
Ask HN: What's the best piece of software you use every day? - thdrdt
After &quot;What&#x27;s the worst piece of software you use every day?&quot; I am now very curious what the best software is we can learn from.
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vegetablepotpie
git

It lets you keep track of your file history in one place. You can share that
history with others in many ways. Use it as a collaborative tool. It allows
everyone to work independently and combine their code on their own terms. It’s
really hard to mess it up and put it in a bad state, almost everything can be
undone without consequences. You can set up central repos on shared drives or
servers, or choose to forgo central repos all together. It works fine using
simple paradigms but can scale to be as sophisticated as you need. It’s easy
to set up and doesn’t get in the way of your other work.

~~~
XCSme
Funny how git was also mentioned a lot in the "worst piece of software"
thread.

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christiansakai
Vim/vi. Was forced to use the bare bones because of some company’s machine
config and yes we debug in production lmao. I slowly discover that I don’t
need fancy configs.

~~~
shoulder47834
How do you get line numbers in Vi? I tried once but `:set number` put them
inside the file!

~~~
jdan222
I am pretty sure you have to add it to the configuration file for line numbers
to display each time you open a new file.

~~~
ShinTakuya
So the "rc" in vimrc means "run commands". And while the term gets abused, by
and large what's in vimrc can just be run directly by yourself in vim without
a file. All the config file really does is run a list of commands on startup.

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Mekantis
rupa/z

Being able to type something like "z ab g f" to reach a fairly deeply nested
directory is almost akin to magic. I absolutely hate cd'ing everywhere, and
often I'm cd'ing between the same couple of directories for a number of
projects, so I feel like it helps retain my sanity. I've also written scripts
to take advantage of it, such as a cp clone that doesn't require an immediate
target. So I can cp a file (or number of files, or a directory), z-jump to a
different directory and paste it there instead of laboriously typing out all
the directory paths. I love it.

~~~
darkteflon
Just wanted to say thanks for this rec. Tried it this morning and I'm smitten.
Adding this to my (tiny) set of non-standard tools, alongside ripgrep, fzf and
fd-find.

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SirensOfTitan
For work and productivity: emacs and org mode.

For personal life: Marvin for reading (infinite auto scroll, custom fonts are
awesome), Insight Timer as a simple meditation timer.

~~~
Jtsummers
Emacs is probably the only piece of software I've used nearly daily
(regardless of OS) for the past 20 years, and org-mode for the past 10 or so.
Really good pieces of software.

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iron0013
Rstudio. It was clearly made by people who come from a data analysis and
statistical programming background, rather than traditional programming.
Having started with R in college, I just took it for granted that every IDE
would be as straightforward and easy to use as Rstudio, getting out of the way
and allowing the user to get shit done. I sadly learned otherwise! In
particular, there is no environment of equivalently high quality in the Python
for data analysis ecosystem. Nothing even comes close.

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artembugara
Elasticsearch. When using it as a text search engine. Love it.

~~~
darkteflon
What do you like about it specifically?

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forgotmypw17
I'm a huge fan of qutebrowser.

It feels years ahead of any other competition in just about every sense.

Runner-up: IntelliJ. I haven't written a line of Java in several years, but I
still use it.

Probably goes without saying, but I don't know how I would survive without
GNU/POSIX. Many blessings to all involved.

~~~
The-Compiler
Yay! :)

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gtaylor
I'm not an engineer anymore so this is going to be pretty unexciting: Google
Docs (and Sheets). Or really any product that offers the same rock solid
realtime collaborative experience.

I'm not always excited to open them up. Docs and Sheets don't seem to be
seeing much visible improvement over the last few years. But in my org they're
the way we build consensus, make decisions, track, document, discuss, and
more. It's easy for me to complain about them, but they are both so effective
and valuable (to me).

As an engineer I probably would have said JetBrains IDEs. I find myself
spending less time thinking about tooling, syntax, the standard library,
finding/moving/renaming things, and more time thinking about what I'm
building.

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smabie
Probably Emacs. Also I like OpenBSD.

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kvark
IrfanView - by far the fastest, most convenient and powerful image viewer.

WinAMP 2.95 - simple and effective music player

TotalCommander - brings file management on the next level, very smooth and
robust.

All of these are from 10-15 years in the past, unfortunately

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yftsui
iMessage and FaceTime.

Simple, works, keep me connected with people who are relevant.

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immago
Recently - linear app.

Long term - Vi/vim as many have mentioned already. Well, more specifically
it's bindings in vscode, but still. It's just so powerful :)

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XCSme
VSCode - Opens quickly, no freezes, regular updates, huge ecosystem

I am also pretty satisfied with YouTube (premium, so no ads): high quality
videos that load fast, clean UI, very good recommendations, huge community.

I would also like to say Twitch, but their platform is a lot more buggy than
YouTube, quality not that great and it's harder to find good
content/streamers.

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terandle
YouTube, supports delivering 8k video on a massive scale and a recommendation
engine that is probably too good.

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Barrin92
emacs although that's probably not a surprising answer. Something a little
less known I found recently was 'Kitty Terminal', which is very snappy gpu
based emulator, makes more of a difference than I thought it would. Also
ripgrep and fish shell, and i3.

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jeffrallen
Emacs

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dorkwood
Houdini. It has so many uses: procedural generation of 3D geometry, as a
learning tool for understanding matrix transformations, as an FX and
simulation tool. It's the most powerful piece of software I've ever used. It
feels like it's from the future.

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thdrdt
I like Blender a lot. Especially since v2.8.

How you can rearrange the interface. The shortcuts. How fast it is.

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originalvichy
Apollo for Reddit on iOS. It checks boxes for

\- good feature set \- active development \- native UI elements

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sanjeetsuhag
Telegram - It's fast, syncs perfectly across all platforms and the UX is
perhaps the most intuitive I've ever seen in a messaging app. Great search
features, an API for analytics/bots, large file sharing limits...

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jis
emacs -- Well, heck its emacs!

git -- Change history is your friend, and you get out what you put in (hashes
verify data against corruption)

tinc -- There Is No Cabal: Mesh VPN lets you build a VPN across diverse
environments including different clouds.

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WheelsAtLarge
Amazon's Alexa on my Echo. I use it everyday as soon as I wake up and when I
go to sleep and through out the the day. It's quirky but for the most part it
works. Pretty amazing...

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noema
IntelliJ / Android Studio / other JetBrains IDEs. Maybe a little too resource
intensive, but the UX and context-sensitive intellisense is light-years ahead
of the competition.

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tmaly
MS Teams. It has really helped my team as we work from home. It is a lot
easier to stay in contact and conduct group meetings.

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stratified
PyCharm / IntelliJ - I used to be a die hard vim user but these products just
blew my mind. Worth every penny and then some!

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g8oz
* ublock origin

* chromium devtools

* vs code

* bitvise ssh for Windows

* Sumatra PDF reader for Windows

* moon+ reader for android (epub reader)

* F-stop Gallery for Android (Picture library management)

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forgotmypw17
I just thought of another one: XScreensaver.

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joddystreet
PostgreSQL (it just keeps blowing my mind).

Firefox.

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badinsie
sublime text

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polyacr
Zsh

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ha-ckernews
Virtualbox

All-in-one Messenger

eReader Prestigio (Android)

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topicseed
Chrome, VSCODE.

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knaik94
Daum Potplayer

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dave_sid
Ios

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naveen99
Autohotkey

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Shared404
For me personally:

Pop!_OS

Alpine Linux

Firefox

Alacritty

Vim

~~~
tuesday20
How do you find pop os compared to Ubuntu?

~~~
Shared404
For my use case, far superior.

It has basically all of the benefits of Ubuntu, with few of the drawbacks.

The biggest benefits for me personally:

1\. I have a laptop with optimus graphics. Pop played nicely out of the box.

2\. Uses flatpak instead of snap. I prefer native to flatpak, but flatpak to
snap.

3\. Has very little bloat in a default install.

4\. System76 has been consistently moving in the right direction UI wise.

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realpanzer
My brain

K-Meleon browser

MiXplorer

Block This

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yadco
My web browser

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billconan
vscode

sublime

photoshop

krita

~~~
rogual
I'm conflicted about Photoshop. It is, at its core, an absolutely fantastic
piece of software, but as time goes on it slowly accrues this accretion disc
of bullshit: dialogs implemented with web-views, video tooltips, mandatory
sign-in, Adobe service tie-ins, and shortly before I stopped using it, I
started seeing honest-to-god popup ads inside the UI.

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toomuchtodo
MacOS. Everything “just works” (iCloud, FaceTime, unlock with Apple Watch,
multiple wide screen monitors) and I can still drop into a terminal whenever
necessary to run something I wouldn’t run in a container.

