What was the best software that you used during 2022?

Caddy [0] has been an absolute joy to work with. I switched this year from nginx for my sideproject-hosting VPS. Just letting it handle the SSL certs and configuring a static site or a reverse proxied route in literally 3 lines of config is really nice.

I'm planning on adding Authelia [1], Prometheus and Grafana Loki to the mix soon, which should all integrate nicely :)

[0] https://caddyserver.com/ [1] https://www.authelia.com/

- WSL: I had to do some work on windows boxes this years and was pretty impressed I could get Arch running with my usual setup and have extremely easy communication between Windows and the Linux env.

- Buku: Continues to be a fantastic little library for bookmarks in your terminal.

- NNN: A very extendable file browser in the terminal. It's become an easy way to wire up actions to files (like upload this file to a static bucket...etc)

- Pop Shell + Gnome: The perfect balance of "i need configuration" and "i want things to mostly just work well together". It's amazing how far the GNOME ecosystem has improved in the past two years.

- Mastodon: At the end of the day I'm pretty impressed that Mastodon has weathered the migration as well as it has. I can question some of the tech choices, but honestly, it only took me a weekend to learn how to set up and host my own instance on a cloud provider. There was years of work in the background that I just sort of walked into.

- Neovim: Continues to improve past Vim is good ways. It's been fun watching the ecosystem move and get so active over the past couple years.

- Alacritty: A very simple, configurable terminal. It provides everything I need, and nothing I don't.

Stable Diffusion and its derivatives by far.

I have always thought that our digital world should service humanity, meaning I want software that augments my human abilities, I extract value from it vs how things are now where services only exist to monetize human activities.

For example: I want an AI mind that helps me discover and use information while factoring in my personal biases, morals and needs.

I know that reeks of idealism but it is what it is.

Meanwhile, we have stable diffusion which hits close to the mark. One of my hobbies is drawing and painting. I don't have a lot of time to commit to it so I try to be sure of the concept before I work on it. I find this to limit my creativity a lot, I get stymied on an idea "is this worth 40 hours of precious free time?"

With SD I am able to quickly iterate on concepts. Of course, its not giving me exactly what I have in mind but it gets close enough that I either renew inspiration or I see my concept in a new light and move on.

The fact that I can self host, tune and even retrain SD gives is super attractive. I sincerely hope more open source models like SD get released so I can build an personal AI ecosystem that meets my needs.

Also on Windows, mostly.

- Git, for being so versatile, after one learns its basic internal model.

- Tortoise Git, for making my day to day job of dealing with branches and merges easier.

- 7zip - my workhorse for compression for many years.

- Visual Studio 2022. Specifically: its debugger, the refactoring support, and its recent intellicode feature, which for me gives better suggestions than Github's Copilot. And its fast C# compiler

- The C# language, for constraining me just so while still allowing me to be expressive and productive. And for having a stable ABI, stellar backwards compatibility, and excellent documentation.

- The C++ language, for allowing me to be expressive as much as I want, while giving the tools to be correct (which do require some self discipline), and allowing me to write very performant code.

- Notepad++ for being simple and fast.

- Godbolt, aka Compiler Explorer. For allowing me to quickly evaluate stuff and see the actual asm.

Each of these also has its bad sides, but I won't go into that, keeping it positive just before the new year :)

Not especially extraordinary, and I'm sure there are tools that are better for other people, but, for my workflow, apple notes has been fantastic.

Any time I think of something cool, see something cool, whatever - I add it / paste it into a long running note I have labeled "Cool stuff." Whenever I'm bored, I just read through it and usually find something I didn't have time to dig into more thoroughly before. Or, if I'm working on something and looking for something I noted earlier, again, just search for it in that note. The note also syncs automatically between my phone and computer, so requires zero mental bandwidth on my end for setup etc.

Can't understate enough how valuable this becomes over time, specific to the individual writing it. If I shared my note, it would probably be completely useless to the rest of humanity, but for me, it is a productivity 100x.

edit: typo

For 2022, Obsidian on iOS and Mac (with PDF Expert for annotating PDFs in my vault).

For all time, Preview.app on macOS, possibly the single greatest advantage Mac has over Windows.

Windows Terminal has completely changed how I view Windows. Open a console and ssh to anywhere. Open a WSL console and use Linux on the desktop. Hard to believe.

If I could only pick one, it would be Dynalist [0]. I know it's essentially just another webapp (with mobile apps) for writing lists, but for some reason is the first one I actually found myself using, both at work and personally.

I primarily use it to keep work logs, write high-level system designs, remember dinner recipes - or generally anything valuable or useful that can be expressed in list form.

[0] https://dynalist.io/

To Good To Go app. I get to pick up cheap food that would otherwise get trashed.

https://toogoodtogo.com/en-us/

Excalidraw

https://excalidraw.com/

Text editing: Geany + snippets calling various scripts & programs I wrote

Entertainment: VLC followed by QMMP

File management: PCManFM, especially for viewing PDF covers at beautiful sizes

Phone: QuickEdit+, Spiro (fidget toy), SmallBASIC (+AppImages on desktop), OsmAnd- (hiking)

Terminal:

find . -iname "blah" (find a file quickly. find in general was amazing to me in 2022, with -mtime, -size, and other flags)

du -hs (how big is the stuff in this folder? Ah, that big.)

lsblk (figure out what your linux system named your usb disk, for example)

mc + sshfs (for moving files around the LAN mostly; midnight commander's progress bars are very nice)

Scripting: ABS-lang.org

Overall I give my awards to `find`, ABS, QuickEdit+, PCManFM, VLC, and Geany.

The GoLand IDE. Makes Go programming a breeze. Can't imagine programming in Go without it. Also used some of the other Intellij IDE's, including Intellij Idea (Java) and WebStorm (JavaScript). All very nice products.

Blender.

Learned to use it over the year and its UI is so much better than 3ds max, which is particularly impressive for an open source project; they are usually weak in things that require cohesive overall vision.

- TablePlus is a great database client.. It is simple but powerful. Can connect to any rdbms out there, fast and stable. (https://tableplus.com)

- Kaleidoscope is the best diff / merge gui app I have used. (https://kaleidoscope.app)

- Shottr, macOS screenshot app with a snipping tool for OCR.

- NetNewsWire, FOSS macOS and iOS feed reader.

- topgrade, CLI to upgrade most things on my systems.

- Forklift, macOS client for file management, especially good with remote sources (SFTP, FTP, Google Drive, S3…)

- Raycast, Spotlight replacement with better unit conversion and plugins

- Infuse, macOS/iOS video player, can connect to remote sources like Jellyfin and Plex.

I just discovered the amazing Ultorg (https://www.ultorg.com/), the commercial version of some serious research done at MIT.

It's easily the most powerful database explorer/reporting system ever built.

(No connection with the author except enthusiasm over what he's built.)

Just - https://just.systems/man/en/

Simple, readable task runner. It has replaced make and rake in a lot of use cases.

Home Assistant, ZigBee2MQTT, OpenWrt and Grafana+Prometheus as they are plugged into my home automation system.

I have many complaints and issues with this stack but it's the only thing I had this year that brought me the pure joy of hacking and just making something work because it was cool and fun.

Not bogged down with bullshit deadlines and requirements. No advertising, subscriptions or monetization nonsense. No messed up approval processes or limits of what is allowed. No new workflows or another half baked product trying to convince me it will make my life easier when in fact it actually does the opposite but hey I get charged for the privilege and oh yeah everything is locked up in the cloud and slow as molasses.

None of that. Just some cool software doing fun things and being wildly successful at it.

- WSLtty (https://github.com/mintty/wsltty)

Better than the Windows Terminal for WSL. You can work in tmux without getting strange visual artifacts, and allows you to view sixel graphics in console! Fair warning though, I only installed it about two weeks ago, so I can't claim I've battle-tested it though.

ETA: The one thing it doesn't allow me to do is change font programmatically, which would allow me to switch fonts to render non-english characters. I'm very much a beginner in terminals, so if anyone has a solution to this, I would love to hear it.

I work with a lot of Terraform and introducing process controls around Terraform using https://spacelift.io has been a massive win for me and my team.

Raycast. Apart from being a great launcher, it has replaced the need for a dedicated window manager and clipboard app.

Tried Zed editor and never switched back to Sublime. Looking forward to see Zed on more platforms! Currently, it’s just macOS.

https://zed.dev/

The best new software that I picked up and used this year was Alfred, the spotlight replacement on macOS.

I spent a few hours spread across the initial few weeks focusing on defining workflows and it has been such a breeze. It has been a huge productivity boost overall.

Another software I’d add is syncthing for syncing files between my devices. 2022 was also the year I completely removed my reliance on Dropbox for inter-syncing between all my devices and syncthing has been instrumental for that.

Zotero. Once they added PDF annotation and improved their iOS app, became a great way for organizing and annotating PDF documents in a single place.

It has to be Signal. Most people I talk to frequently had the app downloaded already so switching to it was very easy. Now Signal is my go-to messaging app. I still keep a few others for the people I communicate with less frequently but Signal is by far the texting app I use the most. The iOS and Mac apps feel great. No complaints at all.

- helix https://helix-editor.com/

- cleanshot x https://cleanshot.com/

- btm https://github.com/ClementTsang/bottom

- Mastodon

- Fedilab, a Mastodon client for Android

- Traefik, a featureful HTTP reverse proxy, including dynamic configuration in Kubernetes or docker-on-host.

Logic Pro. I’ve been writing a ton of music, and it does a really great job of letting me do it without being in my way.

Orion - The WebKit-based browser from Kagi.com. It has all the benefits of Safari, but allows Chrome and Firefox extensions (and uBlock origin runs in it). Paired with their paid, ad-free search, it makes the web usable again.

one combination I came to really love this year is babashka (https://github.com/babashka/babashka) + websocat (https://github.com/vi/websocat). I wrote about a method of live web programming with this pair at https://github.com/whacked/cow/blob/main/a%20technique%20for...

babashka isn't strictly necessary; you can also pipe plain text, but pushing hiccup expressions to the browser DOM from the REPL with instant feedback has opened a new world of interactive programming for me.

> Sublime Merge

I'm a longtime (10+ years) user of Sublime Text (on macOS) personally and professionally, and I wish I could agree.

I've tried multiple times to get behind Sublime Merge, but the interface is just so complex and convoluted compared to tools like Tower, resolving a merge conflict on GitHub, or these days even using GitHub Desktop.

I don't love any of these git or merge tool alternatives the way I do Sublime Text, but it's always baffled me how different Sublime Merge feels in comparison. To me, Sublime Text looks and feels streamlined and well-designed, while Sublime Merge looks like someone in an Intro to Java GUIs class made while they were first learning about toolbars and widgets and just started spewing GUI components everywhere. It's never actually made merge resolutions easier than the alternatives to me.

https://cachyos.org/

Arch based kde distro that has has an easy installer, looks really pretty and is well put togther and has packages compiled for the latest instruction set so I get a 15-30% performance boost without having to change hardware. Just a really well put together linux distro with all the benefits of arch (bleeding edge and most things available as packages or in the aur), plus a few extras.

Nothing interesting but:

Work:

- QGIS for its accessibility, print layout, and plugin ecosystem

- Notepad++ & DBeaver for being reliable daily tools at work

- The VS Code Jupyter notebook plugin

Grad school:

- Typora for simplicity and elegant note-taking in markup, though I've only been on the trail version.

- SumatraPDF for lightweight book reading on the computer (I read ~30 books this way this year)

Honorable Mention:

- This tiny, ad free solitaire app that hasn't been updated in 2 years. My go-to for planes and waiting rooms. [0]

[0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/classic-solitaire-klondike/id1...

Home Assistant for self-hosted home automation.

https://www.home-assistant.io/

Jellyfin as a FOSS Plex alternative

https://jellyfin.org

rclone for encrypted cloud storage network mounts.

https://rclone.org

Script-server for self-hosted script execution, including live-editing from mobile devices.

https://github.com/bugy/script-server

Add Tailscale and it all makes for a sweet setup.

Definitely Runcat. It’s the perfect companion for remote code pairing.

https://kyome.io/runcat/index.html?lang=en

- Workflowy https://workflowy.com/

- Sublime Text

- TaskTxt https://tasktxt.com/

Shameless plug for my company Robomotion RPA ( https://www.robomotion.io )

It is a node-red inspired RPA product written entirely in Golang.

Neovim and the whole Lua plugin ecosystem. It's so so good.

Been using vim for 10 years+, converted configs to Lua and modulized everything. Amazing rework on a piece of technology as old as computers.

As a macOS user:

- iTerm2 terminal (https://iterm2.com/)

- Visual Studio Code

- Typora for Markdown notes (https://typora.io/)

- MacPass for password management

CLI:

- Everything developed with bubbletea :)(https://github.com/charmbracelet/bubbletea)

- Homebrew

- jq

(this is the best software I used during 2022, but obviously this is not "new" software: software that also had a first release in 2022).

I used Tailscale to

-Replace Zoom with FaceTime audio + screen sharing

-Prototype APIs totally privately with remote collaborators

-Give tech support to my elderly landlady

-Self host a "Netflix" to friends and family

-Monitor my home security cameras from afar

- Procreate on iPad for drawing - Anki (macOS and iOS) for language study - Forest on iOS for focus timer / pomodoro app

…the same things I’ve used every other year. They’re all very good apps.

nvi2 [0]: I got to like the simplicity of nvi when installing Void Linux on my laptop, but it had some annoying bugs that made me switch to nvi2. In general, it feels like `good' software; powerful enough by virtue of being a 1:1 vi clone with a few crucial improvements (multibyte, multi-undo, etc.), but simple enough to hack on if I miss some feature. Though no autocomplete means it's not suitable for more verbose languages, like Java.

QuickJS [1]: qjscalc is my go-to scientific calculator, and qjs my go-to JavaScript implementation for simple programs. The C interface is very nice to use, too. All in all, it feels very much like a "complete" engine, even if not quite as fast as one with JIT.

w3m [2]: Somewhat lacking as a web browser, but a very good pager. Would take it over less any day. Also has the best table display of any text-mode browser, supports inline images, and is rather extensible.

Wine [3]: It's gotten so good that I no longer have to dual boot Windows. Still not perfect, but definitely on my list of "good software".

[0]: https://github.com/lichray/nvi2

[1]: https://bellard.org/quickjs/

[2]: https://github.com/tats/w3m

[3]: https://www.winehq.org/

It has been an AI year for me:

- ChatGPT

- Stable Diffusion

- MidJourney

- Dall.e 2

- GitHub Copilot / OpenAI Codex

- The new Tesla Copilot

FitBod [0]

Completely changed my approach to the gym. I used to never know what to do when I arrived in the morning. I’d usually do some cardio and then go shower.

FitBod now has me consistently doing hour-long workouts 4 days a week. I’ve used equipment I’ve never touched before and seen fantastic improvements in my fitness and strength.

[0] https://fitbod.app.link/NjdyRdaMesb (referral link for 6 free workouts)

Figma

Davinci Resolve

Retouch4me photoshop plugins - finally acceptable skin auto retouching

Lightroom

Ruby

Ruby on Rails, stimulusJS, Hotwired

html5, contemporary css, scss, slim-lang (once you go slim you won’t go back)

SublimeText, acejump, text pastry

iOS, MacOS, Notes

Alfred - everything at the tips of your fingers

CraftCMS, Twig

GoodReader, ProCreate on iPad

iTerm2, zsh

Basecamp - collaboration, everything find-able and accounted for

Obsidian

dbdiagram.io - quickly imagine your database

DataGrip - database ide from jetbrains

Postgresql

Heroku

Middlemanapp - static site generator

Git, GitHub, sublimemerge

1password

Dropbox

Pocket - save articles for later, open them on your eink e-reader.

Overdrive - borrow library books and transfer them to your ereader.

Logitech vertical mouse, Wacom intuos, Apple iPad with pencil, 2022 MacBook Pro, appletv, boox nova ereader.

https://link.horse

Linkhorse has been great for organizing my links. Like my own personal bibliography.

I began taking GIS seriously this year so QGIS, GDAL, Shapely + GEOS, PostGIS & Valhalla.

As for video editing, I'm using DiVinci Resolve for all my videos now.

MAME with the Pegasus front-end.

I was able to pull together a retrogaming system and show it off to my neighbors kids. And the availablity of controllers like the 8BitDo Pro 2 allow for a fully functional system.

https://www.mamedev.org/

https://pegasus-frontend.org/

Still Karabiner (https://wiki.nikiv.dev/macOS/apps/karabiner/) and VSCode (https://wiki.nikiv.dev/text-editors/vs-code/).

- iTerm

- Ideavim (amazing emulator, emulates vim in IntelliJ; I love it)

- IntelliJ features (quick lists, GitHub integration, etc)

- Raycast (What I would want Mac Spotlight to be)

- QMK (Open Source Firmware for keyboards. Allows you to program the hell out of your keyboard, amazing tool. As an example I’ve placed all commonly used vim symbols in very comfortable positions on the home row via the Layers feature)

-Gnome on Ubuntu -VSCode & GitHub Copilot

Trello remained the most useful and core part of my work and self-management, though it's starting to look a little too busy on the front end.

https://trello.com/

I'd agree with Windows Terminal with WSL2/Ubuntu and VSCode.

- Neovim: so good and so fast, it is almost criminal. The pace of the ecosystem ATM is very good.

- iTerm: More comfortable than running tmux, still a lot of control over tabs and splits.

- LaunchBar: Old, but still like it more than Alfred.

- Clippy: this is how compiler errors should look like in 202*.

Copilot for me. Writing Go and React in VSCode w/ Copilot has been an awesome experience.

JetBrains CLion every year and every day

Operating systems: macOS and FreeBSD. Also every year and every day

interested in Windows Sandbox - couple of use cases? AFAIK, it's useful when trying things out, while I'm not doing this much - pretty stable requirements/software selection - but may be I miss some trick here.

Simple Mobile Tools - https://www.simplemobiletools.com/ A collection of open source applications for Android.

No frills, easy to use, fast and reliable.

Qubes OS [0], my daily driver. Gives incredible feeling of security, organization and control over your computer. Can't recommend enough.

[0] https://qubes-os.org

NixOS, QEMU, Obsidian, Tailscale, and Reader by Readwise are up there for me!

Finally decided to splurge on a Davinci Resolve license. I'm an amateur at best, but rendering on the GPU is very nice.

Besides, Wireguard and Tailscale do not cease to amaze me.

Slack. Every day I pray my company won't switch to MS Teams. For chatting Slack is simply the the best user experience.

Anything from JetBrains... truly awesome products.

Emacs.

Native compilation, eglot, and getting sensible defaults.

VCV Rack - open source virtual eurorack studio

https://vcvrack.com/

Microsoft To Do. Simple, free, cloud synced. Makes sharing grocery shopping and errands much easier.

Funkwhale [1]

[1]: https://funkwhale.audio/

NotePlan 3 - https://noteplan.co

WSL and VS Code are delightful.

- Obsidian + Anki - Caddy -

Jellyfin

Probably the DAW Ableton and the nvim extension for VS Code.

relax/hobby

- Stable Diffusion

- Procreate

- TikTok

- Plex

Hardware with Apps that increased Productivity

- Logitech MX Keys Mini & Mx Master 3S Mouse using Logi Options+ software with the Flow option

- StreamDeck and its software for physical keys with macros

- StabilityAi/Stable Diffusion

- bigscience/bloom

- OpenAi/Whisper

- Affinity Photo

- DTrace (surprisingly on Windows)

JavaScript.

Unreal Engine, Figma

Doom Emacs

Figma, Blender, Telegram.

Wireguard, Signal, ZFS.

NetNewsWire on iOS

I thought Windows Sandbox would be more useful but over time I just haven't fired it up... I kind of forgot about it. I do use Hyper-V to run Debian constantly.

Every Windows user should run WizTree on their personal machines at least once a year to get a lightning fast report on disk space usage. Cleanup should start wih the largest items or you're just wasting your time! (Apparently "rclone ncdu" is helpful for cloud storage...) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33893815#33894842

Also Windows only: Bitvise SSH Server is now free for personal use. I've been using it for over a decade since it offered simple multifactor authentication before OpenSSH (https://security.stackexchange.com/q/17931) and can block most bots by client identifier (libssh) -- OpenSSH does not yet support this so no one bothers spoofing. It has a nice UI and PowerShell CLI for settings, including TOTP auth (no U2F yet) and IP address allow lists. Their free-as-in-beer SSH client is a great GUI for port forwarding (especially RDP), SFTP, etc. but I dislike its terminal's clipboard handling.

A Mac-only recommendation: https://gitup.co a GPL3 Git client with a unique UI and undo. I've cloned repos on a Mac just for another perspective that helped me understand what was happening. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27579701&p=2#27580659

If you use Pandora, check out the pianobar cli. For Twitch, there is Chatty (+streamlink cli & VLC).

I set up signal-cli with a Google Voice number but haven't continued down the path of automating Signal.

I tried Tailscale 2021-ish but it seemed a bit early, couldn't log out yet (run as a service). So I went with ZeroTier. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30284754

I use the Brave browser on the desktop and Firefox Focus on mobile. I would like Brave better if it supported containers, but no browser does that for Incognito mode so I just use other browsers for multiple simultaneous temporary disassociated sessions.

I set up a Valheim server on the Oracle Cloud "always free" tier following this guide (running 32-bit & 64-bit x86 on 64-bit arm): https://old.reddit.com/r/valheim/comments/s1os21/create_your... along with a shell script to filter the logs and announce logins on Discord.

Dyalog APL.