AutoHotKey<p><a href="https://www.autohotkey.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.autohotkey.com/</a><p>Create scripts to automate all kinds of things, usually triggered by keyboard / mouse conditions.<p>Here are a few - these are small things, but they can incrementally save hours and hours<p>- CTRL+@ - pastes my email address at the cursor<p>- ALT+MouseWheel - Page up / Page down<p>- ]d - send the current date and time to the cursor<p>- CAPSLOCK - sets transparency of window to 75 as long as
caps is held down<p>- #t - open <a href="http://e.ggtimer.com" rel="nofollow">http://e.ggtimer.com</a><p>It's also set up as a universal spell-correct and intellisense for SQL/ JS / PHP etc independent of IDE<p>---<p>ShellJump<p><a href="https://github.com/kjerk/shelljump" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/kjerk/shelljump</a><p>Set up jump locations and shortcuts so that you can quickly move between project folders in powershell<p>---<p>Renamer<p><a href="http://www.oldware.org/software.php?swid=74" rel="nofollow">http://www.oldware.org/software.php?swid=74</a><p>The original authors site isn't available anymore, not sure why because this was a super useful utility. Its like Ant Renamer or File Renamer or any of those, but I just prefer this one's simplicity<p>---<p>Mp3Tag<p><a href="http://www.mp3tag.de/en/" rel="nofollow">http://www.mp3tag.de/en/</a><p>Bulk edit Id3 tags on mp3 files (if anyone has mp3s anymore)<p>---<p>NimbleText<p><a href="http://nimbletext.com/" rel="nofollow">http://nimbletext.com/</a><p>Simple tool to repeatedly format text. Like foreach for plain text
I'd have to throw most of the standard UNIX utils in there: grep, awk, cut, sed, sort, uniq, and of course, vim.<p>Outside of the tech world, people seem to think that grabbing some columns out of a file and rearranging them or pasting them somewhere else is some kind of sorcery.
I came here expecting someone to recommend 'make' - and some others to link to interesting make resources. I'm kind of surprised no one has.<p>Make is a utility that's seemed super useful to put into use for non-programming tasks. In my case: take a LaTeX file, create a PDF from it, run tex2html on it and ftp the results up to some web server, run pandoc on it to create a dated epub, etc. But my initial forays into learning make were frustrating and I gave up. Is anyone using make to automate workflow processes, or is that wishful thinking?
Man, I'm pretty convinced that Vim macros have single-handedly saved me years of my life. They're so incredibly useful that it's made Vim one of the first things that I install on any machine.
Some more I forgot about:<p>Chocolatey<p><a href="http://chocolatey.org" rel="nofollow">http://chocolatey.org</a><p>Apt get for Windows, although I would argue its actually better because there's just one central repo, so you don't have to add some long repo before you can install Telegram<p>----<p>Postman<p><a href="https://www.getpostman.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.getpostman.com/</a><p>The fastest way to test APIs - create GET and POST requests easily and view the results any way you like.<p>Most of the tools I've mentioned in this and my other comment are listed on Scott Hansleman's "Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Windows" - (<a href="https://www.hanselman.com/blog/ScottHanselmans2014UltimateDeveloperAndPowerUsersToolListForWindows.aspx" rel="nofollow">https://www.hanselman.com/blog/ScottHanselmans2014UltimateDe...</a>) which is probably the most definitive list out there for this kind of stuff (for windows). It's not been updated since 2014, so there are a few newer alternatives - in particular Foxit reader is kind of a mess these days, there are far better alternatives.<p>Be sure to check out the comments for lots of extra tools in the format "I can't believe you didn't mention {x}, I can't live without it"
Everything - instant search in Windows
<a href="https://www.voidtools.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.voidtools.com/</a>
Xplorer2 (or another TC clone) allow me to filter my folders under a shortcut. I have a set of custom filters for my tasks that directly show the files I need. Combine it with the other nifty power user actions in those Explorer replacements and I easily save an couple of hours a week. The dreadful wait when you see your colleagues having 10 explorers open finding your file to have a quick peek. Additional bonus points for the custom user actions to fire up different cmd shells in ConEmu under a shortcut, open the proper editor, open in your favorite diff tool without having to select etc.<p>Resharper (is that a tool?). No need to explain I guess. You use Visual studio, you get resharper. Can't live without it anymore.<p>The ability to write bash/powershell/your favorite script language. Everything I do more than twice turns into a script and is added as user action in my xplorer2 under a shortcut.<p>ShareX gif capture. My company has email attachment max sizes too small to send proper mp4 longer than 1 min. The gif capture has lower quality (sometimes Horrible) but is good enough for sharing bugs which require investigation before they can be submitted. Instead of having to type I capture the gif and send to our test engineers to turn into proper PR/ticket. Saves time writing it all out and makes me actually share random issues found during doing other stuff.<p>P.s. Try irvanfiew on Windows beats the bulk resize thing in OP.
Intellij with PHP and Python plugins has saved me ~200 hours in 3 years (very conservatively assuming 15m a day 5 days a week 52 weeks a year).<p>I suspect in terms of lost time I <i>didn't</i> have to spend debugging and other stuff it's probably 3-4 times that minimum.
Definitely ack (<a href="https://beyondgrep.com/" rel="nofollow">https://beyondgrep.com/</a>).
It basically is grep but designed for source code. First off it can be downloaded as a single file (Perl script FTW!), so easy to deploy. Secondly, by default it automatically searches recursively, prints out the filename, and line numbers of matches. It also uses PCRE for its regexes which is really nice.<p>But by far the most time saving feature I have is the type searching functionality in it! For example, one can type 'ack --java System.out' and it will search ONLY the java files! No more 'find . -name *.java -exec grep -Hni System.out {} \;'.
And you can add custom types easily through your .ackrc, it is a very well put together piece of software.<p>(PS: If you're trying it, definitely try out 'ack --bar')
This freeware (for personal use) saved me dozens of hours renaming files: <a href="http://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk/Screenshots.php" rel="nofollow">http://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk/Screenshots.php</a>
* 'set -o vi' in bash lets me search my command history with the same keys as moving around vi<p>* git + sql scripts<p>* simplenote (notes across devices) Semi-automation of pieces of my job captured in these notes.<p>* zapier if I'm trying to connect two web apis.
For me it is i3wm - an amazing window manager. After using it for a few days you will never want to go back to using standard mac/linux wm, it is incredibly fast and convenient.<p>Another one is, of course, Emacs. By far the most useful and brilliant tool in my toolbox.
Over the years I've found I've saved the most time less from apps I've found but more the ability to write off-the-cuff single-use Ruby scripts. Whether scraping, renaming, fetching, etc, it can be a huge effort saver.
re: entry #1, if you are at all proficient with a unix/linux/bsd command line, learn to use the command line tools for the ImageMagick library. There are a great many things you can accomplish with the "mogrify" CLI tool to batch manipulate images, and integrate it into workflow/shell scripts.
On the Mac, I think the combination of capability and customizability makes Keyboard Maestro well worth buying for any advanced user. Or, as the software overview describes it, "The only limit to Keyboard Maestro is your imagination!"<p>And while I have no idea how the information is calculated, the About dialog says the software has saved me 6 months (~4,000 hours). It may well be more than that since I've used KM for about 10 years now and that information is a recent addition.
xargs is a remarkable time saver. jq for JSON parsing and selecting at the CLI. ^X^E at the shell to edit command in $EDITOR. for loops at the shell. until at the shell. atd for "run this in two hours".<p>IntelliJ for everything. Extract methods and interfaces auto-modifying to support close duplicates. Signature changes. That sort of thing.<p>Rsync. Zsync allowed me to even get Linux back in the day (thank you Ubuntu).
When working with Excel, there is an addon (paid) called KUTOOLS that saved me a lot of time. It has a bunch of preset operations like removing duplicates, merging multiple sheets, bulking changing rows etc.<p>Another text editor worth mentioning is EMEDITOR that has tons of macros and handles larger files much better than Sublime
Beyond Compare<p><a href="https://www.scootersoftware.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.scootersoftware.com/</a><p>Especially with integrated source control and remote sessions to manage source on multiple server types and platforms. Very customizable rules for compares and folder structure / filename case etc.<p>I used to use Araxis Merge, but Beyond Compare, with a tiny bit of customization, is in my opinion a far superior tool.
My current faves, far from exhaustive
- tac: for very large log files
- emacs: remote file editing, regex replace across matching files, macros, rectangle cut/paste, ...
- xargs -P <n>: use all the cores! for fanning work out across a pool of <n> processes; web scraping, processing lots of files at once
- docker: fast, precise and resusable image building
After spending last two days researching, followed by an hour of programming, this one can hopefully save you some time: automatize web browser tasks with imacros [1]. I use it to feed CSV data to database.<p>I tested multiple other options like Custom Style Script [2] and others but while being ok during initial tests, for some reason nothing worked on my typo3, js based backend website.<p>[1] <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/imacros-for-firefox/" rel="nofollow">https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/imacros-for-f...</a>
[2] <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/nn-NO/firefox/addon/custom-style-script/" rel="nofollow">https://addons.mozilla.org/nn-NO/firefox/addon/custom-style-...</a>
Windows here.
* SharpKeys - swap capslock and escape.
* Keepass - password manager.
* AutoHotkey - a lot of stuff, ex. Escape + scroll truns volume up or dow, Alt + x closes windows
* Wox - launcher with plugins
* Everything - fast file search by name
* Tablacus - file explorer with plugins
Greenshot - <a href="http://getgreenshot.org/" rel="nofollow">http://getgreenshot.org/</a><p>This is THE best screenshot tool on Windows, I've installed it on every machine I use. It also has an editor where you add text, highlight, circle things, etc.
You can store screenshots in a custom folder like this:<p><pre><code> # Store screenshots in ~/temp/screenshots
mkdir -p ~/temp/screenshots
defaults write com.apple.screencapture location ~/temp/screenshots</code></pre>
autohotkey ... task specific ad hoc scripting<p>* mouse moves<p>* keyboard input<p>* raising lowering windows<p>* one keypress -> multiple effects<p>create an edit -> launch -> debug tight loop ? no problem<p>dismiss annoying Lotus Notes dialog warning box -> no problem<p>enter 5000 multi tabbed entries from a CSV into a custom gui -> no problem !!
FastStone Photo Resizer is an excellent batch image resizer/watermarker for Windows that is free <a href="http://faststone.org/FSResizerDetail.htm" rel="nofollow">http://faststone.org/FSResizerDetail.htm</a> .No affiliation.
Apart from many unix utilities (grep, awk, vim) etc, tmux has definitely changed the way i work. Simple idea of session -> window -> pane takes away all the friction of switching between tabs and windows.
Napkin . I use it every day many times a day to make screen shots with quick annotations<p><a href="http://aged-and-distilled.com/" rel="nofollow">http://aged-and-distilled.com/</a>
Does anyone know if something like Hazel exists for Linux?<p>I know I could basically write scripts and start them with SystemD timers/cron but.. not sure it'd be worth the effort doing it all myself.
BBEdit (barebones.com) on macOS.<p>- Perl regexp's<p>- Worksheets for thing you'd want to remember<p>- Process Duplicates Lines / Process Lines Containing<p>- Nice set of Markup tools<p>- Diff<p>- Support all kinds of versioning systems<p>Araxis Merge (x-platform) for text, image, folder diffs.
Whoa, when I click on this link, it automatically closes the tab it resides in!<p>At first I thought this was an elaborate meta joke since not reading articles would save me thousands of hours, but I think it is a bug. I am using the latest google chrome with a very restrictive uMatrix that blocks pretty much all cross-site requests that are not images, and Ad-Block.