What tools are you a 10/10 on?

I use vim (text editor), curl (download from internet (many protocols) and can be piped; can also send), xclip (command-line clipboard access by pipes), dc (calculation), grep, 7z (supports many file formats), and the SQLite command shell. I also use less, bash, gcc, gdb, valgrind, dosbox, Ghostscript, and many others. I also wrote my own programs for some things; for example, I have my own set of programs for dealing with picture files (Farbfeld Utilities), but I also have ImageMagick in case of something that Farbfeld Utilities does not currently do; I have made programs for other things too. (Of course, I use many other programs too.) (Unfortunately, some of them use Unicode even though I do not want them to (others do not have that problem), and sometimes requires writing extra code to work around them (other times I am working only with ASCII and it is not a problem).)

Math, English, computers, TCP/IP, Wikipedia, willingness to change my mind when evidence shows I was wrong, coreutils, C, ssh, Hypothesis, gzip, Markdown, HTML, SQL, 8-bit AVRs, vise-grips, rsync, JS, zipfiles, less, Audacity, kitchen knives (steel and zirconia), CSS, wget, PNG, TeX, solder braid, SVG, PostScript, ffmpeg, LuaJIT, Tor, qemu, mpv, xxd, Arduino, yt-dlp, graphviz, Jupyter, netpbm, ImageMagick, and Numpy.

I'd say 9/10 on Python, SQLite, Git, Emacs, Inkscape, Vim, screen, Bash, Lua, GCC, Audacity, Debian, Octave, Docker, R, Bitcoin, GDB, Matplotlib, OCaml, and Gnumeric; Linux previously belonged to that list but has gotten dramatically worse over the last 25 years, even more noticeably than Python.

New candidates include zstd, Rust, Golang, STM32, RISC-V, lzip, Sympy, PARI/GP, Wayland, systemd, Guix, and XPra.

Excel, Zoom, and Slack are proprietary, and I know better than to invest my time in proprietary tools; I made that mistake already last millennium and lost my entire investment in Borland C++, Visual C++, MFC, Quattro Pro, DR-DOS, 4DOS, Visual Basic, Ultrix, AIX, SunOS 4, INFORMIX-OnLine, VMS, Epsilon, and an in-house source-control system that's blessedly forgotten today.

Linear might be the best-made software I've seen in a decade.

Raycast is phenomenal; a perfect drop-in replacement for like 8 different tools I used to use.

Airtable is really amazing, and their API is sososo close to making it a solid database replacement for super small personal projects.

Superhuman could do a lot more to make email managable, but going back to the Gmail interface makes it clear how much of a 10x improvement it is.

Emacs. I have this irrational love for it that no other computer program has ever come close to. Full of warts indeed? Insignificant details no man so in love would heed!

That you in such a fundamental way can make it your own puts a smile on my face. It enables me to specify how _I_ want to converse with my editor. With my computer. With my digital muse.

I love you, emacs.

(I say this as a vimmer for 15 years before switching)

PostgreSQL, one of the few tools that has been worth all the time I put into learning it.

I use Emacs for literally everything. There is no substitute.

Anki. For pretty much everything from learning/memorizing to creating notes/references to creating reading queues to creating quick latex snippets for copy pasting.

Byobu as a tmux frontent and as a collaborative editor/terminal environment.

guake terminal

linux mint more generally

total commander, keepassxc, and dropsync on android

- Todoist. Been using it for years and it's critical to my workflow.

- 1Password.

- Raycast. Recent convert from Alfred. It's amazing. Lots of nice improvements from Alfred.

- ZSH w/fzf and lots of fun plugins (https://github.com/iloveitaly/dotfiles/blob/master/.zsh_plug...)

- Texts app. Without this I'd lose track of 90% of texts. Huge productivity boost.

- Dash. Saves me lots of time looking up documentation and has advanced snippet support.

Nginx: static hosting, proxy pass, grpc pass, direct socket passthrough, custom modules, tls oid parsing, tls session tickets , horizontal scale out, regex mappings, lua, etc ... There is a lot to this "simple" tool...

The app Everything, it’s search as it should be on windows.

Electric drill with torque selector.

Hi, here's my list: - Total Commander (file management) - Everything search (find stuff on my pc) - Emacs (whatever I do in plain text) - Faststone Capture (screen capture, image annotations) - Autohotkey (various shortcuts and automation, scripting) - Outlook (email) - MyLifeOrganized (task management) - Dynamics 365 for Sales (it's CRM) - Office 365 (word, excel etc.).

Typora for oncall notes - it seems to be the one markdown writing app that lets me paste screenshots in so they will save to disk and render inline with the notes I'm typing.

https://chezmoi.io for dotfile management. I'm the author but I use chezmoi across all my machines.

Outlook (the desktop native app). Evolution comes vaguely close, but other than that? Every single client, desktop or native, just seemed insufficient. Especially if you need your calendar to be integrated into the email client.

- vim: same editor & keybindings on every machine - postman: api testing

- saleae log analyzer with logic2: protocol analysis, message decoding, etc

Zotero. It's like a open-source second brain for me, and saved me a lot of boring reference management by hand.

No tool excites me. Every tool is a cope.

React. I can build anything in it with great test coverage and code reuse.

Definitely Alfred for Mac [1]

[1] https://www.alfredapp.com/

Not sure if OS fits into the 'tool' category but for me it was FreeBSD where I finally found home after trying various Linux distributions, OpenSolaris, Mac OS X and Windows.

I tried to gather some of the reasons 'Why?' I prefer FreeBSD instead of other OSes but I probably did not covered everything that it brings:

- https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2020/09/07/quare-freebsd/

From 'smaller' tools I definitely appreciate that these exist (and use them daily):

- POSIX /bin/sh shell for scripts - zsh shell and its completions - firefox with plugins - transmission - geany editor - also use nvi/vim daily - deadbeef audio player - mpv multimedia player - gimp and inkscape for various graphics related stuff - caja file manager (from MATE) - thunar file manager for its bulk rename feature - xnview image browser for finding similar images - audacity for simple audio modifications - rsync for its versatility in transferring/updating files - wine and dosbox for allowing 'alien' executables run with native speed on FreeBSD - ZFS Boot Environments with beadm(8) for bulletproof upgrades - Jails containers for flexible, easy and fast separated environments

Probably I forgot about something - but these are most important.

Regards.

The more I use a tool the more I become aware of its warts and the more they start to irritate me. Lots of things which I used to sing the praises of have lost their magic to me. Vim, i3, linux distributions (arch and later slackware), the unix shell in general, various browsers, weechat/irc, android apps such as Transportr and Episodes (both in fdroid), programming languages (python and C), hell even websites and communities (such as this one), and many more things are tools that at one point I would've raved about, and while I still like them, their various sets of unfixable flaws keep me from fully enjoying them and recommending them whenever the topic comes up.

I assume this is the way everything eventually goes. Currently I'm over the moon with Lua (pun intended), as I think it's a very neat little language housing a ton of power and expressiveness in an impressively tight package. I haven't been able to use it since I last tried Löve2d over 6 years ago, as I have actively been trying to but haven't gotten a chance to properly use it again, so I'm sure I'll get over it eventually.

Rather than Excel, I'd rather use Lotus Improv or Quantrix (wish that Flexisheet was in a usable state)

Macromedia Freehand is a tool I've been using since v1 of Altsys Virtuoso on my NeXT Cube --- currently running it on Windows, I'll probably give up drawing on the computer and switch to paper and pen and pencil when it no longer runs

Really miss NeXT/OPENstep, and don't find Mac OS X comfortable at all (miss the Unix Expert checkbox). Really miss PenPoint and its intensely notebook-oriented, object-oriented, component-centric UI --- the high-water mark of my user interface experience was the year in college where I used an NCR-3125 running Go Corp.'s PenPoint as a mobile device, and a NeXT Cube w/ a Wacom ArtZ graphics tablet and Microtek ScanMaker 600ZS for input.

These days I'm mostly modeling in 3D using OpenSCAD (which I'd like to find a better tool than --- ideally one which can write out text files as part of 3D modeling), but I'm kind of stuck w/ OpenSCAD 'cause I use BlockSCAD as the front-end.

Nothing is 10/10 really. Some parts come close:

- I enjoy using ctrlp.vim (and similiar). Fuzzy search in general is just faster to use.

- git add -p is gives you a great feeling of control

- the combination of tmux, ssh, grep and so on give you power and provide the flow-state feeling

- Google Search albeit its problems still provides massive productivity gains

- CI tools listening to pushes are fun and magical

AppGrid (light MacOS window manager) https://github.com/mjolnirapp/AppGrid

WireGuard (shameless plug - https://wireguard.how/)

JetBrains everything

1Password

Debian (not my desktop environment, but still)

Mac apps MeetingBar and itsycal to keep on top of remote meetings

- Notepad++ (as a general text editor/manipulator, I have a separate IDE).

- Google Maps (don't know if that really qualifies as a "tool", but it's one of the highest-utility things I know, either way).

- Discord (have never used the public side of it, but for private comms for a small group of friends keeping in touch and gaming, it's proven an incredibly effective solution).

- Paint.NET (I don't stretch it, but as a "better Paint" for very basic image manipulation, it just works).

Those are the ones I'm particularly fond of. I do use other tools heavily that I like but don't evoke as much appreciation - Visual Studio, VS Code, Chrome, Excel, Google Docs, Outlook, Teams - I'm not sure if those are good-but-not-great or I just take them for granted too much.

Anything by Jetbrains. Takes so much crap out of my day.

- Webstorm (I switch languages often and I like to use the same keyboard shortcuts to navigate and search functions, types etc. I’d prefer to pay a team to add core features instead of messing around with plugins).

- Excel (I see this as just an advanced calculator. Basic pivot tables and charts).

- SQLite (I start with this and then move to a SQL server if it cannot keep up with write throughput. I use it to “reduce distributed state” so that I can understand everything with just a function stack trace. I often find data modelled in 2nd or 3rd normal form tables beats “how should I nest this data” in a general language as you can use SQL to produce many tabular views from the same scalar values).

- Javascript (Since I read “The good parts” I find JSON and modern JS as a scripting language much more productive than anything else for small or disposable projects. Closures, event loop and async/await built in by default, global distribution in browsers, JIT produces machine code that gets you closer to a compiled language performance than any other dynamic language).

- Typed languages (I used to dislike types because I felt they got in the way and what’s the point? Now I see them as a tool to get extremely fast iteration loops as your editor will tell you if all the things snap together magnetically in less than one second. Great for breaking things apart and reconnecting them. I work on many code bases, and all that implicit type data in your head disappears when you leave a dynamic code base for a few weeks. Also having a spec for messages your server sends and receives allows you to auto generate docs).

- Sublime (so snappy to start I use it as a general scratch pad).

- Regular expressions (sometimes there is no substitute. I like that there is a little string matching machine and notation that is the same in every language, and that you can rapidly iterate outside of the code base in a web editor then paste it into the program).

- Preview (extremely fast to open and zoom into vector based graphics like PDFs).

- PDF’s (in a world where every app that reads and writes doc-like-data wants to lock you in, being able to export to PDF will at least allow you to read your content without the app far into the future. Spotlight on macOS will index the text allowing for search).

- Pen and paper (just being able to see your thoughts and then refining them or finding new branches of thought is a huge improvement over trying to keep everything in your mind. The computer is often too distracting for this).

MacBook M1 Max (lacks CUDA, but still the best laptop overall if you need xcodebuild)

ssh

I use it all the time to connect to my home server, works like a charm !

Perl (for the tasks I use it for). For chopping up text files and pulling out the pieces you want, it's the best, even today.

(Note well: No, I don't use it for big programs. No, I don't use it for anything fancy.)

PHP, Mobaxterm, VSCode, Firefox Devtools -- I that /anything/ python can do, you can do in PHP and faster. I might be a old fart, but I can make all kinds of stupid shell applets, desktop GUIs (Did you know that PHP has SDL support using FFI :V), hacky scripts to do the cash flow for a point of sale system using serial and tcp based daemons. Hell I once wrote a rather nice IRCd in PHP a few years go.

Mobaxterm is a treat to work with in windows and really improves my workload when working on several servers at the same time that I need to bash out some commands on.

nano editor - ideal combination of simplicity of use and standard features ( just enough for comprehensive editing ). Available on all Linuxes . I always find vim/vi difficult to start with …

A hammer; I used to help my dad and grandpa build extensions and various other wooden things on our houses, and still to this day I can get a nail into a bit of timber with two whacks quite reliably.

CygWin.

Due to my work for clients I have to spend 90% of my time in Windows. First thing I do on a new client is to crap out every telemetry MS has and then I install CygWin, only then I can get to work.

Linear, Raycast, Figma and Safari are the only tools fast enough in my daily use for me to really love. Slack seems to be improving and we’re making serious speed gains at Loops.

Ninite. Make it easy to install softwares on Windows.

Fusion 360 for CAD modelling. I used Autocad before but nowadays I don't need that level of complexity.

Notepad++. Lightweight and simple text editor.

Raycast. It’s a joy to use and build extensions for.

Also Supabase, especially due to being open-source (but im still waiting for their dashboard to be on GitHub so I can fix a few pet peeves…)

Many, however Inkscape is somewhat magical to me because while I have no talent (nor real interest) for drawing, it always enables me to quickly obtain something adequate.

While MacOS gets a lot of deserved flak, there are two features/pieces of software that I am always missing on linux:

- Spotlight, i.e. the search bar, and

- Preview, i.e. the image/pdf/document viewer and editor. It's significantly more feature rich than most pdf readers, allows editing pictures with significantly more tools than paint, allows you to add a signature to sign documents. Absolutely great piece of software.

Heirloom ex-vi: https://github.com/n-t-roff/heirloom-ex-vi

Plus an fvwm2 config built for it: http://trout.me.uk/screenshot4.png

(http://trout.me.uk/X11/)

Gitup, naive macOS git GUI. Use it for almost everything. Use terminal if I need to undo commits.

Bear, macOS/iOS markdown note taking app.

Trello, still nothing in the market that beats Trello’s UX for small project management.

1Password, used together with Apple Keychain, mainly for things that require 2fa.

Bamboo. Very old iPad only sketching app by Wacom. Lacks the infinite canvas of modern sketching apps, but the sketching UX is unmatched.

Concept, for when Bamboo is not enough.

Hammer.

With one, everything gets to be a nail.

OBS Studio, useful beyond livestreaming.

Inkscape is quite good for FOSS, and vector-based drawings are awesome.

FFMpeg for all your media conversion and manipulation needs.

Two that weren't mentioned: Autocad and Sketchup. An emacs for CAD and the most intuitive 3D software by far.

Tools I use: https://github.com/slowernews/notebook/blob/master/on-toolbo...

Superhuman. Livegrep. Basically nothing else? Almost all other software is so slow as to be unusable or made for such narrow usecases that I cannot use it.

I love Zig but this post isn't about programming languages and even if it's super great it's clearly beta software and you hit problems related to that regularly.

Notepad++, vim, git and everything from voidtools

Np++ and vim both for editing files, specifically np++ for doing some quick and dirty edits along with comparing files and vim for when I do more complex stuff.

git for keeping a history of notes, along with normal git usage.

And everything to find any file that I need.

While not 10/10, I use ghidra quite a bit.

Notion.

It's my:

- TODO list & GTD (getting things done) system

- Journal

- Daily planner

- Meeting agenda tracker

- collection of small databases (places I want to go, recipe tracker, etc.)

- outlining tool

- iterative writing tool

- idea notebook

- note taking app

- scrap book

- personal wiki

- personal small project tracker

- gift wishlist I can share publicly

The spartan formatting tools and opinionated constrained layout options allow me to focus on the content, and not get distracted by the squirrels.

Favourite apps on f-droid

Newpipe - listening to youtube in background (music, podcasts)

Aard2 - offline wiktionary

Forget me not - flashcards for learning foreign words

Hacker's keyboard - keyboard with arrow keys, ctrl, etc.

K9 Mail - comfy mail client, no oauth support yet

Material files, Simple gallery

Night light - screen color temperature control

Tmux, to the point where I don’t get how others live without it. It IS my workflow.

They say if you want something done right, do it yourself: https://www.getflookup.com/about

PyCharm made my Python projects more fun to work on.

Just recently, I started learning Ruby and also love RubyMine. I guess all JetBrains IDEs are like that.

Ansible

Once you understand the core concepts (modules, templating, etc) writing the code is a treat.

It's like writing pseudocode that actually does things

No matter how many software tools I bounce around for my whole life, nothing can beat Vim as my text editor and zsh (or even bash) as the terminal. Sadly enough, my life began on MacOS (now I mainly use Arch) but I still have almost every keyboard shortcut, a deep knowledge of AppleScript and all the other small quirks of the OS in the back of my mind. The best way to learn how to use an OS is to want to do something that you aren't allowed to do on it without doing a little bit of secret tinkering ;)

Debian and centos ( before it’s stopped to be free )

Google Calendar (integrated with ToDoist), Git, VSCode, MySQL Workbench and Excel are some tools I am using these days on daily basis.

Obsidian. Saved my ass at my new job. [:a gazillion of interconnected pieces of information to absorb in my small brain, in no time]

SQLYog for databases on Windows. I couldn't find any other DB tool on any other platform that's as good as this one.

some Windows-only things I have no real complaints with: Directory Opus, Henry++'s simplewall, Autoruns, cygwin, StrokesPlus, 7+ Taskbar Tweaker, Veeam Agent, RBTray, InterAccel, ClickMonitorDDC, https://github.com/Freaky/Compactor

RegexBuddy for creating, testing, saving, and applying any regular expressions, with a wide range of regex libraries built in.

I'm not really 10/10 on anything, but Krita is excellent. The only thing that bothers me about it is the text tool.

Maybe an 8 or 9, but:

- VS Code

- Multipass - https://multipass.run/

Maybe few, but the top ones for me are 1. Hammerspoon 2. KarbinerElements 3. Nvim 4. BitWarden

Nix/NixOS, Tailscale, lazygit

AKU drill, AKU impact wrench, AKU circular saw, eccentric grinder. Woodwork is my hobby.

CUE(lang) as a proper language for config & schemas, much better than the alternatives

NixOS, ffmpeg, neovim, swaywm, zfs, home-manager, ImageMagick, yt-dlp, bash, fish

UBlock Origin

Jupyter Notebooks

ITerm2

https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/

oh my zsh

ripgrep

Muse App

Slack

Electric Power Washer

- RipGrep for searching local repos and things

- Obsidian for taking and finding notes

- BitWarden for storing passwords

7zip, VS Code, Beyond Compare, imagemagick, foobar2000, VideoLan, simplewall

Xyplorer - File Manager replacement for Windows (using everyday since ~2008)

KeePassXC + KeePass2Android

Tailscale

Todo : Remember the Milk Notes : Joplin PW : Keepass Sync : Syncthing

GPT-3. Saves so much time on stuff that's mentally exhausting.

The one tool I didn't see already mentioned is checkvist.

Pixelmator Pro. Biggest bang for the buck image editor for macOS.

• GridPane

• Notepad++

• VS Code

• Github

• Random Wikipedia Page on New Browser Tab

• 1Password

• Asana

• ShipStation

• Google Voice (since 2010, which oddly hasn't been killed by Google yet)

Redgate SQL Toolkit. Great for schema updates and deploys.

tmux bash vim strings (stupid useful for poking at a binary without cracking it open with gdb) tree traceroute netcat tcpdump

10/10 is a high bar: Excel awk

AWS CDK. Many many hours of my life

Sublime Text.

Ublock Origin

Can't imagine surfing web without it!

Skimfeed

Amazing news aggregator

Slack

Best for teams communication

Neovim, git, Python, KeepassXC

Ublock origin Fish shell VSCode

Anki

Django.

Aeropress, Roam Research.

SQLite, OBS, 7-Zip, ZFS.

Intellij stuff, Docker.

Hubspot is a god send

Photoshop, Blender.

Taskwarrior!

Blender

Krita

GIMP

Bitwarden

piHole

Chrome

OneNote

Notepad++

Vscode

Inkscape

mutt

napping

1Password, all day every day