
Ask HN: Examples of reliable software you enjoy using - gtirloni
There is so much broken software out there that sometimes it can feel a bit overwhelming and depressing if you have been &#x27;yak shaving&#x27; for hours&#x2F;days&#x2F;months on end.<p>It&#x27;s not rare to forget what you were doing after layers are layers of workarounds and fixes you have to do before actually doing the thing you wanted in the first place.<p>I&#x27;m wondering if people would have examples of good software they enjoy using and trust them to work properly so others can have some hope or feel better about it overall.<p>A similar question was asked 8 years ago (&quot;What software makes you happy?&quot; -- https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=128714) but I would like to focus on the reliability aspect of software.
======
chubot
Python. To a lesser extent, vim and tmux. ssh/scp.

I used to think bash was on that list... it seems relatively responsive and
predictable. I use it all the time.

But then I realized how often bash has weird issues -- like completion
hanging, or inexplicable inability to complete (this could be due to the
distro though). Or it just seems easy to get it in a bad state by hitting the
wrong keys, or dumping a binary file to the terminal.

And recently I have been looking through the bash source code, and it's a bit
horrifying. The reliability is done by brute force of special cases over
decades, not by good design.

I like the semantics of the shell language, in that it lets me get things done
fast. But I don't like the syntax or the implementation I happen to use. bash
is pretty complete, but not well implemented.

~~~
guitarbill
Agree with the list and bash. I switched to fish because of this and never
looked back.

Although tmux isn't perfect when there's a lot of scrolling output on account
of it being a terminal multiplexer, the only decent replacement I've found is
terminator, which is a terminal emulator. But I hate the terminator key
bindings, and it doesn't have a option for screen/tmux style shortcuts.

~~~
akkartik
What's wrong with tmux scrollbar buffers?

~~~
guitarbill
Nothing. However because tmux is a terminal emulator running in a single
terminal, the whole thing can freeze with loads of output if you don't rate
limit [1]. My understanding (and experience) is that terminator emulates
several terminals, so one pane freezing doesn't affect the others. I still
prefer tmux, but I do find the different approaches interesting.

[1] [https://superuser.com/questions/417556/is-there-any-way-
to-p...](https://superuser.com/questions/417556/is-there-any-way-to-prevent-
tmux-freezing-when-lots-of-text-is-output-to-the-ter)

------
aerovistae
VLC. There have been so many times I thought "man it would be great if there
were this crazy hypothetical feature in my media player" only to find out it's
like a stable long-established feature that's a keypress away from activation
after a quick google search or glance at a dropdown menu.

~~~
audleman
Or for folks like me: I just want to play my video files no fuss, no muss.
Something other major media players seem to have more trouble with than they
should. But not VLC! 100% of the time it works every time!

~~~
aerovistae
Doesn't matter what filetype it is...it just runs them all, instantly, like
magic. I have never missed Windows Media Player for even a moment.

~~~
rsync
"Doesn't matter what filetype it is...it just runs them all, instantly, like
magic."

Does it play DVD ISO files ?

Can you use the menus, etc. ?

Just curious ... XBMC back in 2004 could do this (navigate and use DVD menus
in a DVD ISO) but then that feature actually went away in the following years,
never to return ...

~~~
antisthenes
> Does it play DVD ISO files ? Can you use the menus, etc. ?

Those are semi-loaded questions. It can and does play .vob files, which is
enough if you actually just want to watch the video, which is VLC's primary
use case.

It is not a full media manager with additional functionality.

~~~
nereus
It does play DVD ISO files. Just drag and drop them in, hit play.

------
SwellJoe
git is so reliable that I forget that reliability used to be a problem in
version control (I've had to reconstruct CVS and Subversion repositories that
got corrupted via various bugs and quirks of the system). It's also pretty
fast.

SQLite is an automatic, and easy, answer. It almost goes without saying at
this point, I guess.

vim is everywhere. I like knowing I can always run it no matter where I am or
what server/VM I'm logged into. That knowledge provides comfort.

go. I don't actually love the language, but the solidity of it and it's
ecosystem is really nice. Everything around go has a patina of workmanship
about it; not in a corporate "professional" sense, but more like a well-made
wood plane or something.

Perl. Again, I don't entirely love the language, but the incredible backward
compatibility (we have ~20 year old code that still runs unmodified!), the
rarity of bugs (especially given how big the surface area of a huge language
like Perl is), and the overall culture of testing, leads to a pretty nice
experience. I feel like I can count on it, even if I might get grumpy at some
of the quirks.

Python, for different reasons from Perl. I can come back to Python after years
away and find that it's maybe even a simpler (but not less powerful) Python
than I used a decade ago. I just poked at Python 3 for the first time a few
weeks ago, and found it immediately readable and intuitive. The language is
more reliably "Pythonic" every year.

OpenSSH. Always works. Always trustworthy.

Google Inbox. I want to host my own mail (and do, for my business), but
nothing is as good as Inbox.

~~~
plaguuuuuu
>Inbox

I've had a heap of issues with not receiving notifications for emails that
were miscategorised.. or just never popped up on my phone... I check gmail on
my desktop every few days just to see if I missed something.

~~~
SwellJoe
Now, y'all have me paranoid that I'm missing mail. I don't _think_ I have
been...buy maybe so.

And, now that you mention it, GMail _is_ faster, and I can chew through mail
at a much, much faster pace. But, the smarts built into Inbox means I can
safely ignore a lot more mail (about half ends up in Promos and Finance and
Social categories; all ignorable until I'm looking for something specific or
expecting something), which is maybe a worthwhile tradeoff. I don't have to go
as fast if I only have half as much mail to think about.

------
cel1ne
Postgresql. Such a marvel of reliability and good design. All features just
logically and consistently work with each other.

~~~
lowry
It's so oraclish an ingresish in the way it treats the command line monkeys...

~~~
throwanem
There's a reason for that:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Stonebraker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Stonebraker)

~~~
ThatGeoGuy
This is actually the first time I've seen POSTGRES referred to as named for
being post-Ingres. This wiki page is full of quite interesting tidbits of
history on DB research, thanks.

~~~
atdt
Great interview with Stonebraker from 2013: [http://www.se-
radio.net/2013/12/episode-199-michael-stonebra...](http://www.se-
radio.net/2013/12/episode-199-michael-stonebraker/)

------
lucb1e
Windows: "Everything" (that's the name). A lightweight, fast and advanced (if
you want it) file search engine.

Linux: Most tools of course, as they are made with the Unix philosophy, but
these days I'm most surprised by print drivers for Linux. Where in Windows the
printer is always magically offline or slow, from Linux I can print and scan
very reliably.

Vim is also worth learning, it makes editing much more... relaxed I guess. No
longer have to move your mouse to the arrow keys or even the mouse/touchpad to
scroll or select. It also helps that it exists on nearly every Unix system
you'll ever connect to.

And finally I recently discovered LaTeX, which could be described as markdown
on steroids. A little more difficult to get into, but it's easy to create
professional documents and have a plain text source (which works nicely with
git and other unix tools). If you have trouble getting started in LaTeX, ask
me (comment here or see my profile), I also didn't know how to get started for
a while.

Edit: Another Windows tool is Notepad++. I have not seen the likes in Linux
when it comes to robustness. It has all the basics you need for handling any
sort of file that involves manual editing, binary or plain text. If there is
no binary editor available for your file of choice, or if you just want to
have a quick peak, Notepad++ will do just fine. Beware of really huge files,
although I have seen it handle some big things on low RAM machines too.

~~~
barsonme
If you've any latex pointers I'd appreciate it :)

I used latex to write a paper for the first time last week, and while i
thoroughly enjoyed it, i'm fairly confident there were lots of things I
could've done better.

~~~
Analemma_
IME, the most important key to Latex is setting up your environment so you can
have a fast turnaround time between writing some markup and seeing what it
looks like (essentially, getting a "Latex REPL"). There are a bunch of
different ways to do this, you'll have to pick what's best for you. On Macs I
tend to use Sublime Text (substitute with your editor of choice) with a macro
to invoke pdfTeX; on Windows I use TeXstudio which has live preview support.
There are other ways; do whatever's best for you.

The second most important thing I've found for latex is setting up macros. In
TextExpander/AHK I have several dozen Latex macros set up, like

    
    
      \tbl3 => \begin{tabular}{ l | c | r }
                 a & b & c \\
               \end{tabular}
    

With a bunch of variants for different styles (full borders, etc.), column
numbers, etc. Once your macros have become muscle memory, writing Latex speeds
up considerably.

~~~
majewsky
On Linux, I do the following:

    
    
      while inotifywait *.tex; do sleep 0.2 && pdflatex main.tex && killall -HUP mupdf; done
    

This will, when a .tex file is written, wait a moment until all disk IO is
done, then run pdflatex and trigger a reload in my PDF viewer (some also do
that automatically when the .pdf file is changed).

The only annoyance is that big .tex files (esp. Beamer presentations) may take
long to compile, which interrupts the flow. But in that case, it helps to
distribute the sources into multiple files and to comment out the source files
that are not needed at the moment.

~~~
lucb1e
inotifywait is fantastic, used it lots of times. Good idea to use it for TeX
too!

------
mangeletti
Alfred ([https://www.alfredapp.com](https://www.alfredapp.com))

Alfred is absolutely the most game-changing app I've ever been introduced to.
I only use it for finding files, searching, opening a page by direct URL,
defining words, calculator, translation (via Google), launching apps, and
quickly jumping to apps that are already open. It's probably saved me hundreds
of hours in clicking around, etc.

I've never purchased the paid version (been using since 2011), but I support
them by searching Amazon (results are via affiliate link) when I buy things.

~~~
mbreedlove
I've installed Alfred before but just kept using Spotlight. I never saw why it
amazes so many people.

What does it do that Spotlight can't?

~~~
vurrpurr
there is a lot of features in Alfred, but my absolute favorite is the
workflows [1]

I use Alfred workflow with dash [2], so i can type "go fmt.Println" into
alfred, and jump straight to the man-page.

I also use Alfred workflow with SnippetsLab [3], to open my personal notes in
a similar fashion.

    
    
        1: https://www.alfredapp.com/help/workflows/
        2: https://kapeli.com/dash

Dash is also an absolutely wonderful app, for having all your coding docs on-
the-go. Since I am often without internet access, Dash lets me continue
working. It even has offline stack exchange if that rocks your boat.

    
    
        3: https://www.renfei.org/snippets-lab/

SnippetsLab provides a very much awesome way of organizing all your snippets
of code / notes, etc.

This way of navigating means I have to use the trackpad pretty infrequently.

My only complaint about these tools, is that I'm stuck in Windows at work :-(

For another software I use daily and can no longer live without, it would be
tmux.

~~~
adt2bt
Would you mind sharing your Alfred dash workflow?

Edit: Found it. For those interested, you need the Alfred Powerpack and Dash
installed. Go to Dash Preferences -> Integration & click 'Alfred'.

------
SchizoDuckie
Total Commander. I've been using it since the first versions that came out for
Windows 3.1 and it provided a smooth Windows transition from Norton Commander
for DOS.

The changelog goes back all the way to 2002, but it's been there for waaay
longer. ( [http://ghisler.com/whatsnew.htm](http://ghisler.com/whatsnew.htm) )

I hope he continues to make a healthy income from it. It's litterally the best
piece of shareware in the world in my eyes, that i've happily bought a license
for.

Super Awesome Footnote: I just found out that you can still get the version
6.5, which is every bit as stable as v8.51a, built for Windows 3.1 :
[http://www.ghisler.com/wcmd16.htm](http://www.ghisler.com/wcmd16.htm)

~~~
artimaeis
I've seen this program come up a few times in the last couple of years - but
every time I look at it I can't see a use case that sticks out. I've looked
through the FAQ and installed it and I just can't seem to get why I'd use that
opposed to Windows Explorer, 7Zip, and WinSCP.

Can you share why you find it useful? Thanks!

~~~
SchizoDuckie
I guess it only becomes a real power tool if you learn to navigate and harness
the power of the 2 side-by-side panels by keyboard.

Long story short, let me sum up some of my favorite features:

    
    
        - Tab to switch between panels
        - Navigate with arrow keys through the files list 
          (very handy if you have it on 'brief' view, especially since you can walk 
          through whole directories with left/right arrow until you hit the '..')
        - CTRL + F1/ CTRL+F2 to select drive for the left or right panel
        - Using any type of packer (zip,arj,7z, etc) as a directory by just hitting 
          enter on it to see the files inside, view them, extract, add and remove
        - CTRL + Pagedown to navigate even into some packaged files that aren't 
          normally accessible as folders (like .msi)
        - F-Keys with a clear indicator at the bottom to move and copy files, insert 
          to select and move to the next file
        - F3 for an all you can eat file viewer that can switch to different view modes
          like HEX by pressing 1,2,3,4 and doesn't bork on large files
        - F4 launches your favorite editor
        - Hit space on a directory to compute the full size recursively 
        - ALT+F7 for find-in-files and fast file search
        - The most powerful multi-rename tool you could ever wish for in the file menu
        - Built-In FTP Client (CTRL + F) with a favorite list, queue list 
          and resume from queue list.
        - Download any random file (with resume and queue) using CTRL+N (HTTP/FTP)
        - Plugin support to enhance the thing with stuff like SFTP/FTPS support, 
          which you can open from the 'network' drive
        - Background copy for most operations (in it's own thread, and with pause)
        - Double click the file path at the top of the panel for a popup hotlist where
          you can add favorite jump-to spots
        - CTRL + Arrow key opposite to the current panel opens the folder under the 
          cursor in the opposite panel
        - CTRL + UP arrow on a folder opens it in a new tab (which you can even lock to
          persist them or have handy nav points)
        - Numpad + to select files in a folder according to a wildcard
        - Numpad * inverts currrent selection or selects all
        - Pack some files using CTRL + F5 on a selection
    

There's just so much goodness that this list could go on and on for way too
long. Double Commander comes close on Linux, but there's no thing like
TotalCMD for me when i'm on Windows.

~~~
ZenoArrow
Just out of interest, what are your thoughts on Directory Opus?

[https://www.gpsoft.com.au/](https://www.gpsoft.com.au/)

I've not used Total Commander or Directory Opus much, but I figured DOpus was
something you might be interested in.

~~~
SchizoDuckie
I have no thoughts on DOpus other than: it looks horrible GUI-wise

------
d0lph
Sublime Text

Files auto save, so a crash, or even accidental close will not cause you to
lose anything. Also handles massive files, which is nice. On top of being a
nice, very configurable code editor,

~~~
billconan
I like sublime text too. but the most recent update seems to have an issue.
sometimes when opening a file on linux, I won't see any content rendered
unless I resize the sublime text window.

~~~
zeta0134
I have that issue with some other apps as well. It's particularly noticeable
for me with Terminal windows, which will lose their contents if I drag them to
another monitor. I'm not entirely sure that's Sublime Text, I think it might
be something between the window manager and the GPU drivers.

------
rev_bird
Ancestry.com, both its web app and iPhone app. This is a little different than
most other responses in the thread, but I'm absolutely astounded how smoothly
it works -- sure, you end up with some weird entries (husband/wife get tagged
as the opposite in a marriage record or something), but the more I use
Ancestry the more I'm convinced it's the best piece of software I've ever
used. I'd break down my amazement into a few categories:

\--Discovery. The search function has some weird responses sometimes, but I'm
astounded how frequently the "Hints" feature finds documents about relatives
that I'd never have found on my own. Ancestry's search has a huge
understanding of which names might be mixed up with others -- I once found a
census record from the late 19th century that had both a husband AND wife's
name incorrectly tagged, but Ancestry found it anyway.

\--Intuitive interface. After some initial confusion on the mobile app, it's
been smooth sailing. Not only can you pull facts out of documents and attach
them to relatives, but Ancestry preserves the "citations" so you can go back
and figure out, "hm, how do I know so-and-so's birthday?" or "which facts did
I already pull out of this record?" You can also link one record to multiple
people in one action.

\--An unimaginably broad corpus of documents. This one isn't really the
software, I guess, but the amount of data Ancestry has access to is
unbelievable. I figured out my great-grandmother had a child as a teenager
(with a man who was not my great-grandfather) that nobody in my family ever
talked about. I found the full text of a 300-year-old will from my sixth
great-grandfather _while I was sitting on my toilet_.

Anyway, it's good.

------
thedudemabry
Synergy. It's a keyboard and mouse sharing client/server application that runs
on every platform I use.

I don't know if better alternatives exist because it has just been rock-solid
for the last 12 years that I've been using it. I've used it in multi-monitor
and machine desktop setups (e.g. an Apple laptop paired with a Windows desktop
and linux desktop for enterprisey cubicle development), as well as to let me
drive my gaming and media PC from my couch using an Apple laptop.

I was a bit bummed that the pricing model went from free-as-in-beer to free-
as-in-speech, but couldn't be happier to pay $10 for a lifetime license.

I feel it belongs in this thread because even when I've neglected to upgrade
various machines, or upgraded OSs on machines with the application installed,
it just continues to hum along. I can count on one hand the number of times
I've had to deal with any problems in any capacity.

~~~
icholy
Eh, maybe it's gotten better since the last time I used it, but I found it to
be pretty unreliable.

~~~
chriswarbo
Agreed. I started using it recently, after previously using x2x, and I keep
hitting
[https://github.com/symless/synergy/issues/9](https://github.com/symless/synergy/issues/9)
:(

~~~
pritambaral
Interestingly, I switched from synergy to a self-made ssh+x2x wrapper. Two
reasons:

1\. Ease of install; and 2\. Backwards compatibility (Ubuntu 14.04's synergy
just couldn't work with Arch's)

------
PaulHoule
IntelliJ Idea is head and shoulders better than many other IDEs, particularly
Eclipse in the reliability department.

~~~
gshx
Care to give some examples how? For me, Eclipse has remained very stable.
Maybe we are using them for different languages and/or things.

~~~
PaulHoule
I worked with Eclipse for a few years and found it was a constant source of
stress, refusing to stay synchronized with maven, crashing, having to restart
it, etc.

~~~
stillworks
TL;DR +1 for IntelliJ

I was hating maven, until I started using IntelliJ. I don't remember ever
Eclipse going to zero error count on a maven project whereas the project would
just compile if maven was used outside of Eclipse.

IntelliJ just works. FTW it has Eclipse key-mappings as well.

------
rsoto
Firefox. And it has been for years, I remember when I downloaded a zip file
with the Phoenix browser, you had to manually enable flash, and even with such
an early version, it was magic. If I remember correctly, it even had tabs.

Then the add-ons and extensions, which enabled you to do something entirelly
different or bring back an old behaviour. I still use oldbar since the
«awesome bar» might be too awesome for me. Also, the tabs groups, if you are
like me, a hoarder of to-read articles, and leaving things for later, you can
have a clean slate without losing those tabs.

And if you want to look behind the scenes, you have about:config in which you
can bring behind some of the old features.

And it's everything open source! I know Firefox has suffered a lot because
it's seen as slow, but I open Firefox once a day and never have complained
about it.

------
anoonmoose
This might sound nuts, but if you're using LabVIEW to control National
Instruments hardware, and you don't write bad code, you've got a surprisingly
fast and powerful system available at your hands. You can measure, drive,
control, whatever verb for whatever piece of equipment you're using, with
surprising speed, accuracy, and reliability.

It's a pretty expensive stack for doing some pretty particular weird stuff but
I kind of love using it. I would at least say that the prices for the hardware
aren't too much higher than the competition, and the software side is way way
better than the competition. I have never met a person not employed by NI who
liked NI software AND equipment as much as I do. Honestly, I don't think I've
ever talked to someone who used it the way I do, though...

Swear I wasn't paid to write this. Figured people might have written this
stuff off a long time ago and I wanted to toss some respect its way.

~~~
striking
Goodness gracious, I love LabVIEW. It's so gratifying to be able to watch the
data flow from VI to VI, checking what arguments are passed. I used it for
FIRST Robotics, and writing code with LabVIEW was a dream compared to its
hobbled Java-1.3-like counterpart.

Interfaces are great, in terms of putting together "75% tools" (ones that
aren't perfect or polished, but get the job done). Being able to pull all
sorts of data from an active robot and relay it to the users in an easy-to-
design interface was awesome.

I still wish there were a good open-source version of some parts of LabVIEW.

(I also was not paid to write this. I just loved the dev environment. I never
looked at data quite the same way again.)

------
vblord
Beyond Compare. An amazing/cheap file comparison tool. -
[http://www.scootersoftware.com](http://www.scootersoftware.com)

~~~
vmorgulis
It's a very good tool.

Meld is the equivalent under Linux.

~~~
therealmarv
Meld is not even close to BeyondCompare. I would also say kdiff3 is better
when looking at all my Python merge conflicts in the past. Nevertheless
BeyondCompare is on another level when looking at extensibility.

------
Yetanfou
The Linux kernel! It runs just about everywhere from dishwasher to modem to
thermostat to PC to mainframe. One size fits all? Well, not if you want to
optimize to the last bit, but within a very wide spectrum it actually does.

------
gkst
Apache server. I know it is not a hip choice, but I've used it for more than
15 years to serve static and dynamic websites. I've changed tech stacks from
perl to php to python used different data bases and Apache always just worked.

~~~
noir_lord
Same and I've used it for a similar period, I look at alternatives but since
apache has never let me down, is ridiculously stable and I know it well I've
simply never seen a reason to leave.

------
CodeSalad
As a MS stack dev:

Chocolatey ([https://chocolatey.org/](https://chocolatey.org/))

VsVim for Visual Studio
([https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/59ca71b3-a4a3...](https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/59ca71b3-a4a3-46ca-8fe1-0e90e3f79329))

Everything ([https://www.voidtools.com/](https://www.voidtools.com/))

Wox ([http://www.getwox.com/](http://www.getwox.com/))

and of course PowerShell

~~~
workingspaceaC
Mhhh, VsVim is probably the worst implementation of Vim in an IDE in my
opinion.

Vrapper for Eclipse, does the job, the Vim plugin in Intellij sucks as well
but still better than VsVim.

The Xcode version is ok.

Few versions ago, there was that nasty bug in VsVim where it would throw an
exception if you save an unedited file ...

------
tombrossman
Hands-down winner for me is Radio Tray. Simple, works as advertised, and it's
running pretty much 100% of the time my computer is on. It has never crashed.
Very lightweight too, and the config file is simple enough that a quick glance
at it in a text editor is all you need to make customizations faster than
using the GUI preferences.

A very close second is the ext4 filesystem, but I don't know if this qualifies
as software. I've done all kind of stupid things when formatting or unplugging
drives and have never lost data. Full-disk encryption on everything and never
a problem. SO reliable. I was doing a full backup to two separate drives at
once, one external and one SATA internal. The power went out and I wasn't
using a UPS. When the power came back on, everything was still fine but I was
worried about data corruption so I plugged in yet another, my last good
external drive with a known good copy of everything to compare against. Then
the power went out again! I didn't even shout or curse, that's how mad I was.
No data loss though, everything resumed from mid-backup and happily continued.

------
virmundi
RabbitMQ. It just works. We're operating with in the normal use case for it.
We turn it on, transfer 50k or so messages a day, then forget about. The
memory is fairly low, CPU is low and constant. The connections for month or
year long clients stay open.

~~~
darkr
I'm actually a fan of rabbitMQ generally, but I'm not sure I'd put it in the
category of notoriously reliable software. It can throw away acknowledged
writes (afaik [https://aphyr.com/posts/315-jepsen-
rabbitmq](https://aphyr.com/posts/315-jepsen-rabbitmq) has still not been
fully fixed).

50k messages/day is pretty low throughout and under that load it should plod
through just fine.

Under much higher loads than that (10's - 100's millions of messages day) I've
seen it die in a pretty ungraceful manner. At that scale, Kafka is a good
candidate.

~~~
busterarm
Under those high loads I've seen every single MQ fall over like a house of
cards. At lighter loads you can get the job done with other tools that scale
but with a little bit more pain. Leaves me super skeptical about them on the
whole.

~~~
cespare
We push on the order of ~a billion messages / day into one of our Kafka
clusters without having too much scaling difficulty.

~~~
jstanier
Indeed. We have completely replaced all queues with Kafka. In fact, I'm not
sure what it would take for us to even try anything else at this point.

------
repeek
1Password on Mac - phenomenal UX, all around joy to use

Not as pleased with the Windows version, but it's serviceable

~~~
blakeyrat
Starting from the top, I think you're the first person to mention user
experience.

Man, this topic has done nothing but remind me how far I am outside the
"software development mainstream". Vim? Git? Are there seriously that many
developers who _enjoy_ using such unusable software?

~~~
bryondowd
I never got my head around using Vim rather than an IDE, but I can say I
genuinely enjoy git. It's very easy to get a lot of value out of it without
needing to learn the esoteric details by just keeping to a simple workflow
planned out by someone who understands it better. Of course, it was the first
version tracking system I'd worked with, so I have nothing to compare it to.
It just made me incredibly happy after working on a very large system with no
version tracking beyond a boatload of comments referencing a date and
ticket/project.

~~~
blakeyrat
I guess different strokes.

For me, Git is the worst software I've been compelled to use since Lotus
Notes. I think it's terrible. I would never use it if I didn't absolutely have
to as a condition of employment.

~~~
bryondowd
Interesting. I wonder if it's a usage difference. A hammer can be a terrible
tool if you try to put in screws with it. It works best when the workflow is
designed around it and the user only needs to remember a handful of commands
to do specific tasks.

------
aserafini
Reaper DAW. Tiny executable, rock-solid reliability, low RAM and CPU usage,
effortlessly configurable. It's closed source so it's just a gut feel but it
gives the impression of being 'well made' under the hood.

I call it my 'Vim of audio'. It was written by the creator of Winamp.

~~~
tomc1985
Reaper was written by the Winamp people? No wonder!

I love Reaper too, it's a bitch to figure out how to use for ITB production
though

~~~
SwellJoe
It is pretty focused on multitrack recording, rather than on being a
sequencer. So, ITB production is probably better served by other tools (I use
Renoise and Fruity Loops, mostly, both of which suck for multitrack recording;
lots of folks like Ableton Live). Reaper has a sequencer, but if what you want
is to compose ITB or the remix with loops, there are better tools.

But, if you're recording live instruments and mixing and mastering the
resulting multitrack recording, Reaper really is among the best in its class,
and comparable to tools costing many times more.

------
conception
Trying not to pick fan favorites/well knowns -

SecureCRT - SSH and more client (win)

Quicksilver - OSX launcher

Pathfinder - OSX finder replacement

Notepad++ - Win text editor

Gawor's LDAP Browser - still my favorite (Java)

Cog - OSX Music player (ala winamp)

GCalTookit - Doing Google Calendar Magic (Java)

Plex + ShowRSS + Catch - Netflix but better

Synology - Their NAS platform is pretty amazing. You can do just about
anything with it.

Workflowy - Bulleted List Magic (web)

Xee - Simple and effective image browser (osx)

YNAB Classic - If you don't budget, you should. If you do, you should check
out YNAB!

NFSManager - OSX NFS Manager

All of these apps do what they do well and I've never had any issues with
them.

~~~
KeepFlying
I love that you suggested YNAB here but I have one significant problem with it
that doesn't have a consistently good workaround.

Reimbursements.

When I m out with friends and the restaurant doesn't split the bill I'll often
cover it then get paid back with cash or PayPal. YNAB doesn't seem to handle
this very well.

Then wirh longer term reimbursements it gets worse. Either you forget that you
are owed or you float the debt.

I still recommend YNAB. but that specific problem means it's not on my
"reliable" list.

~~~
pantaloons
Split the transaction in YNAB, send your part to the correct category
"Dining", and itemize owed amounts per person into another category "Loaned
Money". It's easy to track if "Loaned Money" has a positive balance, and you
don't screw up the budget for your Dining category.

------
mikestew
In the vein of not "shaving yaks", my list is software that, when something
goes wrong, it's almost always my fault. I don't care that it works well, but
that it works consistently and predictably. Sadly, that's a rare trait based
on some of the tools I have to work with daily. On to the list:

 _vim_ \- going on, what, thirty years of use and it rarely surprises me.

 _bash_ \- same thing. The only surprise is my own ignorance of it after so
many years.

 _SQLite_ \- so small, so useful, and so reliable for what it is.

I guess that ended up being the list a lot of others posted. Which ought to
say something for the products mentioned.

~~~
nojvek
I really wish there was a Json oriented db like sqlite. I really like making
underscore like queries.
db('x').table('y').getAll(prop:true).sortBy('propB').limit(100)

Or may be there is and I don't know.

~~~
majewsky
Shouldn't be too hard to translate that syntax into SQL. I actually did
something similar in my last team, a simple query language to expose to admins
etc. as an API. For example:

    
    
      VirtualMachines.with(os == "linux" and alerts > 0)

------
happyslobro
Vagrant, Ansible. I'm slowly reducing our scattered flock of precious little
snowflake servers to nice, boring, version controlled configs. Being able to
sleep for 8 hours every night is glorious; I will never take that for granted,
for the rest of my life.

First I SSH into local VMs to prototype a minimal cluster. Then once I'm done
making mistakes, I write out the playbook. Spin up some EC2s, add them to the
inventory, and deploy.

Reading through a Git history of playbook changes beats the hell out of
searching for an email thread from a sysadmin who no longer works with us. I
guess Git is the real hero here, I keep forgetting that there was a time
before git. Those were dark times.

------
sbecker
CircleCI ([https://circleci.com/](https://circleci.com/))

I add this to every new project. Best cloud-based continuous integration
platform I've used so far. Sane intelligent defaults, many projects start
building out of the box. You can easily link it to Slack (another piece of
reliable software) and start getting continuous feedback that your project is
working correctly / is getting deployed - as it is being built.

~~~
donatj
I've become a big fan of Drone CI. Open source, Docker powered, written in Go.
Been using it for a couple years. The current .4.x branch has some kinks but
it's technically still beta.

------
mrgreenfur
Omnigraffle is the software that originally convinced me to switch from
windows to mac. I love it so much. Great features, simple UI that doesn't
fiddle too much version to version and it basically never crashes on me.

~~~
j2bax
Omniplan is indispensable for me as a project manager. I just wish there was
something online as easy/fast to use with support for multiple project
managers/projects.

~~~
brightball
Nice to see somebody else that uses it. I use it for all of my personal
organization.

------
agentultra
awk, grep, sed, and these days I add jq to my standard tool belt. I also
really enjoy fish as my shell language of choice. Languages, runtimes, etc
come and go but these programs remain as useful as they were 19 years ago when
I first learned about them.

~~~
quantumhobbit
I used sed today to complete a "large story" in a single command. Felt like a
badass.

The email to the product owner was more work than the "coding".

~~~
mtrn
> I used sed today to complete a "large story" in a single command.

Great, I sometimes do that, too. Downside is that your patience level for
"enterprise architecture" goes way down.

------
scottlocklin
Nobody has mentioned screen. This is unacceptable! screen is extremely
reliable and useful.

I'd like to say emacs, but it's not really that "reliable" in that it often
goes crazy and eats up a CPU, and I must maintain separate .emacs files for
slightly different computers and vintages of emacs. It does work very well
though.

~~~
jjfine
Someone said tmux above.

------
subpixel
Private Internet Access. I've been a paying customer for years and use this
VPN service to watch sports and tv programming that simply aren't available
where I live.

It was during the Olympics a while back that I thought "there must be a place
where I can watch every contest, on demand" and it turned out that place was a
website in another country.

------
carlesfe
Nethack. It was one of my first games on Linux (circa 1999) and I've been
replaying it since then. Infinite replayability, lots of fun, still haven't
found the Amulet.

------
warpech
OneNote. Works for me so much better than Evernote. Excellent cross-platform
sync

~~~
Artemis2
OneNote on Mac is pretty slow, I find the editing features somewhat lacking.

~~~
softawre
what do you use instead?

~~~
Artemis2
Still OneNote, it's the one that sucks least. I'm contemplating moving to
iCloud Notes though, the new formatting features are neat.

------
blt
Ableton Live, a music creation program. Its data recovery has never once
failed me. Those moments when I needed to use data recovery were caused by
unreliable plugins, not Live itself.

~~~
jimothyhalpert7
I love how accurate the proposals for missing samples is.

------
dvirsky
1\. Go and its toolchain and standard library. Just an awesome piece (or
collection of pieces) of thoughtful and stable engineering.

2\. Redis. Nuff said.

3\. Gnome. Yes yes, don't laugh. Gnome 3's latest versions are very stable and
work very well.

------
paxunix
/bin/true

Without fail, it has always done exactly what I wanted it to do. Simple.
Solid. Reliable.

~~~
majewsky
Also /bin/false. Its manpage describes too many of my weekends:

    
    
      false - do nothing, unsuccessfully

~~~
stevekemp
I have a shell-script in my sysadmin-tools repository called `maybe` which
sometimes is /bin/true, and sometimes is /bin/false.

Keeps me on my toes ;)

------
falcolas
From the desktop, most of my development toolkit: bash, vim, git, etc.

On the server side of things: nginx, haproxy, redis, memcached, cron,
logrotate, Linux

And controversially (probably since I've learned their quirks): MySQL, Nagios.

They all just... work. I use these tools to set up a server, and after
configured, the VM usually goes down before they do.

On the flip side of things, tools I have to use and highly resent their lack
of reliability: collectd, Docker, Safari/IE/Firefox/Chrome, OSX.

~~~
donatj
I'd say give MariaDB a try. It does everything MySQL does, fully compatibly
without the guilt of supporting Oracle.

~~~
falcolas
Using MySQL does not support Oracle, unless you buy their support packages. If
anything, it's a cost center to them.

That said, I do prefer the PerconaDB packages myself, but that's because they
are a pure superset of the core MySQL, and improvements to MySQL are
improvements to PerconaDB.

------
kieranajp
Trello. Occasionally, on spotty cellular connections, the sync messes up, but
that's rare. Overall, it's a great-looking app, super simple to grok and use,
and saves me tons of cognitive load every day.

------
HeyLaughingBoy
This morning on my way to work, when I needed to merge with traffic quickly, I
got the revs on my 350Z up to about 5,000 RPM then dropped the clutch and hung
on for the ride.

My engine management firmware has never failed me.

------
gglitch
MOC. Music on Console. I've been using it forever with no issues of any kind.
It's immediate, it's lightweight, it never fails, it works with my files in my
hierarchies, it has all the important functions mapped to individual keys.
It's brilliant. My wife calls it "nerd mode," which obviously makes it even
more appealing.

~~~
brotherjerky
I've been using cmus for a while, which I've been pretty happy with. Anything
I'm missing with moc?

~~~
gglitch
Looks comparable. Moc's interface may be simpler. Moc starts in server mode so
you can quit the interface and keep listening, though frankly I don't think
that's as big a deal as it used to be.

------
BruceEel
Glad to see you folks coming up with many examples. For me it's more like a
journey of constant sorrow, i'm hardly put coming up even with _one_ example,
but maybe:

\- übertime on iOS = i _hate_ time tracking, this rock solid app makes it
bearable.

\- Brief (under DOSBox) just to remind myself that good, reliable, general-
purpose text editors did exist at some point...

~~~
vram22
Wow, Brief. I used it, years ago. Very fast [1] and good text editor [2]. A
few years back, in Boston, I was introduced to the person who wrote it.

[1] It had all kinds of shortcuts for speed. I think I remember one where, if
you pressed an arrow key for a short while, it would move the cursor
(up/down/left/right) at some speed. If you held the key down for longer, it
would guess that you wanted to move longer distances in the file, and move the
cursor faster. May have used low-level assembly language techniques and code
for speed.

[2] A free version of it was available recently. I have it on my PC and use it
sometimes these days.

~~~
BruceEel
So cool you've met him! I believe he also authored SuperDuper on the Mac,
another excellent piece of software I've used in the past.

And yes, the speed and the quality of Brief. Especially the fact it didn't try
to malloc the whole size of the file, rare nowadays. Opening a 40MB file on my
Win98 PC with 8MB of RAM was, essentially, an instantaneous op. Fast forward
to last week and one of the IDE's praised elsewhere in this thread, running on
my corporate Lenovo with 12GB of RAM, warned me against trying to open an 8MB
XML file. Well, at least it warned me, rather than just crashing...

~~~
vram22
Ha, good points ...

------
rdoherty
haproxy and redis are the two that come to mind. Not necessarily because they
make me _happy_ , but they never seem to make me angry or sad. Which with most
infrastructure software is rare.

~~~
Artemis2
Terraform is surprisingly painless for new-ish software.

~~~
toomuchtodo
I've had several occasions it took action in production that weren't in the
plan when we applied. Terraform has not made it to my warm and fuzzy list yet.

------
rmsaksida
There have been lots of Windows and Mac OS replies to this thread, so here's a
few Linux ones for a change:

i3wm. I've experimented with many tiling window managers over the years but
none of them got me to switch. i3, however, is something else. It's extremely
simple, intuitive and easy to configure, and it might give you a small
productivity boost depending on your workflow. For me this is tiling WMs done
right.

Sublime Text 2 and 3. It's rare to find multi-platform desktop software that
works reliably on Linux, and ST does it exceedingly well.

Valgrind. It's a game changer for certain kinds of development.

Ruby. I rarely write scripts, because most of the time I can just run irb and
do everything with an one-liner.

The apt package management tools, or just Linux package management in general.
Whenever I'm forced to use Windows or Mac I realize how fortunate it is that
in Linux we're able to apt-get pretty much anything.

SQuirrel (agnostic SQL client). It's not very well known but it's a solid
client for anything that has a JDBC driver.

Transmission. I find it has the perfect balance of features and simplicity for
a Bittorrent application. It does what it needs to do reliably and doesn't get
in your way.

mplayer/mpv. This has been my media player of choice for what, 15 years? Back
when my PC wasn't fast enough to play some video formats reliably, mplayer
could do it if I killed everything else and used the vesa driver. No other
software could do this.

Comix. This is probably the best software I've ever used for browsing images
sequentially in a folder (not just comic books). The interface is so simple
but has all the features one would need (automatically uncompressing files,
fast thumbnail generation, fit-to-width zooming, etc).

youtube-dl. Give it an URL, it will download media from it, no questions
asked. It's hard to find software that does the right thing as often as
youtube-dl does.

curl. For the same reason as above.

ffmpeg. It can get quite advanced with the command line options but with just
`ffmpeg -i format_in.<ext1> format_out.<ext2>` you can do any video conversion
you can imagine.

And of course, the favorites that have been mentioned here and I couldn't live
without (git, ssh, bash, vim, python, sqlite, postgres, nginx, redis).

~~~
rsync
"youtube-dl. Give it an URL, it will download media from it, no questions
asked. It's hard to find software that does the right thing as often as
youtube-dl does."

I will second that. youtube-dl is like magic. It's too good to be true.

~~~
random778
I'd like an easy-to-use plugin for FF to call youtube-dl.

------
ibudiallo
I feel that sometimes bad is synonymous to "hard to use". A lot of software is
hard to use with a bunch of unfriendly settings. But the more time I spend
trying to figure out, the better I get.

One example is Git. I used to use SVN with a GUI and it was a breeze. When
work required me to use git, I hated it. But after a while of using it, I
stopped doing the 'how do I do svn feature X with git' now I understand it,
and even recommend it to people.

I'm mostly familiar with git on the command line and when work required me to
use it on a gui with visual studio, I first started by complaining about how
complicated it makes it. But after a while, I got used to it.

Approaching a new software is always hard and frustrating in the beginning.
But the more time you spend on it, the more you will tolerate or appreciate
it's short comings and complexity.

~~~
justinlardinois
As someone who's young enough to have never used anything but git, I get the
impression that knowing how a different VCS works makes it hard to learn. Git
was super intuitive when I learned it, I think just because I was never taught
any other way of doing things.

------
tmaly
vim as a text editor has worked consistently for me since 1996.

ssh has worked for me for about the same period of time.

the linux kernel has worked for me for pretty much the same time period.

the software running in my TI-85 calculator has been working for me since
1994.

------
busterarm
OpenBSD, tmux, coreutils, QNX, postgres, Jasc Paint Shop Pro 6 (Yeah, the 16
year old one)

~~~
milcron
Seconding OpenBSD!

------
jeffthespasm
Great thread. Important to keep perspective.

So far the responses seem desktop-centric, but I'm going to throw out a few
web apps that I have a lot of respect for:

\- Instapaper

\- Trello

\- Google Inbox

And, on the desktop side I have to give credit to Garageband and Logic, which
I honestly can't recall having crashed or let me down in recent memory. YMMV.

~~~
daveloyall
What is Logic? I'm having trouble performing a websearch on that one...

~~~
wezm
Logic is professional music production software from Apple:
[https://www.apple.com/logic-pro/](https://www.apple.com/logic-pro/)

------
syphilis2
These are software I love to use. I don't assume they're the best, and if you
have any similar suggestions I'd love to hear them. There's a heavy Windows OS
slant to this list.

SunVox - Sequencer and tracker. The user interface is a big evolution from
more traditional trackers because of how visual it is. This reduces the
barrier to getting started, but it also make using the program simply more
enjoyable.
[http://www.warmplace.ru/soft/sunvox/](http://www.warmplace.ru/soft/sunvox/)

VirtualDub - Video processing. This is my go-to tool for simple video editing.
It remains the quickest and easiest way I know of to make animated GIFs from
video. [http://www.virtualdub.org/](http://www.virtualdub.org/)

HxD - Hex editor. Handles GB scale files very well. [https://mh-
nexus.de/en/hxd/](https://mh-nexus.de/en/hxd/)

Foxit Reader - PDF reader. There's some conflict in the past with bundling
adware installers with the software, I hope that practice is long gone. This
is the most full feature Adobe Reader alternative I know of.
[https://www.foxitsoftware.com/](https://www.foxitsoftware.com/)

Daemon Tools Lite - Virtual disc drive manager. Unfortunately limits to 4
drives. [https://www.daemon-tools.cc/products/dtLite](https://www.daemon-
tools.cc/products/dtLite)

Space Sniffer - Disc space visualization. The clean look and intuitive visual
interface is why I prefer this over WinDirStat.
[http://www.uderzo.it/main_products/space_sniffer/index.html](http://www.uderzo.it/main_products/space_sniffer/index.html)

Other software I use, but which I expect is already well known: 7-Zip,
Audacity, Blender, GIMP, ImgBurn, Inkscape, IntelliJ IDEA, Kodi, Libre Office,
Notepad++, PuTTY, Unreal Engine 4, VLC

~~~
vaibhavsagar
I'd recommend Sumatra PDF and WinCDEmu over Foxit and Daemon Tools.

~~~
syphilis2
I tried out both of these today and I agree.

Sumatra feels snappier than Foxit. It doesn't have as many buttons to
interface with, but there are common keyboard shortcuts for the things I use.
I dislike that the Advanced Options do not have a GUI interface, they're
edited by modifying a text file. WinCDEmu is exactly what I wanted. I also
appreciate that both programs are portable.

------
patrickmay
Scrivener
([http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php](http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php)).
It's a fantastic tool that gets out of your way while writing but still gives
you the ability to operate on larger units from paragraphs to chapters, plus
keep track of all of your research materials.

------
robinhoodexe
\- LaTeX

\- OS X & iOS

\- (GNU) coreutils (sed, cat, grep etc)

\- GNUplot

\- Mathematica

Primary usecase for listed software is studying chemistry. I enjoy using
DALTON (quantum chemistry software) and Dwarf Fortress, but neither is really
_that_ reliable (yet).

~~~
throwanem
Dwarf Fortress is extremely reliable! You can always rely on it to make you
say "... _what?_ "

------
gameofdrones
Dev: Ruby (chruby/ruby-install), node, postgres, redis, elasticsearch, Dash,
MacVim

Console: zsh, iTerm, tmux

Mac apps: Bartender, Hands Off!, Breakaway (a 10.10+ fork), coconutbattery,
iStat Menus, flux, Forecast Bar, TotalFinder, Daisy Disk, VLC (+ trakt-for-
vlc)

~~~
vurrpurr
Ah, i also find flux impossible to live without! But now and then it drops
back to cold blue/white colors in the middle of the night. Like when exiting a
full-screen game or similar. I seem to recall there was talk about such
feature would be integrated into MacOS eventually. I really do hope so! (I am
already using the iPhone Night Shift feature).

So if any Apple dev read this. Please bring this feature to tvOS, too!!! The
cold light of my TV hurts my eyes more than ever these days, thanks to flux
and night shift

------
CPAhem
On Windows:

\- Notepad++ [https://notepad-plus-plus.org](https://notepad-plus-plus.org) is
a superb text editor with support for almost every language and a great number
of advanced and useful features.

\- Everything [http://voidtools.com](http://voidtools.com) is a great local
drive search tool and is blindingly fast.

\- Syncdocs [http://syncdocs.com](http://syncdocs.com) is a better Google
Drive client that supports multiple users and a host of other advanced
features.

~~~
nkg
Notepad++ is a must-have! I have been using Eclipse, Sublime, Atom, Nano and
Visual Studio, but when I just need to edit a file in a hurry, none of them is
as convenient as Notepad++.

------
sbecker
Spectacle ([https://www.spectacleapp.com/](https://www.spectacleapp.com/))
Github:
[https://github.com/eczarny/spectacle](https://github.com/eczarny/spectacle)

Easily resize and arrange windows on a mac - move windows between monitors,
make them full size, or half size, anchor them left / right, etc.

It's open source, it just works, and you'll wish every new Mac you interact
with had it installed by default.

~~~
softawre
Heh. So many times I cmd+alt+left on someone elses mac and it doesn't work and
I just :(

------
davidw
Let's see... stuff I have been using for around 20 years and still use today:

* Emacs

* Postgres

* GCC

* Apache web server

* Linux - although it's big enough in scope that it does have its issues from time to time.

~~~
sedachv
+1 for Emacs. eshell is my main command line and interactive shell, and since
GNU Emacs 24 I have not touched a terminal emulator other than ansi-term.

~~~
Semiapies
I tinker and putter with my emacs setup all the time. It's like a hobby
motorcycle that way...but at any moment, it will still be ready to drive
across the badlands like some old Land Rover.

------
potatolicious
I suspect many are already familiar with this:

Sketch ([https://www.sketchapp.com/](https://www.sketchapp.com/))

It's hard to imagine what life was like before Sketch. You'd work with a UX
designer, who would pass you PNGs and PSDs. There would be designs, and then
there would be a whole 'nother set of files for specifying dimensions, colors,
typefaces, sizing, kerning, and a whole slew of other stuff.

You'd also have to get asset packs from your designer - for mobile devs you'd
get a _large_ set of assets of different resolutions and sizes specced for
different device types.

Need a design change? Be prepared for another mega-sized download from
Dropbox, not to mention the labor intensive task of the designer re-exporting
all of these bits.

Then comes Sketch - good for anything from wireframing to pixel-perfect
designs. All measurements can be taken directly from the app, so you send the
working project file to the engineer and the engineer can take all the
measurements they need. Automatically accounts for dp/px translation.
Automatically exports _all_ relevant sizes/resolutions for assets into their
expected native formats. Color palettes embedded, type parameters embedded.

It's saved us mobile devs _so much time_.

~~~
ferbivore
Is there anything as good for Windows or Linux out there?

------
benologist
All that 'yak shaving' makes me feel like Windows and OS X are poised to
become legacy desktop operating systems. Every other popular consumer
operating system today avoids that stuff somewhat successfully and none of us
wish devops would disappear so we can manually do that stuff again. Security
around traditional desktop operating systems is getting unfunny very fast too.

Some of the software we like is so wasteful too. I think we have a duty at
this point to not be environmentally callous when we write software - manual
updates are a good example, a minute wasted here and there might go unnoticed
but something like Alfred nominated elsewhere in this submission probably adds
up to millions of minutes of computers on and the operators devoted to
watching a few megabytes download for a minute or two every time they update,
probably actual tons of coal frivolously consumed.

I nominate Chrome OS. It has a lot of warts but it removes all of that stuff
and dev mode = Ubuntu alongside Chrome OS. Once the Play Store is integrated
Android apps will fill in some more of the functionality holes.

~~~
donatj
I bark to people all the time about how environmentally unconscious it is to
do something on a million client machines which could have been done _once_ on
the server and cached. Namely client side JavaScript based document
composition. If everyone is going to do the exact same thing, it's just a huge
waste of cycles.

~~~
stuxnet79
Being environmentally unconscious does not increase the average tech company's
bottom-line. But reducing load on their servers does. So from that angle it
makes sense. Interesting perspective though - I've never considered servers
deferring compute tasks to clients to be undesirable. When I first came across
the idea it seemed pretty revolutionary and sensible to me (maybe JS hype
contributed to my viewpoint).

------
egypturnash
Adobe Illustrator.

Which is probably a teetering pile of kludges on top of hacks on top of "quick
fixes". But I've been using it to draw for about fifteen years now, I have a
sixth sense that tells me I'm about to do something that may cause a crash and
makes me hit "save".

Earlier this month I was playing with running it on a Surface, and ultimately
stopped because there is some interaction between Illustrator and the drivers
for the stylus MS used in that device that drops the first half-second of
every pen stroke I make. And I draw fast.

So one of the things beneath it that's so reliable I never even consider it
could be a problem is the tablet drivers I'm used to using with a Wacom tablet
on my Mac.

(There was a lot of other yak-shaving in those weeks, in which I tried to turn
a Windows system into something that wouldn't drive my Mac-using self crazy,
and into a super-portable art tool. Keyboard remappers, Dropbox, tons of
Windows settings... the only part that wasn't pretty unpleasant and tedious to
wrangle was Dropbox.)

------
VSpike
For me, probably dwm. I almost forget that I'm using it, but in a good way. It
has merged with my muscle-memory and never, ever fails.

~~~
codepie
I recently tried some tiling window managers, but the problem with those was
that none of them provided basic default configuration and you have to
configure them from scratch. For example you have to add a plugin for small
things such as a battery indicator. The custom themes were too much bloated
for me. I ended up installing shellshape for gnome. Do you know any tiling
window manager which solves this?

~~~
nanny
I'm fairly certain that i3 comes with a percentage battery indicator by
default. The default config is pretty good (except it uses `jkl;` instead of
`hjkl`, but that's a simple fix).

~~~
OJFord
I think that's part of a different package, i3-status or something, which is
not strictly required but recommended in docs etc. Possibly it's also
installed by default if you just choose 'i3', depending on your package
manager.

~~~
nanny
You're right, turns out Arch's i3 package is a group of packagse: i3-wm,
i3-status, and i3lock (screen locker).

------
javanix
ZFS.

I created a raid-Z zpool in 2010 on FreeBSD and those same bits, with two
different drives, are still floating around intact 6 years later, across
multiple different operating systems.

------
jefe_
Hype Machine, somehow free and ad free. The music aligns with my tastes and
one of the few things that hasn't changed radically since I started using it
back in 2008.

------
eel
Reliable: vim, Microsoft Word/Excel, SQLite, tmux, GNU coreutils, svn

I think most would agree with most of the items, although svn warrants an
explanation. I prefer the paradigm of git, but svn always impresses me with
its ability to handle large repositories and large files out of the box
without falling over.

~~~
reitanqild
Word has destroyed lots of work for my ex-colleagues.

Also it was such a major pain when I had work with two other students on my
final project that I ended up doing the last major changes in Open Office
writer before reopening in Word to finish off the last details. Admittedly I
guess this had a lot to do with how some people don't want to learn how to use
styles but Word didn't help either.

~~~
pdm55
Word was fine for my PhD. My supervisor from those times - now 80 and still
collaborating with scientists from around the world - has written hundreds of
papers with it. I think I can speak for him when I say that over the last 30
years he has found it a far more reliable option than the typewriter and
carbon paper he used to write his own PhD in the 1960s.

I frequently use Excel for calculations. Just the simplest way to check I have
entered the correct numbers.

------
ymse
From the systems/operations side of things..

Ganeti: rock solid clustered virtualization suite.

OpenBSD: no fuzz server/router distro.

Ceph: clustered network storage without tears.

Varnish: covers any HTTP needs. Add haproxy or nginx for HTTPS.

Corosync/Pacemaker: Designed for reliability. Leave VRRP where it belongs (I'm
looking at you keepalived).

xCAT: Little-known but widely used datacenter lifecycle management suite.
Comes with cluster-aware shell, native remote consoles, BMC provisioning,
unattended installs, DNS and much more.

Guix: The package manager for the future.

Things that make me want to tear my eyes out:

Openstack: keeps breaking inexplicably, nightmare to configure and maintain.
Terrible documentation.

Vyatta: Don't even want to talk about it.

RHEL: Upgrades systemd 207->219 in minor release. Backports unstable kernel
patches. Requires EPEL for lots of standard software. RabbitMQ logging has
been broken more than two months (BZ 1324922).

~~~
mwpmaybe
> Corosync/Pacemaker: Designed for reliability. Leave VRRP where it belongs
> (I'm looking at you keepalived).

I just set up a floating IP address for the first time today and went with
keepalived. Why would you recommend Corosync/Pacemaker over keepalived?

~~~
ymse
If you need _just_ the floating IP address, keepalived is fine.

I'm mostly bitter from spending days tracking down a race condition stemming
from its notification scripts, which wasn't really keepaliveds fault per se.
But if you need to start/move/constraint/notify anything along with the IP, or
require sub-second failover, Corosync/Pacemaker is a far better choice.

However due to their complexity, for just a floating IP address, keepalived is
unfortunately the best option for Linux (I usually have OpenBSD in that spot).

~~~
mwpmaybe
Thanks for the explanation. Out of sheer curiosity (and because I run BSD-
based pfSense and FreeNAS at home), how do you handle floating IPs and that
sort of thing on OpenBSD?

~~~
ymse
OpenBSD invented a similar protocol to VRRP called CARP back when VRRP was
patent-encumbered[0].

Configuring it is deceptively simple: just create an interface with ifconfig
called "carpN", specifying VID, password and IP address[1].

You can also make it load-balance traffic between your carp hosts if
desired[2].

Give it a go for your next firewall/server build :)

0:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Address_Redundancy_Prot...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Address_Redundancy_Protocol)

1:
[https://www.openbsd.org/faq/pf/carp.html](https://www.openbsd.org/faq/pf/carp.html)

2: [http://man.openbsd.org/OpenBSD-
current/man4/carp.4](http://man.openbsd.org/OpenBSD-current/man4/carp.4)

------
Draiken
PuTTY

Saved my ass a lot of times when I wasn't around a linux machine.

~~~
lotyrin
Putty has some pretty strange design choices. They coupled the terminal
emulator and the SSH client, and (at least used to have) really bad default
configuration (blue color was unreadable, windows codepage instead of utf-8,
etc. etc.).

Now that Mintty exists, I prefer to use it + openssh on Windows.

~~~
reitanqild
And the config ux is really ...weird.

~~~
brokenmachine
Yeah, the way you load/save sessions in preferences is very strange. I'm
familiar with it now, but I still need to think too much when trying to set up
a session.

------
ryanisnan
Moom window manager. Vimium chrome extension. Sublime Text is more reliable
than Atom, but I do prefer Atom these days. 1Password also always just works.

~~~
zoba
Seconding Moom.

------
ChicagoBoy11
ngrok

I mean, there are so many pain points when it comes to developing hybrid apps
and integrating APIs and all the rest.. and ngrok was a true lifesaver. It's
also always, always, always worked 100% of the time. Every time I fire it up,
I swear I think I'm cheating somehow.

~~~
inconshreveable
<3

------
aerovistae
The original popcorntime.io client was _incredible._ I've never seen design
like that. It worked so unbelievably well, it made me want to watch things
just to use it.

It has since degraded since other developers took over with various forks.

------
bberrry
Notepad++

~~~
Yhippa
I want to say I've been using this for over 15 years now? With all the text
editors out there this one is my favorite use out of the box.

------
dandelion_lover
Qubes OS¹, the only reliable OS of our time.

See also "The Linux Security Circus: On GUI Isolation (2011)" by Joanna
Rutkowska².

¹ [https://www.qubes-os.org/](https://www.qubes-os.org/)

² [https://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.de/2011/04/linux-
securit...](https://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.de/2011/04/linux-security-
circus-on-gui-isolation.html), via
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11229517](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11229517)

~~~
milcron
I prefer OpenBSD to Qubes.

Over the past couple years, my approach has changed from blacklisting what’s
broken, to whitelisting what’s safe. NoScript in the browser, and I’m working
on installing OpenBSD on my Libreboot laptop (tricky because UEFI support is
so new).

OpenBSD has my favorite approach. Continual auditing of the codebase, and
they’re always implementing new 'seatbelts', such as ASLR, W^X, and now
pledge(2). These seatbelts are used liberally – even in programs that you
theoretically shouldn’t need protection from, such as the system-provided
implementation of cat. They aggressively delete dead code, and probably have
the smallest codebase of all modern nix systems. The best code is no code. :)

Theo has some great comments on magical “silver-bullet” thinking about
security. In this case, specifically about the security of VMs (2007, so
pretty dated now):

    
    
        x86 virtualization is about basically placing another nearly full kernel, full
        of new bugs, on top of a nasty x86 architecture which barely has correct page
        protection. Then running your operating system on the other side of this brand
        new pile of shit.
    
        You are absolutely deluded, if not stupid, if you think that a worldwide
        collection of software engineers who can’t write operating systems or
        applications without security holes, can then turn around and suddenly write
        virtualization layers without security holes.
    

Harsh, but not inaccurate. And it’s part of the reason I’d rather use OpenBSD
than QubesOS.

Eight years after that comment, a critical vulnerability in Xen affected the
security of QubesOS, and the developers were shocked, _shocked!_

    
    
        It is really shocking that such a bug has been lurking in the core of the
        hypervisor for so many years. In our opinion the Xen project should rethink
        their coding guidelines and try to come up with practices and perhaps
        additional mechanisms that would not let similar flaws to plague the hypervisor
        ever again (assert-like mechanisms perhaps?). Otherwise the whole project makes
        no sense, at least to those who would like to use Xen for security-sensitive
        work.
    

[http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/10/xen-
patches-7-year-o...](http://arstechnica.com/security/2015/10/xen-
patches-7-year-old-bug-that-shattered-hypervisor-security/)

~~~
dandelion_lover
Thank you for a comprehensive answer. I do not think that one vulnerability in
8+ years proofs insecurity of QubesOS (by the way, it was found by their
developers). OpenBSD is not free from kernel vulnerabilities on such a long
time scale. Security through correctness never works, because people are not
ideal. (Xen developers are also trying to decrease the code base and make sure
the code is as correct as possible.) The only "silver bullet" is defense in
depth [0], i.e., trying everything you can.

I heard [1] that OpenBSD is concentrated on the security of the kernel too
much, ignoring the isolation of applications. However, most frequently,
attacks come through applications. And this is exactly the point of QubesOS:
to isolate the applications as much as possible.

You might also be interested in a comparison between different approaches to
security [2].

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_in_depth_(computing)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_in_depth_\(computing\))

[1] [https://allthatiswrong.wordpress.com/2010/01/20/the-
insecuri...](https://allthatiswrong.wordpress.com/2010/01/20/the-insecurity-
of-openbsd/)

[2] [https://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.de/2008/09/three-
approac...](https://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.de/2008/09/three-approaches-
to-computer-security.html)

~~~
milcron
Great links, thanks!

Defense in depth is a good strategy, and it's definitely good to see QubesOS
doing their thing. I'm glad to see activity in the secure computing space
regardless of which OS is the most secure.

Since the focus of the thread is reliability, I'd like to point out one common
criticism of OpenBSD (such as in your link [1]), which is that they aren't
_actually_ focused on security as they are on writing correct, quality code.

...Is that actually a downside? I _like_ correct, quality code. And if that
approach happened to get them 90% of the way to a secure system, that's just a
cherry on top. What I like most about OpenBSD is how starkly simple it is.
Yes, technologies lag behind somewhat - they just got support for EFI and
802.11n - but in OpenBSD something either works or it doesn't. Nothing in the
base system is obviously busted.

A native OpenBSD hypervisor[0] is finally in the works, so in the future it
might be possible to build a Qubes-like thing on top.

[0] "OpenBSD vmm/vmd Update"
[http://bhyvecon.org/bhyvecon2016-Mike.pdf](http://bhyvecon.org/bhyvecon2016-Mike.pdf)

------
ArkyBeagle
Tcl. Everything about it is reference-grade.

~~~
gglitch
Can you say more about this? Is there any particular problem space you like it
for?

~~~
ArkyBeagle
Yeah; mainly for:

1) Testing embedded things over comms links. 2) Modelling/simulation,
particularly discrete-time simulation. 3) Anything where the ability to
generate permutations is important. 3a) At times, generating big tables in
other languages like 'C' based on permutations, lists or other data. 4)
Operating Excel/Word through OLE.

The thing that Python does not have is 1) packaging ( at least not as well )
and 2) sockets and other comms objects are first-class objects in Tcl.

It's a bit old (it has a 1990s aroma ) for web-based things, although there
are web servers in Tcl, most famously AOL's.

It's a fantastic duct-tape language.

------
kuon
"ag" that thing is blazingly fast

~~~
walrus
Never grep -R again! I'm also a fan of this software.

Link because the name makes it hard to search for:
[http://geoff.greer.fm/ag/](http://geoff.greer.fm/ag/)
[https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher](https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher)

~~~
alixaxel
Accidentally misclicked the down vote button.

Sorry for that!

------
dopeboy
Surprised no one has mentioned this yet - venmo. Does exactly what I want and
nothing more. And it's free.

~~~
omgdlight
venmo is good and I appreciate, but at least on my android it's not what I'd
call reliable. It suffers some random crashes and failures (although it's
never done anything too terrible like double charge me)

~~~
dopeboy
I haven't experienced crashes but I've had trouble finding certain people. Not
sure if that's an android specific issue.

------
skoocda
ninite.com

Your one stop shop to get a Windows PC back on its feet after a wipe. Ninite
always works great for me. The application packages are a single click to
install, and it really helps minimise the clammy, sticky feeling of using IE
Explorer while you go download Chrome / Firefox / Opera.

------
reitanqild
The JDK, including the toolchain. Just works.

(Yep, not my only posting but I figured they should go in separate comments.)

------
squeaky-clean
Ableton Live 9 on OSX is excellent. As well as anything by Native Instruments.
I only use NI's Guitar Rig when rehearsing or performing even though I have
better sounding amp simulations, because I have never had it crash once on me.

One time during a gig, running (pirated at the time) Ableton Live 8 on Windows
7, Ableton crashed. Thankfully Guitar Rig somehow kept running throughout the
whole set! Even though the only thing onscreen was the "Ableton has
encountered and error... and will now exit. <OK>" prompt. (For anyone who
doesn't know these programs, Ableton runs as a host, in which Guitar Rig can
be loaded as a plugin).

There are a few other plugins I trust, but not many. I've learned the hard way
that "Well it's only crashed once this month, what's the worst that can
happen?" means "It will crash 3 times during a 45 minute performance with a
few hundred people staring at you." I'm only a hobbyist musician, but I'd
still like for that to never happen again.

Edit: I think Reaper, another audio host program, is even more stable than
Ableton. Ability to isolate plugins so if it crashes, the whole system doesn't
die. Great crash handling/restore. Faulty plugin crashing every time you load
your project so you can't even undo adding it? Try it 3 times, and on the 3rd,
Reaper will deactivate the plugin and alert you.

Reaper is more "studio" software though, so it's less important. Worst-case
scenario in the studio is you admit you've lost the take, apologize, and tell
the drummer to go get a cup of coffee while the system reloads, and we'll try
again.

------
leephillips
As others have said before me, Linux, vim, git, postgresql, Apache, and
XeLaTeX are worthy of becoming part of the infrastructure of your life. I'd
like to add mutt, which makes wrangling thousands of email messages a breeze,
and dovecot/imap, which is a very solid imap server - I can access my mail
from several devices simultaneously and it never falters. Also, the amazing
ImageMagick.

------
pspeter3
Bazel has increased reliability, stability, and speed for all of builds/tests
at Asana. We no longer need to clean because of incorrect caches.

------
wvh
rsync+ssh: Still more reliable than other sync software or exotic filesystems.

Inkscape: When you have to do graphics and diagrams for slides and posters,
you don't have all that much choice on Linux, so I'm happy a quality vector
graphics program exists. It might be a bit more cumbersome than commercial
software dedicated to schemas and technical drawings, but at least you can
rely on it to get the job done, with only your creativity as the limit.

Cog/Cogx, XMMS and Winamp: I don't have Windows or Mac OSX, but I have good
memories of using these simple (in a positive sense) music players on
occasions I had to use those operating systems, and I still miss a basic
player such as XMMS these days when everything looks like it's trying to out-
iTune iTunes.

Then there's mostly server-side software such as Nginx; Sqlite and Postgresql
(and other database software); and typical mail server software like Postfix
and Dovecot that I guess most people would agree to be vastly reliable, but
that shouldn't be a surprise given the nature of server-side software.

~~~
rsync
"rsync+ssh: Still more reliable than other sync software or exotic
filesystems."

Remember that rsync.net has a "HN Readers" discount. Just email us.

------
rbosinger
It's been a while (and therefore several versions since) I've done audio
recording/editing but I was always impressed with Propellerhead's audio
software. I remember using Reason alongside Adobe Audition or ProTools or
whatever-else and Propellerhead's Reason would be running all these synths in
parallel and never hiccup or crash. This was on machines from 2005.

I recall Windows semi-crashing (and Audition or ProTools with it),
explorer.exe completely gone and just a desktop background screen and our midi
keyboard still controlling a multi-layer synth set-up and playing from the
speakers with perfect responsiveness.

(for those who might say that Reason crashed the rest of it and hogged all the
resources I'll say this: It never happened when we only had Reason running. It
only happened when we had other editing software open as well... and we always
had plenty of memory available).

I don't know if their stuff is still the same or has started to rot but there
was a point where it was a real _engine_ that blew my mind.

------
spapas82
Under windows:

mencoder which I prefer over ffmpeg that some users have mentioned. It uses
the same libraries and has -at least for me- a simpler command line interface
(mencoder file.in -o file.out -ovc select_video_codec -ovc select_audio_codec
-of select_output_format -- try mencoder a -o o -ovc help -oac help -of help
to see all options).

Also its sister program mplayer is great for playing everything under windows
- I also prefer it over VLC that has been mentioned here. It has a much
simpler interface (only uses the keyboard - left right up down page up page
down f o + - etc) than VLC and can be run through the command line (run
mplayer test.avi and the video will immediatelly start). Finally, it can
easily be integrated with windows explorer: Just add a "Send To..." mplayer
shortcut and you'll be ready to play everything under windows!

I'm using these tools for around 7-8 years for all my audio/video (transcoding
and playing) needs, they munched everything I had thrown at them!

------
chucknibbleston
#1 - Nginx #2 - Redis #3 - Postgres

------
protomyth
Visio before Microsoft[1]

It was super simple and something OmniGraffle never really got right. In fact,
it was so easy and nice (particularly boolean shape operations and object
properties), it made using OmniGraffle painful. Of all the Microsoft software,
that was the one I wished had been ported to the Mac.

1) to be fair, haven't used it after the buyout since I went full time OS X

~~~
therealmarv
Look at yed or this thread:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/2x5f3a/what_are_you_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/2x5f3a/what_are_you_guys_using_instead_of_microsoft_visio/)

~~~
protomyth
Looks nice but doesn't seem to have any boolean operations on shapes.

------
dpcan
This is actually a topic that I think about often because I LOVE several of
the software tools I use daily, and the majority of my favorites are made by
either individuals or smaller companies (except a few).

I've purchased licenses of the following and have used them all for years.
These are all wonderfully simple in my opinion, and the most reliable pieces
of software I have ever used and I have been very happy with my purchases:

EditPlus

Probably the best money I've ever spent. I use it for almost all of my coding.
No other code editor seems to be arranged the same way with Folders and Files
on the left with a tab to quickly switch to a function view, and simple color
coded syntax highlighting. It's SO fast too.

ScanWiz 2

Converts scans to PDFs. For me, it has been flawless and perfect in every way.
I once had to email because my computer crashed and I needed my license key
again. I was literally lost without it. I've never used anything so
beautifully simple for the single function it performs for me.

XnView and IrfanView

I purchased a license for each at one point. XnView for batch processing and
IrfanView for almost all other simple image functions. I know I can batch in
IrfanView, but I like how I can select filters and such in XnView.

Adobe Fireworks

I cannot believe this one is supposedly being shut down. I have never used
such a simple vector based editing tool in my life. I literally do everything
in it, and when I try to use something else, I can't stand it. I pray they
leave it available through my Cloud subscription for forever.

Bvckup

I actually only got Bvckup about a year ago, but it has already saved me - and
allows me to run my backups super fast and more regularly. Again, it's all
about the simplicity.

~~~
xenihn
What do you think of XD in comparison to Fireworks?

------
nickpsecurity
Someone should thtow in some non-UNIX software. So, OS/400: the OS of
AS/400's. I know they can crash but I've never seen it or met someone face-to-
face who has. Those jokers just seems to always work for years. OpenVMS was a
competitor that also ran years at at time under load with cluster record being
17 years. These are still sold.

------
juped
FreeBSD.

------
znpy
StumpWM: despite being Emacs-inspired, you can get going with very few
keystrokes (just like in ratpoison) and despite I would like to switch to i3
(many friends have super cool setups) I cannot manage to stop using StumpWM.

It just like vim: you learn those 4 things and you can do 90% of the things
you usually do. For the remaining 10%.... there is the manual.

------
apjana
I maintain 2 command-line utilities for my own needs:

to google: googler -
[https://github.com/jarun/googler](https://github.com/jarun/googler) for
bookmarks: buku -
[https://github.com/jarun/Buku](https://github.com/jarun/Buku)

------
Sophistifunk
SQLite is probably a contender, but think a pretty good case can be made that
the JVM is the best software ever written.

------
reitanqild
Netbeans IDE. Cannot remember one serious crash. Have emptied the cache twice
that I can think of over the years I have used it. (And most importantly: I
have less problems than my colleague who uses IntelliJ.)

Also as others have mentioned I've had major stability problems with eclipse,
mostly in connection with the perforce plugin.

~~~
Draiken
Man times must have changed... Had to use Netbeans on college and it was
literally the worst IDE I've ever used.

Crashed so often I just gave up. Decided to work with Gedit for a good period
before I was introduced to vim.

Have never even tried to use other IDEs unless I'm kind of forced to (like
android development) and made sure to stay away from Netbeans.

~~~
reitanqild
As I have pointed out elsewhere sometimes some piece of software isn't a good
match for someone.

Me personally I don't like Mac OS X or Ubuntu Unity. I don't say they are bad
but I will make an effort to avoid having to use them. (And I can tell you
why.)

I can clearly see how some people might have similar issues with my favourite
software.

That said: if last time was a few years ago and you youch upon Java code again
you could give it another try; maybe it works better on a modern machine?

------
suby
I don't use it anymore because it's Windows only, but Foobar2000 was damn near
perfect for a music player.

~~~
RachelF
You could run it under Wine

~~~
suby
Yeah, I tried it under wine. It suffered from graphical and audio glitches.
I'm sure if I fiddled with it I could have gotten it to work quite well, but I
didn't have the patience for it.

------
nulltype
Go, super stable, reliable and fast. I also love the ideology.

~~~
wintermute42
I'll give you the first 2 at least. On another note, having an impoverished
type system isn't much of an ideology..

~~~
nulltype
Or it's proof of the strength of their convictions that they can have an
impoverished type system despite all the pressure to have an enriched one.

~~~
xupybd
Convictions won't solve the problems that generics could...

------
cypher543
VMWare Player. I needed to run Linux in a VM with nested virtualization and
hardware-accelerated 3D graphics. VirtualBox doesn't support the former and I
couldn't get 3D acceleration to work even after installing the guest
additions. Everything worked in VMWare Player right out of the gate.

~~~
tostitos1979
Player is pretty nice no doubt. I also really like Vagrant + Virtualbox. Just
works. And I can't believe Virtualbox is from the loins of Oracle.

~~~
xemdetia
VirtualBox came to Oracle from the Sun acquisition who acquired InnoTek. I
really have always preferred VirtualBox over VMWare player, if you are playing
the game of many VM's open VMWare player just is not so fun (I usually am
running 2+ virtualbox all the time on my main system, not counting secondary
systems). It really is the software I am turning to constantly, ever since I
was looking for something easier to use than qemu around the time VT
extensions hit the Pentium D.

~~~
tostitos1979
We should convince the VirtualBox devs to do an AMA or a conference tech talk.
Not only is it deep tech, I get the feeling it is a small number of really
strong devs running the show (and possibly being ignored by the beast). Their
networking options are also fairly awesome IMHO. I guess I'm a VirtualBox
fanboy :)

------
LarryMade2
Inkscape - May not be AI but it does a great job for what it is - recent
improvements have set it in a class of its own.

Eclipse - slow probably, reliable yes.

Thunderbird - Just works

A Good Text Editor - (choose your flavor) When word processors or other text
tools just get in the way - you can clear up a lot of frustration with a
decent text editor.

Meld - Great file & directory comparator/text editor

MacOS/OSX - compared to other OSs Mac "just works" (though over the decades it
doesn't "just work" always as well as it had - but still "just works" better
than most for those not OS savvy.)

Linux - may be a bit of a struggle to get up to speed initially but it doesn't
let you down

Ubuntu - Some years are good some are bad but even on the bad years the
community support will get you up and running and once you are there you're
good for a few years.

------
xchaotic
1\. Operating Systems: it's easy to take them for granted, but nowadays they
just work, for both Windows and macOS and even Ubuntu are fine. Linux kernel
is particularly impressive - I have a server with 1800 days uptime. Mobile
OSes are dumbed and locked down so I am not a big fan, but again, they just
work. 2\. Browsers: Edge, Chrome, Firefox, Safari - they just work. 3\. Text
editors: Sublime, Notepad++, VSCode etc 4\. Virtual Machines: VirtualBox,
VMWare - again the core software has not crashed on me once, even when using
dual virtual NICs etc 5.Steam, Source Engine or Frostbite Engine or id games.
Generally with some sad exceptions (Batman) you can just launch a game and
enjoy it. 6\. Plex - I've had it running 24/7 for years, streaming movies.

------
textmode
Anything from djb. Juxtaposed against the usual autoconf/Makefile insanity,
his more recent make-free build system is a work of art. Part of the
reliability equation to me is highly portable, quick, easy compiling. I've not
come across anyone who does it better.

------
steveax
BBEdit - it truly doesn't suck. Supremely scriptable and stable.

Pinboard - amazingly good bookmarking.

Pathfinder - the Finder is better than it used to be, but still no match.

Soulver - the notepad calculator.

Fiddler proxy - I use Charles on the Mac, but miss Fiddler.

Omni Outliner - superb outliner.

Arq - awesome backup software.

jq - never work with json without it.

iTerm2 - so good

httpie - does what I mean.

Audio Hijack - record anything.

------
thenomad
I'm absolutely amazed I haven't seen Photoshop on the list yet.

Incredibly powerful, very reliable, thoroughly worth the pricetag - and I
don't love subscription software.

It's generally a joy to use. And I can't think of another piece of powerful
visual creation software that is.

~~~
huhtenberg
Photoshop is _incredibly_ glitchy, at least its Windows version is. It manages
to crash even while initializing.

~~~
simbalion
CS5 never crashes for me...

That said, The price tag is obscene. Large price tags for specialty business
software is fine when the publisher is an indy developer with a small
demographic. Photoshop does not qualify.

I understand they will charge whatever the market will pay, but that doesn't
make it right or "not evil". It's 2016 and I think we should really grow up as
a species. Competing so ferociously with your fellow man that you make all the
money and they end up dead should not really be socially tolerable.

~~~
jpindar
Corel PaintShop Pro is a professional quality program that's almost as almost
as full featured for a fraction of the price. I create content for virtual
worlds and once I moved past the beginner's stage of using free programs (of
which I believe Paint.Net is the best) I bought PSP and found it has
everything I need.

------
bberrry
SQLite

~~~
joshuata
I've gotten to the point that sqlite is my immediate answer to any Ask HN
about useful tools or good source code. I'm to the point of slight
obsession...

------
AdmiralAsshat
A month ago, I would've put Winamp on this list. Unfortunately, the lack of
updates to it has made it impossible to read on my new 4K laptop.

Huge pity, otherwise, as I still love the thing. I wish they'd just open
source it so someone can future-proof it for Hi-DPI displays.

~~~
feiss
I remember it had a 2x option, to double the size. Did you try it? Still
small?

Foobar works for me, it has a small memory footprint and it's very
customisable

~~~
AdmiralAsshat
I noticed a scaling option in the Window preferences and tried setting it to
200%. It's not perfect, but I think I might be able to resize it and disable
some elements until it works. Thanks for the tip!

------
vram22
Good question.

Python is one software (among others) that is somewhat reliable, both based on
personal experience over several years, as well as according to the Coverity
study (some years ago, IIRC).

Interesting that at least some replies have some items in common. I also have
to say the same, at least about vim and vi before it - hardly ever (or never)
crashed on me, IIRC.

Linux of course, does crash once in a while, but again, very rarely, much less
than Windows, IME. Same for Unixes I used before Linux - okay, not all the
same. Some of the PC Unixes used to crash more than once in a blue moon. HP-UX
- very reliable software, when I used it in production for some years. Even
their patch management system was very good, and helped with the reliability.

------
shermanyo
For music production, I use Ableton Live. It has a non-linear workflow that
increased my creativity by an order of magnitude, and is a joy to work with.

In my experience, its been rock solid reliable (generally give them 6 months
before upgrading to most recent versions).

------
steveeq1
emacs

~~~
pzone
I'm a huge fan of emacs, but even though I use it constantly, I do not
consider it exceptionally reliable. A modern experience really does rely on a
huge number of powerful and excellent but sometimes glitchy packages. (helm,
org, haskell-mode/python-mode/etc.) I also find it crash prone on Windows,
which is not totally surprising given Emacs' ownership, but disappointing.

~~~
ams6110
I've had emacs go out to lunch on rare occasions, but I find it to be far more
stable than Firefox or Chrome. I have had emacsserver sessions run for months
without issue, and I do all my email as well as coding and org-mode task
tracking in Emacs.

~~~
pzone
I use Spacemacs on Windows so I'm pushing Emacs a bit past its limits. ;)

Actually I was going to compare Emacs stability to Chrome stability. Though
for me Emacs gets terminal segfaults more often, Chrome has more random
failures that require restarting.

------
blaze33
Git, Linux, Python, Sublime Text, Redis, Postgresql, VLC.

Also Ubuntu, I remember how I always felt having a half broken setup when I
started using it in 2007 but for the past 2-3 years it just worked, really
stable, no more release upgrade mess ups, really enjoy it.

~~~
reitanqild
Belive you about Ubuntu but it is weird:

I loved Ubuntu but now don't bother to even try after having tried Unity a few
times (no, it's not about stability, it's about breaking alt-tab for me).

------
hanoz
LINQPad.

Don't know how I'd get by without this for ad hoc / exploratory .NET work.
Love it.

------
anonymous344
trello.com for 1st. place! They survived katrina, or whatever that was for
just couple hours of downtime and that was years ago.

~~~
andrei_says_
I was using them on a project at the time and reading their blog. They were
carrying gas upstairs to run the generators for their servers :)

------
anexprogrammer
handbrake (the video transcoder). It just works. given the mass of containers
and video formats this is a little surprising!

------
collyw
Django. Makes me way more productive, and the guys who wrote it know a lot
more about web dev than me. It has taught me a lot and made me a better coder
as well as improving my productivity. Docs are good as well.

------
DavideNL
For OS X (or should i say macOS...), this is a nice list of apps:
[https://github.com/iCHAIT/awesome-osx](https://github.com/iCHAIT/awesome-osx)

------
aiPhie5u
Debian, Vim, Python, Nginx, NTPd, sshd.

------
Aoyagi
On Windows:

Everything - simple and quick file search tool

Ditto - clipboard history

Nokia PC Suite - I still use Nokia 808 PW as my primary device, and the PC
Suite is one of the reasons

Puush - quick screenshot/file sharing tool

KVIrc - IRC client

Pidgin - multi-protocol IM client

Opera 12 - living with this thing is becoming increasingly difficult, but I
don't want to imagine living without it

WinDirStat - storage space allocation visualisation

...

Then there's a ton of regular stuff: VLC, Photoshop, GetDataBack, Winamp,
Telegram, Astroburn, CrystalDiskInfo, NetLimiter, LibreOffice, OpenVPN,
Filezilla, 7Zip, Deluge, VirtualBox, TeamViewer.....

~~~
stuxnet79
Can you integrate Pidgin with Google Hangouts?

~~~
Aoyagi
As far as I know you can, but some features may be limited/nonexistent.

------
lewisl9029
Discord has been rock solid so far for VOIP, and actually has great UX.

A refreshing change after years of using mumble/teamspeak and maintaining my
own servers on flaky cheap VPS providers.

~~~
infectoid
Ridiculous how well this actually works. The target market is gamers but I use
it for business.

~~~
Semiapies
I just use it to talk to friends and drop links. Much nicer than Skype or
Google Hangouts (after Google took out all the functionality).

------
samuell
Thunderbird mail client. Just works.

~~~
xupybd
Yes, until it takes an attached image and replaces it with an image from a
previous email....

------
juliancox
TinyPNG and JPG. [https://tinypng.com/](https://tinypng.com/) Very reliable
and makes me happy - thanks Panda.

------
two2two
Wunderlist. Lightning fast sync across devices, a webapp that is
indistinguishable from the local app, a free version is more than I could ask
for, 4-5 features that are neatly organized/appropriately available, and even
the sound it makes when I check off a task gives me joy.

There's more that I can't recall at the moment. For a simple little list
application, it reminds me every time I use it that other software could be
this good, too.

------
geff82
Knuth's TeX and Texstudio, in conjunction with gnuplot.

------
serguzest
Notepad++

~~~
arkitaip
Most definitely. My favorite feature in the auto save feature for unsaved
files. So even if you close down notepad++ or it crashes (never actually
happens) all you stuff is where you left it.

~~~
simbalion
it crashed once for me and the auto save didn't work, however there was a
cached version in another folder so I was able to recover my work.

------
mrob
Qalculate!. This is easily my favorite calculator app. It's fast, it has many
useful features (I especially like how you can specify units for all your
values and get an answer with a unit), and it lets you type in expressions
instead of wasting space on skeuomorphic calculator buttons. I configured the
dedicated calculator button on my keyboard to run it, and I typically use it
multiple times a day.

------
scholia
I note that "good software they enjoy using" includes software that people
have been using happily for many years, but less experienced users might still
find a bit of a nightmare.

As a Windows user, the tools I've used for a long time include Search
Everything, Process Explorer, FreeFileSync, Paint.net and David De Groot's
PIXresizer, along with the usual suspects: Gmail, Word and Excel.

------
zoom6628
Below are the things for me that "just work" day in, day out: IM -
Telegram(all),WhatsApp(all) PhoneOS - BB10 Hub Web - Safari(mac) Find Files -
AgentRansack(Win), powershell(Win), Alfred(mac),Win-S(Win8/10),'find'(*nix)
VPN - ExpressVPN(mac,iOS) OS - Linux Mint H/W - Mac,iPAd,iPhone RF - XBee,
NXP, Nordic WiFi- Realtek chips IDE - PyCharm, Lazarus

------
brightball
Navicat Premium. I bought this years ago when I needed a solid OSX database
tool that I could use with all of the various databases I dealt with, which at
that time was MySQL, SQL Server and Oracle. Now I work mostly with PostgreSQL,
MySQL and SQL Server but it has been kicking along make my life easier the
entire time.

It's almost an extension of my professional self at this point.

------
atsaloli
CFEngine for configuration management. CFEngine is a promise engine -- you can
see what promises about the system state have been verified, which have been
repaired and which couldn't be repaired. I like the insight into
infrastructure that it provides. It's been around since 1993 and is quite
mature.

Working with CFEngine, I got into git. I trust git too. :-)

------
dkersten
Checkvist, a checklist, task management and planning tool. I mainly use it for
brainstorming and planning and its great. Been using it for many years now.
Just wish the mobile experience was better (its too easy to accidentally move
items on mobile), but they have a decent API, so maybe one day I'll hack one
together that works how I want.

------
rbanffy
Emacs. Does what I need, is versatile and fast.

------
teamhappy
zsh, vim, git, tmux, ssh, curl, less, rsync, mosh, ag

VLC player deserves extra credit because it's a big, messy, cross-platform GUI
app.

~~~
lucb1e
VLC is a great example I forgot about. If anything mainstream has been
reliable over the years, cross-platform, it's VLC.

------
zelon88
Sublime Text 2, Plex, AudioStreamer2.1, LibreOffice, and Unoconv. I'd also
like to mention that for archives I prefer Rar & Unrar instead of 7zip. I'd
also like to add that I find 7z to be somewhat unreliable. Does anyone else
agree or have another alternative?

------
cdeshpande
JVM

------
dbarlett
SQLite

------
Const-me
Winamp 5.

Microsoft Word, Excel, OneNote, Outlook.

Total commander, far manager.

IrfanView.

------
Grue3
Emacs, git, GIMP, postgres, SBCL, Winamp, uTorrent (old version), PuTTY,
Dropbox, 7zip, IrfanView

------
pocketstar
Notational Velocity. The project has been abandoned for years on github,
because NV is perfect. Syncs with simplenote if you want. NV is just a simple,
fast, notes app, full of useful hotkeys. I've used NV daily for the past 6
years with zero issues.

------
sirbranedamuj
I recently discovered a new game recording software called "Loilo Game
Recorder". It skimps on features, but it records games with really good
quality and, so far, without any noticeable performance loss. Does exactly
what it sets out to do.

------
nojvek
VSCode - Not too light, not too heavy. JS development and debugging is a
breeze.

VLC. Related Popcorn time. Great interface.

RethinkDB - RQL is a great query interface. I wish there was an embedded
version like sqlite.

Chrome-dev-tools: As a JS Dev, love what they've done.

Whatsapp - Their focus on simplicity and doing one thing very well.

PowerShell

Bash

Charles Proxy

------
pdm55
I mention Geogebra, [https://www.geogebra.org/](https://www.geogebra.org/),
because I believe more people interested in exploring mathematics should be
using it. Me, I cannot get enough of it.

------
combatentropy
psql, vim, git, bash --- all the old Linux command-line tools for that matter.

For something with a GUI: Gmail.

Don't know if this will help or not:
[http://gettingreal.37signals.com/](http://gettingreal.37signals.com/)

------
robobro
Ktorrent is the best torrent client I've ever used.

KeyPassX is my favorite password client... generates passwords well and saves
them. Very easy to use.

And Seamonkey is a pretty righteous browser. It has email built-in and it runs
leaner than Firefox on my machines.

------
ivanyv
RubyMine. Went through TextMate, Sublime, vim, you name it. For Ruby
development this IDE is superb and a joy to use everyday. Only downside is
getting used to it when sometimes it isn't available (vim comes to the rescue
usually).

------
dmytroi
Far Manager
[http://www.farmanager.com/index.php?l=en](http://www.farmanager.com/index.php?l=en)
\- works perfectly, still have this Norton Commander feeling from 80-x.

------
NetTechM
Royal TS v3, Solarwinds, SQL Server Management Studio 2014,Python, Cisco
Jabber, (Mobile) Secure Apps Manager, Mobile Iron, Powershell, Paessler Data
Extractor, PRTG, Vsphere, Sourcefire/Firepower... The list goes on.

------
curryMyLambda
Been using the Ramda lib for functional programming.

It's been a great intro lib to the aspects of func. programming, and while the
learning curve is steep, the result is cleaner code with less chance of making
a mistake.

------
pcunite
FileSearchEX, a file search tool for Windows 10 that is so beautiful in its
simplicity, astonishingly quick, and priced like ya stole it. You'll be driven
to madness when you don't have it with you.

~~~
scholia
Not heard of it before (I'll go and get it) but have you compared it with
Search Everything? [https://www.voidtools.com/](https://www.voidtools.com/)

Maybe the names should be the other way round because Search Everything just
finds filenames while FileSearchEX searches file contents too.

------
rosstex
MobaXTerm, it has all the features I could want in a console/FTP client.

------
LeicaLatte
Paw is a HTTP client for macs and a joy to use. Its maintained very well. I am
more comfortable using curl on the command line but Paw is the one I end up
recommending to newer programmers these days.

------
revicon
I live out of evernote most days. It could be better but it works for me.

~~~
theseatoms
Speaking of which, it looks like Evernote's free tier won't be supporting
syncing for an arbitrary amount of devices for much longer.

------
petrikapu
Dropbox

------
revelation
TrueCrypt, or one of the various forks now that the original developers are
gone.

Software with utter class. They released full-disk encryption and it was
basically flawless from the first release, just works.

~~~
mkoryak
whats is the good fork?

------
untangle
PopClip on Mac. A tiny menu-bar app that does so much, so easily. All cliches
apply, including the one where Apple should buy them. This should be part of
MacOS. Extensible architecture too.

------
mohsinr
Git, Filezilla, VLC Player they just work have been using for years!

~~~
thedudemabry
VLC Player! I didn't even think to include it on this list because I rarely
think about it, which is a great sign. I always install it on new OSs and make
it the default media player. But it plays all the things I've thrown at it
well and even changes its icon over the Christmas holiday to have a little
santa hat!

------
nekopa
Goodreader on iOS. I still keep my iPad 1 around for this software.

------
jakeogh
[http://git.suckless.org/surf/log/?h=surf-
webkit2](http://git.suckless.org/surf/log/?h=surf-webkit2)

------
Klasiaster
moc - Music On Console, use mocp to spwan it and you can also detach again.
Never used another music player afterwards.

youtube-dl

ack instead of grep, most instead of less

tor

GNOME stuff just works, from gnome-builder to gnome-disks to gscan2pdf

~~~
gglitch
I've dj'ed several weddings with moc, including my own. I wouldn't even think
of using anything else in a high-stakes situation like that.

------
kowdermeister
Propellerhead Reason, Sublime text, Total commander, GIT, ConEmu

------
RGamma
weechat (IRC client), because of sane defaults, nice UI, active development
and simple source code. Oh, and it's basically bug-free from a user's
perspective.

------
jfb
mbsync [0]. It is a great example of blue-collar software. Unshowy,
unfeatureful, it Just Works. Combine with mu and mu4e [1] and my mail
situation is pretty much just fixed.

[0]
[http://isync.sourceforge.net/mbsync.html](http://isync.sourceforge.net/mbsync.html)
[1] [http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu](http://www.djcbsoftware.nl/code/mu)

------
emacsygen
On OS X - Emacs, Alfred, VLC, Postgres.app, Spectacle, iTerm

------
ashwanidausodia
xmonad

~~~
steveeq1
Such great software. If you are a programmer and have a big monitor, this is a
MUST

------
johnorourke
SMS Backup (Android app) - literally "just works"

------
the_watcher
Snip. It's a screenshot tool that just works. I mapped to CMD+CTRL+A and it
saves the image to the clipboard. It just does exactly what I need it to do.

~~~
majewsky
How's this different from OS X's built-in screenshot tool (Cmd-Shift-3/4)?

------
thesumofall
1Password for Mac - For Windows not so much, unfortunately

------
therealmarv
Forklift on (OS X) or even better: Total Commander (only program I miss from
Windows).

rsync if you copy a lot (it can be overwhelming with all options but I trust
it).

------
placeybordeaux
neovim + neoterm is now my default terminal emulator.

------
nodivbyzero
Emacs with Org-mode

------
kawera
Notational Velocity

------
the_watcher
Don't see it anywhere, but ack has been such a big improvement on grep for me,
particularly once I aliased a few ack --with-flags

------
facorreia
git

------
djhworld
Reliable? ZNC (irc bouncer), I've had it running on my raspberry pi for so
long now I sometimes forget that it's there.

------
azazo
Trello Tweetbot Buffer Overcast Pocket Spotify

------
agounaris
+1 for major databases, IDEs and web servers...I think there is a lot of good
software, one or two bugs is close to nothing

------
clock_tower
Visual Studio. I can't get much of anything done unless I have Intellisense
and GUI debugging/monitoring tools.

------
tingol
Out of those not mentioned here for me it's beets and cmus. My go to for music
for years without a single issue.

------
zem
vim. been using it for decades now and i still stop every so often to marvel
how much pleasanter it makes my workday.

------
throwaway6497
git, mercurial, linux, emacs, vim, intellij, java, zsh

productivity: chrome, google docs (slow but works), dropbox, tiddlywiki,
gmail.

------
hack_edu
ffmpeg and libav

~~~
Khao
I just started playing around with ffmpeg for a side project of mine. I'm sad
because it's C++ (and I didn't write enough C++ in my life to be any good in
it) and I was looking around for a good C# wrapper exposing a media player
that I can simply use in a desktop app, but everything I found was extremely
buggy and laggy.

I'm currently trying to make an exact copy of ffplay.exe (since the source
code is available) in C# using an tiny SDL2-C# wrapper and a tiny ffmpeg-C#
wrapper, instead of finding a library that does everything. I'm glad to hear
that ffmpeg is reliable and solid, I hope I can make it work in C#! (I'll
probably put everything up on github if it works)

------
sidcool
Google Docs/Spreadsheets are amazing.

------
tujv
The Public Domain Korn Shell version 5.2.14.

A rock solid shell that hasn't been (or needed to be) updated in nearly 20
years.

------
aerovistae
TurboTax. The fact that I actually _look forward_ to doing my taxes is
just....hard to believe.

------
sha257
ls - this program has never failed me

------
dorfuss
winamp. sublime text. anki. libre office. audacity. quicktime. eclipse.
komodo. english dictionary (part of mac os). TextEdit. codeblocks. virtualbox.
join.me, vcl

broken software I hate: all web browsers, thunderbird, gimp, microCommander,
calibre, itunes, iphoto, cyberduck, skype,

------
jpatel3
pocket. It just works and saves lots of time from distraction without loosing
what I want to read.

~~~
anotherevan
I use Pocket a lot because it has integration with my Kobo ereader. That said,
I find it often fails to parse an article that Instapaper or Readability
handle no problems. That is my only complaint with it.

------
greydius
TexMaker. Does its thing very well.

------
tujv
nvALT, which is a fork of the Notational Velocity note-taking app on OSX.

Rock solid and very fast!

~~~
tuananh
nv is already simple and very fast. I found nvAlt rather buggy

~~~
tujv
Just curious, but what bugs have you encountered in nvAlt? I switched over for
the Collapse Note List function.

------
ammobear
Spotify. Very rarely do I run into performance issues or bugs on any platform.

~~~
Khao
I often hear my friends talking shit about the spotify desktop app and web app
not working properly. I don't use spotify but it seems like something's not
working at least every month or two.

------
kasperset
SQLite

------
adultSwim
nano

------
xanadohnt
Late to the party but ... Google Maps. So buttery, extremely reliable, and so
many form factors where the experience is the same: superb. I'm afraid it has
become such a daily utility that perhaps people don't appreciate just how
amazing Google Maps is.

~~~
brokenmachine
I'm also amazed by it and use it all the time, but the Android version of Maps
has been getting progressively slower and less responsive with every new
version. [1] Performance should be a feature!

[1] [https://blog.codinghorror.com/performance-is-a-
feature/](https://blog.codinghorror.com/performance-is-a-feature/)

------
netgusto
The PHP5+ interpreter. Has served the world reliably for over a decade.

------
turnip1979
vi, python 2.7, virtualenv/pip unless I need to install MySql.

------
mcs_
* mint, * git + gitlab ce, * webstorm + nodejs, * chromium

------
reiichiroh
"Everything" NTFS search engine at www.voidtools.com

------
tokhi
I like pgAdmin3, a great tool to manage your postgres DB.

------
Philipp__
Emacs with org mode, iTerm 2, Sublime Text 3 and Winamp.

------
pws5068
CMD+F for Xcode; not a single mention. Well, until now.

------
talles
git, SQLite and vim immediately comes into my mind.

And maybe Redis too.

------
edoceo
jEdit. It just works. Its been stable for 10+ years

------
walrus01
OSX: TextWrangler for multi-file GUI text editing.

------
pmontra
Emacs, thunderbird

------
Finbarr
Alfred for mac. App launcher and so much more.

------
gosukiwi
Vim and Chrome :)

------
dyeje
Skitch - Simple, reliable, and to the point.

------
mavelikara
IntelliJ IDEA, WhatsApp, VLC, HotSpot JVM.

------
homoSapiens
iTerm on mac. You'll appreciate it more if you've used a linux (Ubuntu etc) OS
for a long time before.

------
rasengan
sed, chattr, dtach, screen, ssh, bash, etc. are all nice tools that can help
you get shit done and mad reliable.

------
epynonymous
vmware workstation/fusion, sqlite3, nginx, redis, chrome browser, mac os x,
vi, ubuntu server, postgresql

------
ssanders82
EmEditor for large text files

------
lode
Can’t live without: 1Password - First install on any system I use. I only know
2 passwords by heart: my login password and my 1Password vault pw. Also
supports TOTP 2 factor authentication.

Dropbox - It’s a folder, it syncs, and does this very well. Syncs my 1Password
vault as well.

GrandPerspective - Visualise where your disk space is going. Every time I fire
this up I find stuff I’ve forgotten about that takes up a lot of space, or
something that is using disk space it shouldn’t. (Once a WiFi log hadn’t
rolled over and was using 8GB of space.) -
[http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net/](http://grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net/)

Synology - It took some investment, but now I finally have a place where all
my data is, safer than on one or two external drives. But that’s not all,
Synology also is a fantastic home/office server with an “app store” where I
can run applications, run a VPN endpoint, run Docker containers, ...

Crashplan - Not the fantastic lightweight native Mac & Linux tool I’d want,
but rather a somewhat heavy Java tool. But the business model for me is great.
Free replication between endpoints, ie. all my family and my NAS and unlimited
replication to their datacenters for my own devices for $5/month (Crashplan
Family) - [http://www.crashplan.com](http://www.crashplan.com)

Plex - For me it’s always been super reliable. Server runs flawlessly on my
Synology. - [http://www.plex.tv](http://www.plex.tv)

Pinboard.in - Proudly non-free, stable and boring. The author’s presentations
and twitter feeds are insightful and hilarious, I’m glad to support his work.

Superduper - I use it less often than before, since I now have a proper NAS
and backup solution (see above), but Superduper has helped me so much in the
past it deserves a mention. Always provides a safety net when I do a migration
between hdd and sdd, between systems, ... I even bought two licenses as I lost
my previous one, spending another $28 on it was a no brainer.
[http://www.shirt-
pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription...](http://www.shirt-
pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html)

Coda - Still my html/css/php/… editor of choice. -
[http://www.panic.com/coda/](http://www.panic.com/coda/)

Waze on my phone: best navigation I’ve ever used

youtube-dl

wget & curl - they have slightly other use cases, and I love them both. I use
both of them at least weekly, mostly daily

VMware Fusion & vSphere/ESXi: still rock solid after all those years.
(Disclaimer: I work there)

Other software I particularly love: Sketch (mentioned elsewhere in the thread)
and Affinity Designer. I like Illustrator, but as a non-professional it’s way
too expensive for me.

------
fapjacks
My list will echo others out there:

* Linux

* vim

* tmux

* git

* ssh

* redis

* docker

* Sublime Text 3

------
cromulent
Reliability? TCP-IP ;)

Homebrew.

Rsync.

SSH.

------
projectramo
Gmail

Microsoft Excel

Scrivener

------
zubairq
i enjoy LightTable as my text editor. And it has amazing global search

------
hollerith
Glasgow Haskell Compiler

Arch Build System

------
samsonradu
Nginx, Haproxy, Redis

------
jessriedel
Everyone should knoe about alternativeto.net for finding better software.

------
rrecuero
Atom, Slack, Steam.

------
dagw
FME (www.safe.com)

------
kyriakos
PHPStorm SQLyog

------
unexistance
firefox + tiddlywiki

ffmpeg

vlc

virtualbox

vi / awk / grep / more / sed

[windows only]

notepad++ (I sorely miss this in linux T_T)

SysTrayPlay mp3

------
andthat
Ableton Live.

~~~
daledavies
Live is pretty damn reliable, I'll vouch for this. I've used it daily for
years and often had it open for a whole day at a time. Only crashes I've had
have been caused by 3rd party VST plugins.

------
fhood
TextWrangler

------
aphextron
WinDirStat

------
mwpmaybe
Varnish

HAproxy

Ansible

Ubuntu Server

Redis

Postfix

Ruby: Sequel, Sinatra, Sidekiq, Puma

------
adnanh
i3

------
joeyspn
nginx, htop

------
sssilver
xmonad

------
ommunist
TextMate, now TextMate2. Works for me many years. Nice tool. Chrome DevTools.
Before Chrome DevTools was a big fan of Opera Dragonfly (still useful because
of this
[http://www.opera.com/dragonfly/documentation/remote/](http://www.opera.com/dragonfly/documentation/remote/)
)

------
justinlardinois
Probably the most off the wall choice in this thread, but I say HP Scan and
Capture: [https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/apps/hp-scan-and-
captu...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/apps/hp-scan-and-
capture/9wzdncrfhwl0)

It's a Metro app for Windows 8.1 and up to scan with HP scanners. I love it
because it _just works_ , which has never been my experience with scanning[0].
You press a button, it scans whatever's on the tray. You can tweak resolution
if you want. And at the end you save it as a PDF. Simplicity is something that
I think tends to be forgotten when it comes to GUI software.

[0] Except for a commercial scanner I used once where you put in your email
address at the beginning and for every scanned page it sent you an email with
an attached PDF. Although that has its own issues.

~~~
lyonlim
I use HP officejet printer and pretty much never use any software to scan
documents. I scan via their document feeder and it automatically transfers the
PDF to a folder on my Mac. I digitise everything so this workflow is
especially time-saving.

------
simbalion
I'll contribute:

Bitvise SSH Client for Windows. It has SFTP, terminal, and simple profile
management. It's a great free SSH app, however I recommend sending the
developers some money cause it's really worth $10-$15 if you spend a lot of
time using SSH.

------
sayelt
GNU/Linux.

------
bbcbasic
Virtualbox - means I can run Linux on the same computer very easily. Easy to
use and reasonably fast.

Keepass - been using that password manager for years. Nice search feature that
always saves my __*.

Vim - nice way to code on a laptop. Makes super efficient use of space and
rarely requires me to use the track pad.

------
bronlund
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive

I would go mad if I don't get to blow someones head off :D

------
albasha
pip

~~~
Semiapies
Yup. Maybe I need to learn how to use npm better, but I constantly find myself
wishing it were more like pip.

------
blahi
Gretl.

------
camperman
nginx, SQLite, Reaper, Audacity, VLC, ffmpeg and ffplay.

------
frik
WinAmp 2

------
ruler88
FB's messenger - everyone should be using this instead of SMS

~~~
Draiken
It's closed. I will never vouch for a messaging app that is not open.

Long live IRC.

Look at slack... it's IRC with some design in the front, and suddenly everyone
loves it! Somehow it's even worth billions!

Irony aside... I miss the good old days of IRC chatting with bots, privileges
(please mod me!) and even file sharing :D

~~~
Aoyagi
IRC client is one of the first foreground programs that start up as soon as
the OS boots. There's no shortage for people using IRC :P

