What are some excellent pieces of software written by a single person?
A very small team may also count.
Excellent = usability/utility or the quality of code.
FTL and Into The Breach are made by two developers, Justin and Matt of Subset Games.
Woz wrote all the Apple I and II software.
Cave Story, a metroidvania still actively ported to new platforms today.
Doom had a very small team, Carmack doing most/all of the engine work.
Dwarf Fortress is by two developers, and simulates its environment down to a very precise level of detail.
Many more here: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6u4pn/what_suc...
Calibre developed by Kovid Goyal it's a one stop shop for eBook management.
His reply to the issue
"Python 2 is retiring in thirty months. Calibre needs to convert to Python 3."
was
"No, it doesn't. I am perfectly capable of maintaining python 2 myself.
Far less work than migrating the entire calibre codebase.
status wontfix"
[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/1714107
1) Chris Sawyer wrote Transport Tycoon and RollerCoaster Tycoon in assembly.
2) SerenetyOS started off as a one man project by Andreas Kling.
SQLite by D. Richard Hipp also still maintains it by himself
I guess Linux kernel could also be considered still being maintained by a single person even though it's mostly contributions from other people, don't know the rules
I've been amazed almost every single day since I installed it few months ago by how useful and well done Dato on macOS is.
https://sindresorhus.com/dato
It fixes one of my main issue with macOS, its inability to show a calendar by clicking on the day in status bar, and adds tons of great feature without feeling bloaty. Great great job. Thank you Sindre Sorhus for making my life easier !
The author, Eric Chahi, did the design, art, code and some sound effects. Jean-François Freitas did the music and sound effects.
Wondered that nobody mentioned Latex.
I didn't look at the source code, but Laslie Lamport said he would pay a price (1000 USD?) for every error detected, and AFAIR he never had to pay a single dime. So the code should be qualifying for 'excellent'.
Rnote - Sketch and take handwritten notes.
Use it daily to take notes in lessons, never had any issues with it and he fixes stuff really fast compared to other similar sized projects (in my experience).
Before that i used xournal++ but rnote feels more stable/modern but lacks some features that xournal++ has
https://github.com/flxzt/rnote
Pinball Construction Set by Bill Budge.
Steve Wozniak called it "the greatest program ever written for an 8-bit machine."
Minecraft (actually 2 people?), rollercoaster tycoon (written in assembly), the first version of the Facebook, ape (a plasmid editor), Stardew valley, onward VR(??).
Sidekiq by Mike Perham is amazing. I’ve scaled multiple businesses on it’s back.
/bin/false
Does one thing and does it well
I'm not sure about "a single person" but I believe Flask and Requests (both Python libraries) are/were at least strongly connected to a single 'creator' (Armin Ronacher and Kenneth Reitz respectively) that come to mind for me, though both have larger communities of contributors these days.
The Acorn image editor for macOS by Gus Mueller is shockingly polished for a one-person project. I use it all the time. In my few times interacting with him through support he’s been really kind as well.
https://flyingmeat.com/acorn/
There have certainly been other contributors <https://github.com/capnproto/capnproto/blob/master/CONTRIBUT...>, but Kenton does most of the development and maintenance on his own.
There are few things I lament more than having to spin up on a new serialization / file format and it isn't using Capnproto or Protobufs or some similar invention. Capnproto has truly spoiled me in terms of how consistent and feature rich it is for what seems like a "simple" task.
Total Commander seems to be a one-man effort. Similarly, Sublime Editor is two people IIRC?
Wasn't Git written by Linus?
I'm not sure if it truly fits this category, but HarfBuzz[0], maintained primarily by Behdad Esfahbod, comes to mind.
[0] https://harfbuzz.github.io/
Esbuild (it’s open source but much of the work is done by one person)
Nobody's mentioned Touhou yet? Not only does Zun do all the programming, he also does all the graphics, music, and scriptwriting.
There are so many. MIDIBox by Thorsten Klose is great. Open source hardware and software. There are a ton of projects based on it. I am not sure what the level of other contributors are now, but it was mostly or all Thorsten back when I was looking at it 10-15 years ago.
http://midibox.org/
Quentin Zervaas is the creator of the Streaks habit-tracking app (https://streaksapp.com), which I find to be excellent and extremely well thought-out. I’m not sure if he’s still working independently or has a team.
I last used it more than a decade ago, but Pegasus Mail by David Harris was my MUA for more than a decade before that: https://www.pmail.com. Surprisingly it seems to be still alive even today.
https://beta.f1mv.com/ as it's enhanced the experience for F1 for me. Built by a single dev and better than anything F1 management has released as official clients.
Unfortunately it won't run on recent Macs since it's written in 32-bit assembly, so some modifications are needed.
qmail/djbdns written by Dan Bernstein were groundbreaking when released, and are extremely interesting in terms of how to build and design robust software to be deployed in a security-critical hostile environment
I know at this point it must have hundreds of contributors but wasn't Zig mainly built by one guy?
Excellent quality of code and usability...
My very own small Android apps, of course.
GeoFS browser-based flight simulator by by Xavier Tassi
Irfanview
Nirsoft?
I believe Hollow Knight started out as a three person team?
xv image viewer by John Bradley
fvwm by Robert Nation
gwm (generic window manager) by Colas Nahaboo
lilo by Werner Almesberger
vim by Bram Moolenaar