FTL and Into The Breach are made by two developers, Justin and Matt of Subset Games.<p>Woz wrote all the Apple I and II software.<p>Cave Story, a metroidvania still actively ported to new platforms today.<p>Doom had a very small team, Carmack doing most/all of the engine work.<p>Dwarf Fortress is by two developers, and simulates its environment down to a very precise level of detail.<p>Many more here: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6u4pn/what_successful_software_projects_are_oneman/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6u4pn/what_suc...</a>
Calibre developed by Kovid Goyal it's a one stop shop for eBook management.
His reply to the issue<p>"Python 2 is retiring in thirty months. Calibre needs to convert to Python 3."<p>was<p>"No, it doesn't. I am perfectly capable of maintaining python 2 myself.
Far less work than migrating the entire calibre codebase.<p>status wontfix"<p>[1] <a href="https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/1714107" rel="nofollow">https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/1714107</a>
Photopea
<a href="https://www.photopea.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.photopea.com</a><p>Also Sayonara is a great music player for Linux - <a href="https://sayonara-player.com" rel="nofollow">https://sayonara-player.com</a>
Redis I would say, by Salvatore Sanfilippo (<a href="https://github.com/antirez" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/antirez</a>)
SQLite by D. Richard Hipp also still maintains it by himself
I guess Linux kernel could also be considered still being maintained by a single person even though it's mostly contributions from other people, don't know the rules
I've been amazed almost every single day since I installed it few months ago by how useful and well done Dato on macOS is.<p><a href="https://sindresorhus.com/dato" rel="nofollow">https://sindresorhus.com/dato</a><p>It fixes one of my main issue with macOS, its inability to show a calendar by clicking on the day in status bar, and adds tons of great feature without feeling bloaty. Great great job. Thank you Sindre Sorhus for making my life easier !
Another World <a href="http://anotherworld.fr/anotherworld_uk/another_world.htm" rel="nofollow">http://anotherworld.fr/anotherworld_uk/another_world.htm</a><p>The author, Eric Chahi, did the design, art, code and some sound effects. Jean-François Freitas did the music and sound effects.
Wondered that nobody mentioned Latex.
I didn't look at the source code, but Laslie Lamport said he would pay a price (1000 USD?) for every error detected, and AFAIR he never had to pay a single dime. So the code should be qualifying for 'excellent'.
Rnote - Sketch and take handwritten notes.<p>Use it daily to take notes in lessons, never had any issues with it and he fixes stuff really fast compared to other similar sized projects (in my experience).<p>Before that i used xournal++ but rnote feels more stable/modern but lacks some features that xournal++ has<p><a href="https://github.com/flxzt/rnote" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/flxzt/rnote</a>
TempleOS<p>RIP Terry A. David<p><a href="https://templeos.org/" rel="nofollow">https://templeos.org/</a>
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TempleOS" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TempleOS</a>
Minecraft (actually 2 people?), rollercoaster tycoon (written in assembly), the first version of the Facebook, ape (a plasmid editor), Stardew valley, onward VR(??).
I'm not sure about "a single person" but I believe Flask and Requests (both Python libraries) are/were at least strongly connected to a single 'creator' (Armin Ronacher and Kenneth Reitz respectively) that come to mind for me, though both have larger communities of contributors these days.
The Acorn image editor for macOS by Gus Mueller is shockingly polished for a one-person project. I use it all the time. In my few times interacting with him through support he’s been really kind as well.<p><a href="https://flyingmeat.com/acorn/" rel="nofollow">https://flyingmeat.com/acorn/</a>
Capnproto by Kenton Varda <<a href="https://capnproto.org" rel="nofollow">https://capnproto.org</a>>.<p>There have certainly been other contributors <<a href="https://github.com/capnproto/capnproto/blob/master/CONTRIBUTORS" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/capnproto/capnproto/blob/master/CONTRIBUT...</a>>, but Kenton does most of the development and maintenance on his own.<p>There are few things I lament more than having to spin up on a new serialization / file format and it isn't using Capnproto or Protobufs or some similar invention. Capnproto has truly spoiled me in terms of how consistent and feature rich it is for what seems like a "simple" task.
I'm not sure if it truly fits this category, but HarfBuzz[0], maintained primarily by Behdad Esfahbod, comes to mind.<p>[0] <a href="https://harfbuzz.github.io/" rel="nofollow">https://harfbuzz.github.io/</a>
Loren Brichter’s iOS word game, Letterpress, was a one-person tour de force. Not only did he do the sound effects himself, but he apparently bypassed UIKit entirely using OpenGL calls. Kinda crazy, but then again he was on the original iPhone team…<p><a href="https://www.imore.com/loren-brichter-talks-opengl-tweetie-letterpress-and-future-interface" rel="nofollow">https://www.imore.com/loren-brichter-talks-opengl-tweetie-le...</a>
LooknStop Firewall was the best - but who can tell what happened to the only author Frederic Gloannec ?<p>Everything Search 1.5 Alpha by David Carpenter is available for testing ( <a href="https://www.voidtools.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=9787" rel="nofollow">https://www.voidtools.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=9787</a> ).
There are so many. MIDIBox by Thorsten Klose is great. Open source hardware and software. There are a ton of projects based on it. I am not sure what the level of other contributors are now, but it was mostly or all Thorsten back when I was looking at it 10-15 years ago.<p><a href="http://midibox.org/" rel="nofollow">http://midibox.org/</a>
Quentin Zervaas is the creator of the Streaks habit-tracking app (<a href="https://streaksapp.com" rel="nofollow">https://streaksapp.com</a>), which I find to be excellent and extremely well thought-out. I’m not sure if he’s still working independently or has a team.
I last used it more than a decade ago, but Pegasus Mail by David Harris was my MUA for more than a decade before that: <a href="https://www.pmail.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.pmail.com</a>. Surprisingly it seems to be still alive even today.
<a href="https://beta.f1mv.com/" rel="nofollow">https://beta.f1mv.com/</a> as it's enhanced the experience for F1 for me. Built by a single dev and better than anything F1 management has released as official clients.
FASM (Flat Assembler) by Tomasz Grysztar:
<a href="https://flatassembler.net" rel="nofollow">https://flatassembler.net</a><p>Unfortunately it won't run on recent Macs since it's written in 32-bit assembly, so some modifications are needed.
qmail/djbdns written by Dan Bernstein were groundbreaking when released, and are extremely interesting in terms of how to build and design robust software to be deployed in a security-critical hostile environment
xv image viewer by John Bradley<p>fvwm by Robert Nation<p>gwm (generic window manager) by Colas Nahaboo<p>lilo by Werner Almesberger<p>vim by Bram Moolenaar