
Ask HN: What are some free software tools you want? - hpen
I&#x27;m looking to build out my portfolio with free software. What are some tools you would like to have that aren&#x27;t currently free.
======
doomrobo
I'd really like a self-hosted videochat solution that had a native client.
Basically something like Mumble ([https://mumble.info](https://mumble.info))
but for video.

The reason I want it is because most large videochat solutions have a really
high variance in latency and reliability. If I just want a small group chat
with friends, I'd have far fewer issues if I just self-hosted. I've already
found this to be true for Discord audio versus self-hosting Mumble.

~~~
ta17711771
You're looking for Jitsi Meet.

~~~
hpfr
Well, depends on whether you consider an Electron client to be native, but
Jitsi Meet is definitely great.

------
zzo38computer
I would want stuff that many things to do without needing the web browser,
working by free software based command-line operations.

In many cases, I would want to access remote data sources using the SQLite
command line, by SQLite extensions which provide them as virtual tables so
that SQL queries can then be performed on them including joins with other data
sources, copying them to local files, etc (all of this comes "for free" once
it is implemented as a virtual table; SQLite does the rest).

------
gitgud
A codebase tool to check for duplication.

Something that can find repetition in a codebase, which could be extracted.
Fuzzy matching for duplicated code would also be a great feature too. Not sure
if exists, but it's something I've always wanted

~~~
stevekemp
For golang projects I had good success using this tool
[https://github.com/mibk/dupl](https://github.com/mibk/dupl)

~~~
gitgud
Thanks mate! Looks like a cool little project, would be great to extend it for
other languages too.

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wenc
I'm glancing at my phone for apps/services that I paid for because they were
better than the free alternatives. Here's sampling: Dark Sky, Dropbox,
Quizlet, FiLMiC Pro, Camera+, Zoom (but recently canceled).

I paid for Anki iOS app but the interface is so clunky (even though experts
swear by it) that I never really got good use out of it.

~~~
jeffshek
I know this will sound absurd, but buying an Android Tablet for Anki was an
investment that has easily paid for itself.

AnkiDroid is amazing. ~14k cards, so I've committed a lot to Anki.

~~~
wenc
I found your article on how to use Anki.

[https://senrigan.io/blog/everything-i-know-strategies-
tips-a...](https://senrigan.io/blog/everything-i-know-strategies-tips-and-
tricks-for-spaced-repetition-anki/)

I'm likely not going to use Anki but many of the tips and strategies in your
article resonated with me. Thanks!

------
jdlyga
Text to speech software that can convert a text file to an mp3 using modern
high quality voices (think Alexa, Google, Siri, or Cortana). Free software
that does this does exist, but typically with only the voices included with
the OS which usually aren't that great.

~~~
zzo38computer
That would be good, but I would rather it did not use a lossy format as its
output though, but rather raw (lossless) data written to stdout so that you
can then use a separate encoder for whatever format you want (whether lossless
or lossy, including MP3 if wanted, but Opus is better).

------
coderintherye
Perhaps a lame example, but I'd love it if someone would build a good PHP SDK
library for Box.net. There are two libraries out there which are unfortunately
disjointed and relatively unmaintained and unfortunately Box engineers won't
create an official SDK in PHP.

~~~
mappu
The two libraries out there that I found seem to be hand-rolled -

Box.net have an official OpenAPI descriptor at [https://github.com/box/box-
openapi](https://github.com/box/box-openapi) , that you can one-time feed into
an OpenAPI-to-PHP codegenerator such as [https://github.com/janephp/open-
api](https://github.com/janephp/open-api) or [https://openapi-
generator.tech/](https://openapi-generator.tech/) to produce a PHP SDK.

This should help address the "relatively unmaintained" part, but the
disjointedness is perhaps going to rely heavily on how idiomatic the generated
code looks (and you will almost certainly want to ensure there is low-
memory/streaming support for file upload/download APIs).

------
rckoepke
I'd like rustlings to work on repl.it

I'd also like an app that I can take a picture of a recipe on paper and then
scale all the ingredients by some multiple (half, triple, etc) (obviously also
converting ounces/tablespoons/cups/etc).

~~~
amasad
Hi! What's not working with rustlings and repl.it? Feel free to email me
amjad@repl.it

~~~
rckoepke
Hi Amasad! I almost replied to my own comment yesterday after I discovered
that the rustlings readme[0] now has a link to "Run on repl.it"[1] (as well as
Gitpod). Evidently this was added ~11 days ago[2]...although I personally
thought it would be a more complicated solution than just configuring the
.replit file correctly in the rustlings repo. I had independently come up with
the same solution to make the 'Run' button rebuild the .cargo but it felt too
'hacky' for me to accept as a final product and suggest to the rustlings team.

0: [https://github.com/rust-lang/rustlings](https://github.com/rust-
lang/rustlings)

1: [https://repl.it/github/rust-lang/rustlings](https://repl.it/github/rust-
lang/rustlings)

2: [https://github.com/rust-lang/rustlings/pull/471](https://github.com/rust-
lang/rustlings/pull/471)

A couple of months ago my friends and I tried to get rustlings working in
repl.it . I really, really wish I had documented those efforts thoroughly but
at the time it was just an exploratory deep-dive to determine if I should
follow up with documentation of issues and more detail, and I decided against
using my time for that...kind of regret that now.

Three issues I remember facing:

A) inode not updating in the shell even when files changed in the GUI editor.
[seems improved now]

B) /home/runner/.cargo/ (and some other supporting directories i think)
disappearing after some time / series of actions and-or inaction [today only
via inactivity?]

C) At some point we realized the shell wasn't a 'real' shell but I can't
remember what led us to this conclusion, just that it got in our way when
debugging the above issues.

(A) [Basically fixed already] What I remember is that the repl.it shell
environment, while being extremely high fidelity, seemed to have some
idiosyncracies in the way the filesystem worked vs a typical bare-metal OS.
Two months ago I had trouble where 'rustlings verify' worked okay but
'rustlings watch' wouldn't notice that a file had been edited. Oddly enough,
any shell command investigation would also report that the file hadn't been
edited/modified recently, but 'cat file.rs' would still output the saved
changes.

(B) [Partially fixed, still an "issue" due to long re-builds but not hard
blocker] /home/runner/.cargo disappears after any inactivity. This seems more
predictable now than I remember it two months ago - two months ago I might
only be able to run 'rustlings watch' once and then very shortly after, the
shell would no longer be able to find the rustlings binary anymore and I'd
have to rebuild from scratch. Generally there were some errors whenever
rebuilding, so the solution for me was typically to create a whole new repl.it
from scratch and do the initial build. I don't remember what errors caused the
"need" for a new repl.it from scratch every time I needed to rebuild it. This
still seems like an "issue", sort of, that the rustlings .replit file has a
workaround for which works reasonably well and I suspect this behavior is
fairly necessary for repl.it the business. But the binaries still disappear
after a short inactive period and need to be rebuilt which takes quite some
time on the free tier (10+ min?).

(C) [null, and generally not an "issue"] No memory of what behavior caused us
to give the shell the moniker "poverty shell" but overall I've generally found
the repl.it shells to be extremely high fidelity such that I generally don't
realize I'm using a slightly handicapped system. However, this seems to have
changed for python shells...now I seemed locked into something like IPython
and can't get to a linux shell via exit(), ctrl-D, etc. Maybe this was always
the case and I only remember using the linux shell in the C/C++/Rust repl's.

0: [https://github.com/rust-lang/rustlings](https://github.com/rust-
lang/rustlings)

1: [https://repl.it/github/rust-lang/rustlings](https://repl.it/github/rust-
lang/rustlings)

2: [https://github.com/rust-lang/rustlings/pull/471](https://github.com/rust-
lang/rustlings/pull/471)

------
jackhalford
I'd live a tool like grafana but with minimal to no javascript, whilst keeping
the plethora of backends compatibilities. Just simple graphs from any tsdb
with fast page loading speed.

------
techdragon
An alternative to the Dropbox SDK for applications. Yes I can use NextCloud,
and sync files with WebDAV... but now I’m forced to use WebDAV and must be
careful of all of its foibles. Where as if I want to use Dropbox. I add the
sdk, hook it up, user grants permissions, and boom, files get synced into an
application specific sub folder like magic.

------
ianwalter
A really good, full-featured (Heroku-level) PaaS you can deploy to your own
Kubernetes cluster.

~~~
hpen
Very interesting

------
econcon
I want ecom software which rivals Shopify but it's free and self hosted like
Discourse.

Payment method support: stripe and PayPal are enough.

But must have shipment tracking maybe through integration from some service.

All Shopify alternatives suck.

------
efferifick
I'm looking for source to source interprocedural C slicers. If anyone knows of
any freely available let me know please. :)

------
croo
A gant chart and project planner, like MS Project but good.

~~~
hpen
Im working on a project management tool called kanception.io it is free and in
beta now

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noble_pleb
I need a simple seo tool to find keyword rankings and check backlinks without
going through the complex routine of google adwords or costly keyword
platforms. Will you be able to build such a tool and make it open source?

~~~
hpen
With a google search I found several free keyword planners and backlink
checkers

------
justaj
I'd like Bitwig Studio to be open source :(

