example when you open file - you can use search there instead of navigating by hand.

I cannot stress enough the word immediate. Delayed reports (after a week, after a day, or whenever I check) sure give a bit of reality-check and insight on what to change (usually only the first time) but were not useful for actually implementing these changes. (I have ADHD if that matters. For some people insight might be enough.)

Qbserve displays constantly the current productivity score. I had a love&meh relationship with RescueTime (since it does not offer a way to display productivity tracking all the time), but after composing it with a link to report on a new tab (my most common way of procrastination), it was a game-changer.

A small note - if you prefer something more private, and open-source, there is https://github.com/ActivityWatch/activitywatch (I use it as well). Not as polished, but clearly logging well, and it has Web UI on localhost, thus can be used with Custome New URL Tab as well.

- Spotlight - for quick calculations

- Contexts [https://contexts.co/] and chunkwm for window management [https://github.com/koekeishiya/chunkwm]

- Maccy [https://maccy.app/] for a decent and beautiful clipboard manager

The saving layouts feature is an absolute gem.

2) dmenu (https://tools.suckless.org/dmenu/) is a lifesaver. I use it even on Ubuntu to launch custom scripts. The autocomplete is good because unlike when I use alt-F2 I can actually tell if a command is type correctly or not. Also it's a little known fact but you can type full commands into it, complete with pipes, and it will execute it. For ages I had a bind against notify send so I could examine data by doing `Meta-P foo | show` which would dump it to a notification. Just really useful for getting data without needing to wait for a terminal to start, just to show you one thing or value you need for 2 seconds.

3) Also I'll go ahead and plug my filesystem tagger - koios (https://gitlab.com/finnoleary/koios). It has a feature where it will autodetect (using libmagic) the type of a file.

So you can do something like: "tag all the files that have the mime type 'png' files in the directory with the tag 'png'":

    koios auto image/png +png .

    koios show +png | grep -v '.png$'

Less of a given, still Mac: Rectangle Tiling Window Organiser https://rectangleapp.com/

For Linux I would use Xmonad to achieve the same as the two programs above.

Without this, I might have given up on Haskell a long time ago.

Also Cachix[0], as building lots of Nix packages from scratch takes an awful long time, especially on my MacBook Air.

Also git, vim, etc.

[0]: https://cachix.org/

It can be a memory hog when left running ,and I wish I could "pop out" portions of the UI to reorganize on my screen.

Otherwise, indispensable to my work the last couple of years.

I still find myself in situations where I need more than Markdown but less than React; as a result I just need to quickly get some HTML on a page. Emmet lets you expand a snippet similar to a CSS selector into full-fledged markup, complete with attributes.

It has tons of software packages.

    # ci = clipboard in, co = clipboard out
    # xclip so this works in gui apps too
    alias ci="xclip -selection clipboard"
    alias co="xclip -selection clipboard -o"

Docker - Allows reproducible builds and caching, an indespensible and composeable tool for development.

Shell Aliases - just using aliases for common commands in .bashrc saves tonnes of time. Even better version control your aliases in a github repo like this https://github.com/benwinding/dotfiles

Flameshot and Peek - lightweight screenshot and screen recording tools

Linux - It's difficult initially, but Learning and developing in Linux really is just faster, easier, and saves tonnes of time, mainly due to the unix philosophy...

- Magit, to quickly organize hunks into commits and do general git things

- Org mode, to organize TODOs, thoughts and even draft code snippets and designs

- Language-specific layers with great features (usually REPLs, support for refactoring, autocomplete — stuff you expect from any other IDE).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition

https://apps.ankiweb.net

There are two ways in which it’s saved me hundreds of hours. These are of course anecdotal, but the science behind Spaced Repetition is pretty solid.

1. We naturally forget information after a certain amount of time. Much of this information has to be relearned at some point; I’d estimate we end up learning the same fact at least a dozen times over the course of our lifetime. SRS can cut this relearning time to the minimum necessary.

2. By optimizing for ‘daily maximum possible learning.’ This is related to the Spacing Effect and it’s a crucial idea underlying SRS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacing_effect

In my personal experience, there is a limit to the amount of information you can meaningful acquire per day. After that point, it becomes a waste of time and effort. So, by dividing learning materials into smaller pieces and spreading them out over time, you can reduce the amount of time needed to learn them.

This is particularly relevant for useful-but-not-urgent information, like alphabets or geography. For example, trying to learn and remember the Russian alphabet in a single day will probably take you a few hours, if not all day. Learn one letter per day over the course of three months, however, and your daily time requirement is perhaps a few minutes. The retention rate per minute of time invested is dramatically higher.

https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/my-mac-os

I am a hobbyist NLP researcher and have published 4 papers in the last year just thanks to this library and the many life-saving tweaks. Honestly a world-class effort from the team at Facebook.

- Alfred App - helps with tons of things, but the clipboard manager alone has saved me over 100 hours

- iTerm 2, especially with a global hot key (and Guake on Linux before my first Mac)

- Prettier on npm (auto code formatting tool, like gofmt)

- Jumpy on npm (my own CLI bookmarking tool, makes it easy to hop around directories)

Spotlight on steroids, along the lines of Alfred and Quicksilver, but the best of the bunch, imo. It's a frecency based fuzzy matching searcher that adheres to subject - verb - (optional) object grammar, and using it feels like a global GUI terminal. A new mac without it feels completely gimped. Things I use it for:

- quick launch/switch apps

- browse filesystem (like https://github.com/ranger/ranger) and do anything with item

- take selected item (file, folder, url, text) -> open with X, send to any search engine, move, copy, rename, start composing email with text, compress, basic text munging, etc.

- calculator

- clipboard and snippets manager (incl. variables like current date/time)

Also - git, Django REST framework, VueJS

[1] https://quilljs.com/

Mosh https://mosh.org/ I'm a fairly recent user so it hasn't been 100 hours yet, but it will be.

Not a program per se, but a few years ago I set up a cron job to back up my shell history every night to a file named based on the date, and then aliased 'h' to grep them all and pipe to tail. This allows me to see the last dozen times I used any string in a shell command. It comes in handy many times per day.

Instead of stopping whatever I'm doing, thinking about what password I used last time something forced me to rotate, pass saves the day!

* AwesomeWM, https://awesomewm.org/.

Maybe not a program per se, anyway using easy-to-remember keyboard shortcuts instead of clicking through a gui probably saved me a few minutes here and there.

* Gentoo Portage, The Gentoo package manager.

Yea, something that compiles packages from scratch may not sound like your typical time-saver, however, back when I had to track down every dependency and compile it myself just to get whatever package working that wasn't in the current distribution package tree, this saved me a lot of time. - This of course goes for every package manager, however back then(tm) portage had the most current releases and a lot of packages not in apt, rpm, etc.

* tmux (and tmux-cssh), https://github.com/zinic/tmux-cssh/

synchronize ssh sessions, like clusterssh, not very elegant but this saved me more than once, fast synchronized change on multiple machines at once \o/

* Ansible https://ansible.com/

Make tedious boring tasks less so, specify stuff in yaml once, execute and forget about them.

https://www.irfanview.com/

Rubymine - Ruby And JavaScript IDE with powerful SCM, test and debugging tools.

Notion - Shared Knowledgeable and collaboration. Really easy to go from a free form unstructured draft to organized, structured and easily accessible knowledge repo.

Whimsical - My favorite diagraming and wireframing tool.

Notable mentions

Stoplight OPen API editor.

Sunsama - light weight and collaborative todo list with focus on Calendaring

https://imagemagick.org/index.php

My blog post about setting up a Linux workstation has a few timesavers: https://tkainrad.dev/posts/setting-up-linux-workstation/#boo...

An important improvement for me was to switch from Bash to Zsh and use a variety of plugins, such as z, zsh-peco-history (better history search), zsh-autosuggestions, and zsh-syntax-highlighting.

If you work a lot with ssh, it is also worth the effort to create a proper .ssh/config that contains the most used hosts.

Anyway, my workflow is centered around directories and files accessed from Sublime. Every directory is major subject area or project. One directory is the Control Center - filled with documents that drive my work day and planning. Things like Work Journal, Weekly, Master, Research Depot, etc., are all referenced every day - sometimes dozens of times.

Table Editor package for Sublime to create logs, reference tables, checklists (option v = √). Also great for tracking my micro workouts - calisthenics every hour to keep the pump bumping.

Code folding works to hide "folders" of data within a text document so I can access things quickly from their header line. This is particularly handy in the Research Depot file. Exempli gratia, I have NPRs Music recommendations of 2020 folded up to one visible line with checkboxes of albums I've tried. Another folded area is on Stinging Nettle uses.

My zettlekasten system was moved to Sublime as well. It got its own directory. Added a time stamp package for naming the file from the first line with a CMD-T, and some simple markdown, each file is a zettle. I use Zettlr for exploring the notes - but Sublime for editing. Perfect mix for me.

It's not so much this all saved me 100 hours, but my productivity is up 1000%. No hyperbole. My writing, projects, chores, fitness and client labor are all up by extraordinary levels. My down time is more relaxing, work more pleasurable, and creativity is like a real psychic adventure. And, it should also be noted I've been on Sublime for maybe ten years, or so it seems.

  Sublime
    TableEditor
    Code Folder feature
    Tabbed directories - combined windows view
  Zettlr 
  Monodraw - but looking at the markdown diagramming tools...

Though these are hardly secret tools :)

- PDFill Free PDF Tools - indispensable for dealing with any bureaucratic tasks - cutting/rearranging pages, etc

https://github.com/go-jira/jira

Then custom scripts I made to do specific tasks on hundreds of files. So familiar scripting languages, in general, such as those regularly used at work. I had actually used MatLab for non scientific uses like batch downloading, or batch image/audio format conversion.

And a modern IDE that prevents many errors in the first place. VS Intellisense does it for me, but I guess there are equivalents in other development environments.

Spectacle: Easily organize windows without using a mouse on macOS.

https://github.com/eczarny/spectacle

Not only saved me tons of time and increased my development speed, but allowed me to recover from RSI and pains in my forearm, which in my case was caused by moving my hands between the home row, arrow keys and mouse constantly, and especially worsened when using the mouse scroll wheel.

Also, `vim -` (stdin buffer edit mode) is absurdly awesome. It starts with `ls -la | vim -` and ends up with `cat * | sed ... | vim -` and saves a ton of time.

These bashrc aliases rescued my stupidness a lot of times:

> alias cls="clear; printf '\033[3J'"; # clear screen and scroll buffer

> alias cp="cp -i"; # confirm before overwrite

> alias df="df -h"; # human-readable sizes

> alias mv="mv -i"; # confirm before overwrite

> alias ns="netstat -tup --wide"; # show active program sockets

If I would have to choose, it's definitely VIM that automated the most. Switched to VIM around 2004 and didn't regret it eversince.

Remotely debugging on an ssh server to figure out what's going on - with the same editor configuration and setup as on your desktop computer - comes in very handy in emergency situations when you have almost no tolerance for mistakes.

https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-advanced-search-operators/

- Jetbrains IDEs - the refactoring and debugging tools are second to none.

Also, honorable mention for magic wormhole, a finally sane way to move arbitrary files between devices.

It makes purchases easy, it makes reviews / researching games easy, it makes updates very easy, it often makes finding mods easy, it makes installs easy. And it reduces issues of lost games / keys after many years go by, as they're all in the library.

Intent was to explore if I still could be as productive doing a variety of things (general administrivia, writing, design, code) outside of MacOS. So it's organized less around a specific app but rather a workflow/concept.

Ideally I'd love to see a git-backed static website around this so people could fork/collect/share their workflows across environments visually.

ShareX (windows): screenshot > optionally annotate > upload to ftp > copy url to clipboard

But I can also paste from the clipboard:

- if it's a file: upload to ftp, copy link to clipboard

- if it's text: upload to ftp, custom URL makes it load in my org-mode or markdown web-render

https://create-react-app.dev

Having those utilities available in Windows saved me not hundred but ten of thousand of hours.

Also learning PowerShell when dealing stuff in Windows is saving a lot more hours then the ones you put in learning it.

Vivaldi browser - Amazing for productivity, custom search engines, configurable, can be controlled by keyboard. I can search in company ishare/OneDrive via URL bar etc.

Total commander - I use quite minimal interface, it actually looks more like fman. I use the folder jumplist a lot which saves a lot of time. I have some custom buttons (open in gVim for instance) and lynx like movement.

Linux:

Terminator - Terminator with splits, nice font rendering, easy GUI configuration

Arch - I can also put it to the cost me 100 hours list :] but AUR definitely saves time compared to Ubuntu dependency hell.

https://kakoune.org/

GridMove to arrange windows (with multiple monitor support) by keyboard shortcuts according to a grid I specified.

AutoHotKeys script that replaces 'dddd' with current date, 'ddtt' with date and time, 'dtdt' that outputs date and time with underscores (think filenames) and 'tttt' for just time.

The following features have saved me 100s of hours:

  - Being able to run tests/benchmarks directly in a test file via either clicking the play button or using a keyboard shortcut

  - It’s refactor support

  - automatically getting imports ordered and code formatted on save

  - multicursor support

  - and even more!

Visual Studio, ReSharper, Notepad++ (I did many tedious tasks with ease just by using regular expressions), Git, generic To Do list software (Microsoft ToDo, Todoist, etc.) - not everything is to be kept in Jira so this kind of software helps with organizing other tasks.

Not code related: Adobe Lightroom, Adobe Photoshop

Web browser is a piece of software that saved me time but also helped me waste a lot of time. So it's not only software that matters but the user, too.

As a nice bonus there is also a wonderful vim plugin :)

I'm working on a single monitor, so managing workspaces is crucial and xfce4 lets you set these up in seconds.

I am very happy to now can brag about it to someone:

You can allow your desktop to react to your mousewheel to change workspaces. Combine this with a one pixel border on any site of your maximized windows and you can circle your workspaces by just pulling your mouse to the edge. In practice, with an full-hd monitor, one does not see that there is one pixel of your desktop visible. In the few cases where the hand uses the mouse, this is the most convienient feature one can possibly experience.

I also can click in the same area with the right mouseclick and access my applicationmenu.

Another neat trick: xfce4 has to default application finder, alt+f2 and alt+f3. The latter appears to be unusable, because one has to tab to often to select an application.. But you can just resize the right pane far most to the left and the finder will always remeber this behaviour. The latter also includes user generated menu icons.

Since I rely on maximized windows, I also excluded all window borderings to maximize the viewport. simply delete all contents of your selected theme and reapply it.

One Terminal is configured as a dropdown, so it is permanent accessible over the entire worksession until you force close it, also, built-in.

Hotkeys for circuling workspaces and circle the current window within them as mentioned above.

Different backgrounds for each workspace plus a translucent panel, so I can identify on which workspace I am via perceptual cognition.

alt-rightclick lets you resize an window to any size.

It is the perfect workstation and i highly recommend it. Everything is builtin and works on all major distros out of the box.

- Talend API Tester: a Chrome extension to test (you probably guessed it) APIs! I can automate many things with it and use regex in my tests. If I had to do all that manually, I'd have become crazy by now. - Watir: a Ruby library that is essentially a wrapper around Selenium. Watir is easy to use, and I found Ruby very easy to learn. Also, bundler makes the process of keeping my libraries up to date really painless (when my webdriver tells my that it can't communicate with the browser because it has become outdated, a simple 'bundle install' fixes the issue)

[] Note: I don't need to do a fancy program, I just need to write some farily simple scripts that automate actions a verify a few things on web pages.

https://www.checkbot.io/

It saved me a lot of time and caught tons of mistakes before they got to production while working on multiple websites as a contractor

For example, I was assisting a team on one sprawling dynamic website with a lot of SEO and performance issues - the site had been hacked together over the years such that editing one page would usually break groups of unrelated pages in unexpected ways. My extension helped me get on top of which pages were dependent on each other, to prioritise what was worth fixing, and to confirm improvements had been made without breaking anything.

[1] https://www.supermemo.com/archives1990-2015/english/smintro [2] https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Incremental_reading

https://www.keyboardmaestro.com

SSO is free, and they offer other enterprise-focused features, like directory sync and audit trails.

To mitigate that, we've been using a tool called Rookout (https://www.rookout.com). We no longer need console.log statements in our code - We just set non-breaking breakpoints via their Web IDE and it just works - we get all the data we need, and without redeploying ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

TouchCursor to enhance keyboard, mostly as arrows, "Start" and "End" buttons. Allows to deal with text without moving hand to arrows.

Once it is in place it saves plenty of keystrokes and routine tasks.

If you ever had to write a non trivial deployment by hand you know what I'm talking about.

Having a local search engine with annotations is incredibly useful.

Having a simple standard way to automate all of my modify->"do x" runs has been wonderful, and (with a bit of care in your project structure) being able to near-livecode in almost any language is an incredible productivity boost.

* qutebrowser is close second as a lot of time on the web - the more efficient my web browser is the more time I save. Scripts, quickmarks and keyboard shortcuts just save a lot of time.

* spotify, music collection takes a lot of time. Finding music, buying music or even downloading music illegally is very time consuming. I maintain catalogs of obscure vaporwave subgenres and it's really really time consuming.

I learned them from Emacs on Linux and was pleasantly surprised to find that they work in almost every app on OSX.

[0] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201236#text

REAPER, Pure Data and other - I don't have to slice and glue magnetic tape to create electronic music

Thunderbird - I don't have to handwrite letters and bring them to the post office

I think the more interesting question would be: which computer program hasn't saved me 100 hours...

It has tons of useful features that should be in a line of business application. It saves you more than 100 hours with pre-built pages (authentication, permission management, localization, multi-tenancy, SaaS features, CRUD Page Generator (RAD Tool), themes etc.)

If you are not using Kodi, you should already be using it :)

PLEX is a meme.

This combined with a Super+C shortcut means you can copy multiple things in once and paste them in the order you want.

* [1]: https://docs.xfce.org/panel-plugins/clipman/start

Plex - We have munchkins and they love watching the same stuff off youtube or movies over and over. We simply download them and Plex will sync them to all of our devices with easy offline support. (We run it on a synology NAS)

- shell's ^R (history), ^T (args), ^P ($EDITOR)

- vim's ^P and <leader>p (open), <leader>b (buffers), <leader>r (tags)

and small little tools of my own like kd (mentioned around here), or vim's - to go up from file to dir in netrw, that allows to jump to any place of my filesystem quickly.

Prior to that, we would have templates being opened and copied over. As much as developers often don't like Excel, the problem that Excel has always directly addressed still exists: Not everyone wants to program.

[0] https://doublecmd.sourceforge.io/

I find Remfo very useful: https://rememberforever.web.app/

It helps me take notes & memorize things. It is currently in beta but still very stable

zsh & ohmyzsh plugins

Clipboard manager - built my own because I wasn't happy with the ones I had tried... https://nellyapp.com

Linux proper on windows, the Docker Desktop integration and the WSL Remote (and SSH Remote) extensions for VS Code.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2PaLZRpWdY

Likely more than a 100 hours saved using this tool for DWH work.

Easy to see the traffic flow between apps/apis. It helps to read the raw http req/resp, debug and replay the request with modified parameters.

For example, typing "scp" could expand to "scp -r myself@servername /home/myname/.logs/logfile ."

It's a concept that originated with the Fish shell, but is useful if you want to maintain some semblance of bash compatibility.

It pulls source and destination branch merges them locally and then pushes the source branch and creates a pull request if not already there. Reviewers are configurable per repo.

Disclaimer - I have used this every day for past 3 years and i maintain it as well.

- bashmarks

- zsh-autosuggestions

- yasnippet/emacs

- awk

- explainshell.com

- ansible scripts for setting up new dotfiles and my commonly used tools on a new machine/VM

Autosave feature.

Countless hours saved by not loosing information.

https://www.pulumi.com/

fzf - a command-line fuzzy finder

tmux - a terminal multiplexer

bash / zsh and the console tools (grep, sed, awk et al.)

python

vscode

alfred

prettier for js

mix format for elixir

github actions

okta logins for my employees

aptible for server management

render.com for personal projects

it's a linux clone of autohotkey, meaning it lets you script your mouse/keyboard/windows using python. It can trigger the scripts using a keyboard shortcuts or by watching keywords in regular text. I use it to kill emai/phone/date quickly, or to automate combinations of actions in GUI that don't have macros.

youtube-dl

I travel a lot, with plenty of downtime. Downloading conferences from many video sites, or music, turns those otherwise wasted hours into learning experience, relaxation, etc.

dynalist

Favorite life organization app, that I use for shopping, restaurant idea, todo, etc. Basically half of my GTD is in there. It's much more productive than any system I tried before, and I tried a lot of them.

thunderbird

I have 20 email addresses, and this varies depending of my clients. Web base email are not up to the task, and I need offline search/archive capabilities. Thunderbird is the only mature cross platform app that does that correctly.

pulsesms

I have a rich social life, and this means organizing groups of people. Of course, they all have their different chat apps, social account, preferences. Some are using an old 3310. Some don't want to be on facebook, etc. SMS is the only things that works with everybody, but typing it on the phone is a pain. I have an android phone, so no imessage, but no google account, so no android message. Pulsms allows me to write message from my computer comfortably.

fdfind and ripgrep

I search stuff all the time, and since they are way faster type (because easier to remember), faster to execute, and have an output that is faster to read, cumulatively it saves a lot of time.

tilix

I don't use a tiling windows manager or tmux-like software, so I rely on tilix to provide a terminal a the press of a key, and to provide tabs and split screens.

black

Automatic formatting for python code. No parameters.

bitwarden

Or lastpass, or 1password. Any password manager really. But bitwarden is the latest I'm using. I'd also say "tetripin" for otp on the command line but it would not really make it up to 100 hours.

meld

It compares files or directory. It's not the best out there, but it works everywhere, so I don't have to wonder. I just install meld. I'd say reggexer for search and replace as well, but again, not saving 100 hours.

--

Of course I could say GNU/Linux, python, firefox and vscode, but it's a bit obvious. Probably the most productive softwares I use though.

* frequent (automatic) backups (saves time and mood when things go wrong)

* i3

* fd (alternative to find)

* ripgrep

* keynav (don't use your mouse)

* !bangs on duckduckgo

* calcurse (terminal calendar)

* readline: C-h C-b C-a C-k M-b M-f C-u etc.

* howdoi (get SO answers in the terminal), especially useful for things you somewhat know but just forgot the syntax of.

* youtube-dl as already mentioned somewhere: you get out of youtube ASAP to prevent their algorithms from tricking into staying there. I also use it to watch videos later when I don't have internet, using a syncthing folder on my mobile which only syncs up to 10% remaining space (so that it doesn't fill with 100s of videos, just a few, enough for some trip). Videos are also rather inefficient in terms of communicating ideas, so better to keep them for when I really don't have better to do.

* in the same vein, adapt the speed of (technical) videos you watch, to skip the fluff and focus (even rewind) the difficult parts. Skip all ads, everywhere.

* uBlock Origin, for the same kind of reason: just block any annoying, time-consuming parts of website. If I need to go on some website regularly, and they happen to have a news section I don't care about (like their twitter feed), I just block it to get it out of my way.

* even use a text-only browser (I currently use w3m, which could show images in theory) for things like HN. HN itself works well, and its good links as well. You just trim a lot of the fluff, ads, etc.

* an easy way to sync files between your mobile and your computer (I use a combination of "Notes to Self" in Signal with an auto-destruct of 1 week for temporary stuff so that I don't have to delete it manually, and syncthing for longer-term things)

* script your way out of any repetitive task: if you need to register periodically to something, either use their API if they have one, or use selenium to automate it. I was really surprised how little time it took me to write my own script and learn how to use selenium.

* in general, rely less on proprietary software: it has the potential to break ("introduce new and shiny features and somehow make some old ones disappear" or just change the pricing-model) more regularly, and you'll have to switch which can be a burden. If some free (libre) software breaks hard for a lot of people, chances are that a fork will happen and the transition will be easier. This also applies to SaaS.

* try to avoid desktop apps: they don't compose well, you cannot easily script them compared to a CLI. It's also better than having a full remote desktop when you resort to SSH (especially on bad connections).

* try to learn the default keyboard shortcuts of software you use, unless they're really crazy: less config (which you'd have to sync and maintain), easier to use a computer which is not yours if need be

* regularly check that the commands you write in your terminal are not too verbose (use aliases / functions): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22853646

* check what's possible with frameworks like https://github.com/sorin-ionescu/prezto

* some dotfile repository to get you started in 5min on new computers with the same setup you're accustomed to.

* mutt (mostly to easily write emails in vim and grep emails from the terminal)

* cronjobs and reminders (I get new music albums on my phone regularly from my music library, so that I don't have to choose them manually (it's my library so I know I like them anyway). I used to actually spend time choosing music from my own library.)

* typing from your phone is inefficient, avoid it if possible. Batch your (non-time-critical) messaging. Most modern messaging apps have a desktop version these days.

Remote Leaf collects remote jobs from 40+ remote job boards, social media feeds & 1200+ company career pages, LinkedIn and sends the ones that apply to you.

Here's how easy it is to remotely play audio on a stereo hooked to a raspberry pi:

% rimport -a -u mrtea pifi /dev/audio /dev ; play music.mp3

oh, you also wanted to play the mp3's in Shelley's music directory (provided shelley lets us...)?

% rimport -a -u mrtea shelpc /usr/shelley/mp3 mp3 ; play mp3/shelleysfavorite.pls

That rendering job is going to clog up your cpu but you'd rather play doom. instead, run the job on many core server cerberus:

% rcpu -u mrtea -h cerberus -c rendercmd -args

compile and install a program for arm64 so you can also run on raspberry pi 3/4:

% objtype=arm64 mk install

The above commands require little to no configuration or external tools to work. You dial a machine and ask for resources; if you have permission, you will be granted access. If you want a windows domain like network auth you point your systems to a single machines auth server instead of the local auth. The c library is so streamlined that it makes c fun to use again, Go is directly inspired by it. compiler tools kept simple and cross compiling is a non issue, just change objtype. Even system libraries such as tcp communication is dead easy: http://man.postnix.pw/9front/2/dial. No shared libraries. Instead you write programs called file servers which provide services as sharable resources. Every other OS by comparison is horridly is broken.

Unix is broken. OSX is built on broken. Windows took broken to new levels. And every "new" OS is a copy of broken written in fad language du jor; e.g. Redox OS. You want a sane computing platform built by hackers for hackers? Run plan 9.