What are your favorite tools?

I use many of the one you’ve listed.

In addition:

SublimeMerge and Sublime Text.

Alfred.

Iterm2.

Datagrip.

Ruby and Ruby on Rails. I’ve built multiple long-lived apps as a single dev. The productivity this stacks gives is incomparable and the joy of writing Ruby - irreplaceable.

CSS - elegant and powerful when used as intended.

fzf

Davinci resolve

Photoshop and Lightroom.

Figma is incredible. Finally an editor which defaults to what I’m trying to accomplish.

Breadboarding diagrams (see rjs’ work).

Basecamp is irreplaceable for collaboration and makes any other tool feel like unnecessary agony.

Things for personal gtd style todo lists.

Google sheets and google docs are more than good enough. My 82 year old father wrote a 500 page book using google docs and went over editing suggestions with the book editor - without major hiccups.

SCSS is still great and useful.

Utopia.fyi for fluid typography and spacing.

Fujifilm xpro3 with 23mm f1.4 lens brought me back the joy of photography.

Tmux, vim, Linux like every other nerd in this thread. aider is my favorite recent piece of software. Some scripts I made do a lot of work for me, although they're very simple.

Also my 14" band saw, which I tuned most of the vibration out of. And some screwdrivers that belonged to my grandfather. And a beautiful set of blue point wrenches that belonged to someone else's grandfather. A cheap set of wrenches my mom got me for Christmas in 1999. And my old Coleman gas lantern. Those are my favorite tools that I use at every opportunity.

I built a home file server for windows games that are directly playable from the server. I did not want people hunting for the binaries though as they can be buried. I found WinLaunch to point to each binary and display an icon to an interface like iOS. It’s great.

https://winlaunch.org/

Otherwise I like vim, Bodhi Linux, vs code, typescript, yD Firefox add on for YouTube, ffmpeg, samba runs my file server

TCL/Tk and Lazarus for programming.

Trinity for a desktop GUI and file manager.

VirtualBox for multiple testing environments.

VNC and SSH for managing remote machines.

VLC for playing videos.

Speedcrunch for calculations. Imagine if your calculator worked like a text editor... it solved problems I didn't even realize I had.

Right now I don't have a preferred text editor, having finally weaned myself off the one I learned back in the mid-1980s, that had to run in an emulator on modern machines. I've been switching between several GUI and text mode editors, but I haven't found anything I like enough to stay with.

A thumbdrive with Puppy Linux, which is my go-to "unhork the gestupfed computer" Swiss-Army-tool. There are other distributions specialized for that task, but Puppy has managed to do the job so far.

A Raspberry Pi with a carefully curated Pi Hole, so I don't have to configure multiple hosts files and web browsers across multiple real and virtual machines. The Web is a miserable experience without adblocking.

The first thing I install on a new system is a window manager because I absolutely cannot function without one. It's muscle memory at this point. I had used XMonad in the past, but I decided to write my own using the Penrose library (it's not as hard as it sounds), mostly because I find Rust easier to understand than Haskell.

I use alacritty as my terminal. I use Firefox as my browser, and I could go on indefinitely about the different tools I use on the web, but I won't.

For writing code I use VS Code. The Remote SSH extension is a must. Then, I'll have language-specific extensions installed and a theme extension.

I'll add that I use Obsidian as my knowledge base.

My 3 go-to app this year, after I give up a phone for a tablet, are MoonReader, Paperpile and Google Colab. MoonReader for book reading (lots of great textbooks this year on data science), Paperpile as reference manager (and pretty nifty way to share too), and Colab for coding on the go.

The other essential tools are a good fountain pen, a good notebook and a bottle of water.

https://obsidian.md/ mainly for personal notes and journaling

vscode, datagrip, dash for offline docs, tmux, docker, spotify, aldente for better battery management, hey for http perf testing, k9s, terraform, go, rust, dotnet, node, bun, python and some tools around each runtime, drawio, pkgx, raycast, obsidian, synology drive for backups to my nas

24v Electric drill Ifixit repair kit Dewalt Socket wrench set Starter fluid ;)

Chrome extension My Notes for taking notes:

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/my-notes/lkeeogfaie...

Notion for daily task management Copilot for all AI tasks

A custom code generator. It generates 90+% of the code I would otherwise have to write by hand at work.

SeaMonkey for irc/mail/web browsing, dokuwiki for personal notes, emacs for code editing.

VSCode for personal projects.

Jetbrain editors for work.

Caffeine for MacOS.

Wechat for taking screenshots.

Emacs, or vim. GNU/Linux. Docker/podman. Most of my tools are replaceable, but these are the ones I won't do without.

In general, as I become more and more experienced in the art of programming computers, the fewer tools I use. Only apprentice craftsmen obsess over their hammers.

fzf is my newest addition. A fuzzyfinder for your commandline.

(Yes, I know I'm late to the party).

Search after files, history or navigate directories.

one of the first things i do is install caffeine(stops screensaver/locking), sizeup(window manager).

Linux, bash, awk, sed, curl and jq.

- Debian GNU/Linux

- GNU Emacs

- Steel Bank Common Lisp (SBCL)

- Mozilla Firefox

Does Nova support Copilot yet?

- tmux

- emacs

- zsh + oh-my-zsh

Vim, zsh, and dotnet

obsidian for my notes

- helix editor

- tmux

- bash

helix editor

A few that I use the most:

- awk

- bat

- fd

- fzf

- git

- jq

- lazygit

- neovim

- parallel (GNU Parallel)

- ripgrep

- spotify-tui

- tldr

- tmux

- vifm

- yadm

- zoxide

- zsh

- sed