
Ask HN: What are your favourite tools to work with? - dutchbrit
Out of interest, what are your favourite tools to work with (on your server&#x2F;desktop&#x2F;phone etc...)? What do you use daily and what other tools come in handy for you from time to time. What could you not imagine living without?<p>And of course, always interesting to hear if there are any tools out there that you are looking for, but haven&#x27;t found anything that fully fits your needs.
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drallison
I like pencil (or pen) and paper. Self-contained, portable, and broadly
applicable to a variety of different problems.

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nickthemagicman
Seconded, what you sacrifice in scalability, you gain in platform
independence, 100% uptime, and low hardware failure rates.

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HenryTheHorse
How's their Canine Disaster Recovery policy now? It used to be _awful_ back in
the day.

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nickthemagicman
Yep elevated hardware is best practice solution for this issue. Also it has a
known Feline attraction quality causing possible downtime due to sleeping
cats.

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rayalez
Lenovo Thinkpad X1(1st gen) running ubuntu - my god this laptop is gorgeous.
Best purchase I've ever made.

Emacs with org-mode for all the writing, notes, organizing information. I
absolutely love this editor, makes you 100 times more productive, and also
very fun to learn and use.

i3wm - brilliant window manager, after using it for a while it's hard to
imagine using anything else.

draw.io - cool tool for drawing diagrams and organizing information. Helps me
to think.

pelican - python markdown static website generator. I was looling for a
perfect blogging tool for a long time and this is it.

iPad mini with only 4 apps installed:

\- Editorial - insanely good text editor. Supports markdown, python scripting
with all kinds of extremely convenient automation, looks gorgeous. It blew my
mind when I first installed it, after taking most of my notes on android I had
no idea a text editor on a tablet can be that freakin good.

\- iThought - great mindmapping tool, for thinking and coming up with ideas.

\- Track & Share - super convenient habit tracking tool.

\- iBooks

Basically I don't use an iPad for anything but writiing, reading and thinking.
Don't even use a browser, and it is mostly offline. Perfect distraction-free
tool.

Also old second-hand Nexus 7 I bought very cheaply, for watching tv shows,
youtube videos, and browsing HN/reddit. It is very helpful to have a device
for all the time-wasting activities. Every time I want to do something dumb I
use nexus, that way it's not hard to avoid doing pointless things on my
Laptop/iPad, which makes them into perfect devices for focus and productivity,
and it is always clear whether I'm doing something useful or screwing around.

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knotty66
i3 Window Manager. I wish Apple would design a WM inspired by i3 but with the
amount of polish they usually apply.

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replete
Desktop:

-OSX (gestures and spaces work well, with a few niggles like OSX not showing the window when tabbing to a minimised window)

-TotalFinder (OSX finder enhancement, the visor lets you get a finder window with alt+`)

-TotalTerminal (OSX quake-style dropdown console terminal)

-Alfred (OSX fast-spotlight replacement with plugins)

Dev: -Gulp - great for frontend build once you know how everything works

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DaGardner
I always prototype stuff on paper with a pen; best way to use your entire
desk(top) ;)

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desbo
Mitsubishi Uni-Ball pens

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fuddle
My main toolbox is: Spotify, Intellij, Chrome, notepad and pen.

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AnimalMuppet
IntelliJ.

The bash shell and the Unix command-line tools.

As others have said, pencil and paper.

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cweagans
osx, vim, alfred, git, and vagrant pretty much do it for me. Pretty much all
of those things run well on Linux, though, so I'm considering switching.

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gnur
vim

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2mur
vim + tmux

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sebnukem2
notebook + pen, ssh, bash, Perl, Vim, IntelliJ, Eclipse, Firebug.

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tvvocold
c9.io

Can not imagine living without Spotify : )

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cweagans
You're the first person that I've ever heard of using a cloud dev environment
for real work. Can you talk more about your experience and why/how you ended
up with that solution?

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tvvocold
Sure:

I think cloud dev ENV is the future, (You don't have to save your file on your
laptop or dropbox, you got a Linux runing in the cloud(in c9.io, it's ubuntu
64 bit), and you can see your project running in the cloud.The most exciting
thing is you can add your friends then coding/hacking together.)

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siquick
Do any of the cloud environments allow an offline mode? e.g. for use on long
flights

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tvvocold
IMHO, Nope.

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lemmon7
Spacemacs

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aprdm
vim sublime shell git

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chad_strategic
guake

