What is one software product that boosted your productivity?

Espanso (https://espanso.org/) and a custom ~/.Xmodmap to easily type accented characters and mathematical symbols quickly.

Mostly _removing_ big slow general purpose tools that were _in the way_ of my productivity, and using self hosted server with vim and my own PHP tools. It didn’t multiply my effiency, it just made room for things to flow naturally.

When I made a game, the most efficient ”tool” was a page I made with direct links to CC0-only search for graphical & sound assets, so I never had to look for a license and just grab the file. And lexica.art for generating characters, and then ”Pixelator” for turning them to pixel art. It didn’t only speed up the process of adding 200 character sprites, it made it even possible in the first place.

Golang's toolchain.

Compiling, building, embedding assets, strongest stdlib under the sun, golang.org/x, standard codestyle and formatting, standard unit tests, standard benchmarks and CI/CD.

Best toolchain I've ever used, beats all other programming language ecosystems in my opinion.

1. Switching to Go for programming

2. Password manager

3. My brother's Commandline Completion tool https://github.com/zerocorebeta/Option-K

I used to forget most of the commandline.

4. Visual Studio Code

5. Tailscale (used to wait time with ssh -D and socks5 using proxychains shadowsocks.

Problem is they can be blocked by ISP or require lot more configuration than tailscale and are hard to debug when they don't work.

6 about LLLms in coding, I am still waiting for something like cursor but opensource so that I can extend it for my usecase.

In current state cursor and likes are heavily limiting for my workflow.

Jetbrains IDEs. The expand selection feature alone has probably saved me days of my time, back when I had to do a lot of Python and yaml. The refactoring tools are also very solid.

Org mode. Excellent to manage my personal knowledge, finances, tasks and appointments.

All in plain text, with the advantages that this brings to the table.

Dash https://kapeli.com/dash Mac app. A native standardised search and browsing interface for the documentation of almost every programming language out there (and in some cases, their third-party libraries too).

Coming from a statically typed background, having Sorbet types in a Ruby/Rails monolithic codebase helps immensely.

I can think of 3.5 ways my productivity is limited:

1. how fast I think: understand problems/come up with solutions - not a bottleneck as I juggle things waiting on (3)

2. how fast I write - this is the least impactful, if you do it right there usually isn't that much to write. Having dependable refactoring tools for a Ruby/Rails codebase would be killer.

3. how fast I

  a. test - this has been getting slower
  b. ship - the slowest by far, time cycling in reviews, CI/CD pipeline

That is to say don't over-optimize your tools in areas that don't impact the slower parts of your flow.

Back when I used Windows at work, AutoHotKey. It let me automate all the mundane stuff I had to do on my desktop and tie it to various keyboard shortcuts. I eventually also made a GUI, so I could tie it to a spare mouse button. I would highlight something, hit the button on my mouse, then click what I wanted to do with the highlighted text. I also had various text expansions, and alternate paste methods to allow to paste plain text or to type the clipboard, to get around things that blocked paste (or remote server consoles). I shared it with my team, so I made a configuration GUI and everything, where users could pick their own shortcuts if they didn't like my defaults, and also set their path to putty and various other tools if they didn't happen to be installed the same as mine.

When I moved to macOS I missed it a lot. I searched for something similar and it was hard to find something like it. There's AppleScript, but it always feels like it's dying a slow death. I also came across HammerSpoon, which I tried for a while, but I never went as deep as I did with AHK. I also had some really weird issues that seemed to go away when I got rid of HS.

I haven't touched the code in at least 5 or 6 years, and I see a lot of people on Windows still using the AHK scripts I wrote.

For me it's Sublime Text, it's so hackable with python as a scripting language for its plugins. If you can't find a plugin that suits your need among the tons available, you can write it quite easily. It's a bit difficult to grasp everything you can do in the first place, but once you can see all the possibilities that's game changer.

Why not Visual Studio Code ? Because when I discovered ST, vs code didn't exist and it is waaay less bloated because of not being Electron, based on C++ for the core and python for override.

The memory usage is contained and does not blow to your face when you have 4, 5, 6 instances with some plugins because of some weird memory leak. The average memory per instance is less than 100 Mb.

It gets the job done real good for a lot of small tasks. For tasks that require for example big work on code, I use the JetBrains suite that are excellent.

Committing to Apple’s Reminders instead of continuing to fritz with various to-do apps. Reminders was good enough and I havent thought about switching in a couple of years now.

For hardware+software, the Remarkable 2 tablet changed my life. I was never a handwritten notes person and was never even an organized person. I read some book on organization and was like, “I should try being organized.”

Bought the Remarkable 2 with the logic that if I spent $500 on the thing and never used it, I’d feel like a moron.

I’ve been using it daily for about 3 years now and just upgraded to the Pro and love it even more.

Beyond Compare (by Scooter Software)

Briefy.ai

As a media studies major with lots of readings, I use it to summarize PDFs and quickly reference the source. It’s also great for class—when my prof asks questions, I can ask Briefy for answers, which helps with participation. Briefy will only answer based on the materials input, so it's much better than randomly searching online with Google. Plus, it summarizes YouTube videos directly on the site, which I find super convenient.

Lazygit (https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit)

I know there are probably many GUI git tools and editor integrations which make using git fast and easy but I've been mostly using the CLI. Lazygit makes doing things like cherry picking really easy and once you learn the shortcuts it's pretty fast to use.

Custom tooling I wrote:

1. Focus session time tracker with talking clock counting down every n minutes.

2. Activity monitor and alerter. Tracks active window and title every minute and alerts if more than n minutes outside whitelisted websites. Alert immediately if blacklisted website (dns blocking is painful. Sometimes you want to access it for a few minutes).

A bunch of more things but those are the two most effective ones.

Vim and Emacs’s concept of detangling the text buffer from the windows that display them. It feels like working on a real desk, because you can have the files you want displayed at once and move fluidly from one configuration to the next.

expect. It’s basically an old cli tool for automating cli tasks that are (intentionally?) resistant to automation. It’s a pole for vaulting over chesterton’s fence so don’t blow your toes off but god it’s saved me hours and hours

Can people who mention golang explain? I tried it briefly but just thought of it same as for any other lang - it becomes useful once you do a deep dive, so what makes it stand out?

vi/vim and in the second step that it doesn't matter how fast I can edit something.

Most of the time I make mistakes out of ignorance or lack of experience. Unfortunately, there is no tool for this. But it's good to think about how (technical) things work in everyday life and to take a look at the theory in a dry way This can be books, wikipedia or listen to what pepole from the the peak days of software development says (something before 2005)

Key binding for `if err != nil {` when programming in Go.

ChatGPT

Visual Studio is huge productivity booster if you do C# or maybe even C++

GitHub Desktop is really useful.

GitHub itself is huge!

HTTPie GUI, simple and elegant, api testing

vi(m-motion keys in your preferred editor)

Cursor's code editor 1000%

Black Screen (BlackScreen1.com)

tmux

IDE’s

Just one?

1Password