I've asked this previously: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22849208" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22849208</a><p>But a few years have past and want to see what's emerged since. Although can be new to you vs. released in 2021 or 2022 necessarily.<p>Things I've come across in the meantime:<p>* mock AWS services <a href="https://github.com/spulec/moto">https://github.com/spulec/moto</a><p>* query cloud services <a href="https://github.com/turbot/steampipe">https://github.com/turbot/steampipe</a><p>* munge CSV <a href="https://github.com/johnkerl/miller">https://github.com/johnkerl/miller</a> <a href="https://github.com/BurntSushi/xsv">https://github.com/BurntSushi/xsv</a><p>* page json <a href="https://github.com/PaulJuliusMartinez/jless">https://github.com/PaulJuliusMartinez/jless</a><p>* text to tree structure [I use this as a hack to version control my music library] <a href="https://github.com/birchb1024/frangipanni">https://github.com/birchb1024/frangipanni</a>
Gotta say IntelliJ, which isn't just for Java. It's a great coding platform and I used it for Scala, Go, Python, Bash, Java, PHP, Perl, you name it. I know many people like to hate on IDEs, but IntelliJ (and/or its language-specific variants like PyCharm or GoLand) has great support for all the debuggers in the above languages. It has awesome search/replace. Being able to "drill down" in to code, including 3rd party libraries with barely any configuration is like magic. The git integration is phenomenal - I rarely get stumped doing anything in git and dealing with merge conflicts are a breeze.
LSP. The Language Server Protocol. Entirely changed my life for the better this year, once I took the time to get it integrated into Emacs and get the various backends I needed installed.<p>Easily has saved me hundreds of hours so far, being able to view function prototypes quickly, pull up documentation as an overlay on the code, jumping to the next error, and even down to getting simple things like enumerated 'case' labels inside of a switch statement.
Each of the following is in the 1000 hours saved club (in no particular order):<p>jq, perl, grep, gnu textutils, gnu parallel, bash, xargs, gkrellm, nload.<p>Make deserves a special shout out. If you think it's only useful for building software, you've completely missed the point (similarly, if you think some language-specific tool is superior, you're doing things completely wrong):<p>Anyway, this document saved me at least 10,000 hours:<p><a href="https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/html_node/index.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/html_node/index.htm...</a><p>Other peoples' python has the distinction of being the only software in my -1000 hours saved category. (And if you consider maintaining code written in the above "write only" languages, you'll realize how big of a feat that is!)
Microsoft Excel. Manipulating tens or hundreds of thousands of rows, including cross-referencing across tables, is just so satisfying and much faster than doing it with a DB or code. Alternative spreadsheet software do some things better, but they don't come close as a complete package, I don't regret paying for it myself for the first time in my life. It such a life saver in a pinch.<p>Obligatory Spolsky intro to Excel: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c</a>
I find good use of my skill in the following:<p>DBeaver: use a consistent interface for practically any data store. Wanna SELECT and JOIN CSVs? It can do that too.<p><a href="https://www.mail-tester.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.mail-tester.com/</a> - Fantastic email server settings troubleshooter.<p>Excel / Calc / Gnumeric: I don't even know macros, just the functions, sorting, filtering, and pivot tables enable good productivity. And sometimes fun, I chose my current video card, and optimized my Factorio gameplay with Calc.<p>BASH, jq, sed, grep, tr, cut, Geany, regexes: it's fantastic to be able to work with text. Log parsing and other text tasks turn into a puzzle game, where I win fast, and it's usually faster than to use anything else, especially for one-offs.
Not a program, but the concept of functional programming and pure functions. It makes it a lot easier to think about code, and also makes it easier to test and parallelize code.<p>Although be warned, it can also have the "side-effect" (functional programming pun!) of making you somewhat insufferable as you try to convince everyone around you that functional programming is amazing.
Ultrafast, super lite file search on Windows, Voidtools "Everything": <a href="https://www.voidtools.com/support/everything/" rel="nofollow">https://www.voidtools.com/support/everything/</a><p>I haven't touched the Windows Search utility since I found it.
GitHub Copilot<p>As a manager & parent with only occasional bursts of time to code (some work, mostly side/fun stuff), Copilot has turned out to be incredibly useful in smoothing over all of the small things I'm slow at because I don't do them daily. And especially since I have limited time, I just want to get the damn thing working and am quite happy to <Tab> my way there as quickly as possible.
Vimium. Vim-like shortcuts for the browser. I can't name any other tool or extension that gives me anywhere near the productivity boost of Vimium. I spend probably half of my work day plus a few hours a day in my spare time in the browser, and it makes navigating the browser feel like butter. When I'm tired and don't want to be glued to my desk, I can relax and surf with one hand which just feels incredible. I quickly got so used to it that I instinctively try to use Vimium shortcuts when I'm on other computes and feel withdrawal symptoms if I realize that it isn't installed.
RedwoodJS <a href="https://github.com/redwoodjs/redwood">https://github.com/redwoodjs/redwood</a><p>I launched my startup from 0 to first customer in 3 months thanks to this guy. Most of my time saved was because of a solid collection of libraries, brilliantly integrated together (backend to frontend), and I didn't have to suffer analysis paralysis every time I needed something.
I feel like I have a unique one here. The chrome extension: "Replace Youtube's Home with Subscriptions"<p>It has easily saved me over 100 hours by preventing me from continuously scrolling through youtube recommendations.<p><a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/replace-youtubes-home-wit/nfffnooajndeeejgejfkbphjocpkblog?hl=en" rel="nofollow">https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/replace-youtubes-h...</a>
Vim. I can never leave modal editing now. Been using it since 2010 and I think in vim when editing. It lets me enter a flow state so much easier. My brain maps into writing and editing.
Seeing a lot of “fiddly” software being listed here. Stuff that lets you configure and tune a workflow endlessly. It’s ironic that this is the sort of thing most of us will think of, since it doesn’t really account for time saved so much as time spent fiddling…<p>Keeping an eye out for software that you barely use, as this is the kind with the most potential to truly save me time.
Autohotkey
There is simply no better automation program on any OS. I even run a fully fledged tiling wm written in autohotkey. ( For reference, here's when I tricked r/unixporn into thinking it was bspwm <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/nhzz3b/confession_time/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/nhzz3b/confession...</a>
)<p>Fluent search
Spotlight on steroids, for windows. Apart from being a search/launcher, it has a bunch of atrociously good features. It lets you use a custom search indexing backend, which brings me to...<p>Everything
A search indexer backend for windows. Really great search.
If you use Ansible at any larger amount, then you're doing a disservice to yourself if you're not using Mitogen[1][2]. The amount of waiting it has spared me is innumerable at this point.<p>---<p>[1]: <a href="https://scribe.rip/@einarum/speed-up-ansible-with-mitogen-b3a9bf40bc93" rel="nofollow">https://scribe.rip/@einarum/speed-up-ansible-with-mitogen-b3...</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://mitogen.networkgenomics.com/ansible_detailed.html" rel="nofollow">https://mitogen.networkgenomics.com/ansible_detailed.html</a>
Anki - I don't know how I'd prep for the MCAT without this. Open source with desktop and mobile clients, syncing via cloud. It's flashcarding but uses gradual intervals so you see things less often once you've retained them.<p>ChatGPT - I use this as a private tutor (it's great for biomedical stuff) to check my understanding and ask it to correct me if I'm wrong.
Espanso [0] - such a useful text expander with easy inclusion of shell commands and many other features. I love this thing so much as someone in the medical field that I made my first ever open source contribution to it.<p>0: <a href="https://espanso.org" rel="nofollow">https://espanso.org</a>
Did a lot of data wrangling this year. The usual grep, sed, awk, jq and even find has sped up my days significantly. Sed is among my favorites to whip up some quick, ad hoc, transformations.<p>This year I added Miller [0] to my list; a tool to process tabular data, similar to sed, awk, etc. It handles csv, tav, json lines, etc. in a consistent way. I like the delimited key-value pairs format, which allows me to write simple oneliners in bash to collect some data (e.g. "ip=x.x.x.x,endpoint=/api/x") and use Miller to crunch the results. Not sure it saved me 100h, but it was one of the biggest time savers this year!<p>[0] <a href="https://miller.readthedocs.io/en/latest/" rel="nofollow">https://miller.readthedocs.io/en/latest/</a>
Still Karabiner and it's probably 1000 hours yearly at this point.<p><a href="https://wiki.nikiv.dev/macOS/apps/karabiner" rel="nofollow">https://wiki.nikiv.dev/macOS/apps/karabiner</a><p>On order of 100 hours, this year I'd say it's Sublime Merge, VSCode, Height (to manage projects) and Telegram.
Not a program, but being very familiar with the keyboard shortcuts in SublimeText has saved me countless hours of dev time.<p>Things like Ctrl-D to highlight multiple instances of a word, plus the ability to put on Caps checking in the search bar first so you're only highlighting correctly capitalized versions. Make the same change in multiple locations. Saves so much time.<p>Knowing how to highlight a letter, a word, a line at a time.<p>Ctrl-shift-down to make your cursor span multiple lines at the same point, and have copy/paste respect the copied text from the respective lines.<p>So many things add up to hours upon hours of time saved, and frustration avoided.
SmartTubeNext[1]<p>In installed it on my Android TV instead of the official Youtube app and it saved me literal hours:<p>- it blocks ads<p>- it includes SponsorBlock, so sponsored segments, intros, "plz subscribe" are skipped<p>- it allows me to block Shorts<p>Anytime I have to use an official Youtube app, I remember how unusable it was. I even gave Youtube premium a try at some point, but SponsorBlock is just too good to ignore.<p>[1]: <a href="https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTubeNext">https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTubeNext</a>
Home Assistant [0] through bunch of automations we have around our home must’ve saved 100h in total for me and my partner so far.<p>[0] - <a href="https://www.home-assistant.io/" rel="nofollow">https://www.home-assistant.io/</a>
Sioyek: <a href="https://sioyek.info" rel="nofollow">https://sioyek.info</a><p>It's a PDF viewer that automatically finds and previews references in documents, even when the PDF doesn't have links. Makes reading some math books a very enjoyable experience instead of a chore.
The Mosh SSH client for intermittent connectivity ( <a href="https://mosh.org/" rel="nofollow">https://mosh.org/</a> ) has definitely saved me at least 100 hours. Too bad that it's only available for Windows as a Chrome extension, and Chrome will discontinue support for it starting in the new year. Really not looking forward to having to search for an alternative...
Ditto Clipboard Manager for Windows. Yes, I know W10/11 have it native now, but it's not as good as Ditto.<p><a href="https://ditto-cp.sourceforge.io/" rel="nofollow">https://ditto-cp.sourceforge.io/</a><p>AutoHotKey<p><a href="https://www.autohotkey.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.autohotkey.com/</a><p>And if deleting TikTok from my phone were an app, it would be nominated, because that saved me <i>hundreds</i> of hours I'm sure :D
Going to say my own <a href="https://github.com/boyter/scc/">https://github.com/boyter/scc/</a> which I have used to turn down projects of "Oh we just need to do X"<p>It allows me to evaluate the code-base quickly and see where potential issues are, and find hidden complexity in the code. I have said no a lot due to it. The only reason it exists was because I got caught out from another project, which wasted months of my time.<p>Otherwise IntelliJ and the JetBrains IDE's in general.
Not 100h yet but I've been replacing custom Linux command output parsing with <a href="https://kellyjonbrazil.github.io/jc/" rel="nofollow">https://kellyjonbrazil.github.io/jc/</a> (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33448204" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33448204</a>) lately.
Looking at your list you may like VisiData (<a href="https://www.visidata.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.visidata.org/</a>). See the demo from 2018: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1CBDTgGtOU">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1CBDTgGtOU</a>
<i>make</i> + <i>pandoc</i> + <i>a build script in my own programming language</i> + <i>latex</i> allow me to auto-generate the reference manual for my toy Lisp interpreter.[1] That was definitely a huge time-saver, since I already had the help entries for an online help system.<p>[1] <a href="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rasteric/z3s5-lisp/main/docs/reference/build/reference.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rasteric/z3s5-lisp/main/do...</a>
vi and friends (vim/neovim)<p>Being able to edit text by piping it through shell commands and back into the buffer is pretty darn useful. In this case, it's not vi alone that provides the benefit, but whatever.<p>Macros and registers can be super handy when you have to do the same thing over and over in a big file. Sure, I could write a script, but sometimes it's just easier to do it by hand once and repeat the macro thousands of times.<p>Once you are able to commit certain operations to muscle memory, you can really whip around. For instance 'vapgq' selects around the current paragraph and formats it.
kanata[1] and komokana[2].<p>kanata is basically like QMK for any keyboard without the firmware requirement. I use kanata with my trusty old iMac keyboard which is to this day my favourite keyboard of all time. But now I have all the cool QMK-style layers with it.<p>So that is awesome on its own, but where it gets even better for me, and this is where the seconds have really added up to hours, is that I wrote another piece of software which programmatically changes layers on kanata whenever a different window is focused in my tiling window manager.<p>This has honestly changed -everything- for me. I no longer have to waste keys on my keyboard to switch layers, I no longer have to -think- about switching layers, I just focus another window with alt+hjkl and whatever keyboard layer I expect for any given application is automatically applied. Definitely one of those "you can never go back" experiences for me.<p>[1]: <a href="https://github.com/jtroo/kanata">https://github.com/jtroo/kanata</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komokana">https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komokana</a>
Matrix Docker Ansible Deploy [1] allows me to unify all chat networks that I use under one single server (and, therefore, one single client), avoiding switching windows. I do believe it saved me hundred of hours...<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy">https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy</a>
gron <a href="https://github.com/tomnomnom/gron">https://github.com/tomnomnom/gron</a><p>It takes JSON input and produces flat, key-value output based on the path to the value. Usage with grep was obviously the original intention, but I've used it to help me better understand a given JSON's structure, too, which I then usually reflect back into a program that's consuming that JSON.<p>It also supports "ungron" too, so, for example, `gron some.json | grep -v "thing I don't want" | gron -u > filtered.json" makes for quick filtering of a JSON. I find it more user friendly than jq's language.
Throwing my hat in the ring for Justfile. It's basically a streamlined make.<p><a href="https://github.com/casey/just">https://github.com/casey/just</a><p>Where it really shines are in places like monorepos where you may have many inter-related setup scripts, build commands or helper utilities.<p>You define all of your commands in one file (or multiple if you want a hierarchy) and can run commands from any subdirectory.<p>eg. You have a monorepo with a web server, and also a react-native app in separate directories, you can call `just build-app` in the web directory, or call just `start-server` when your terminal's current directory is 7 diretories deep in the mobile directory.<p>The amount of time I have saved cd'ing around has honestly been amazing. It's worth it's weight in gold, especially on large projects.
Not 100 hours yet but I've been pleasantly surprised how effective ChatGPT is at giving me code that is 90-100% good to work with. Never used Copilot but now I'm warming up to this idea.
I've been using clickhouse-local (the CLI tool, not the database) a lot recently to do data analysis work. It's simpler/better developer experience when using local files for quick data analysis compared to writing python scripts. As someone who does a lot of data science and is not a software engineer, it feels more natural to write SQL vs. having to write actual code–and it's super fast...
Careful with moto: it uses Python's context managers to set-up and tear-down the mocking. If you haven't got the right mixture of nesting, yields, etc. then you may end up running tests against real AWS resources (using your default credentials).<p>For this reason, I don't have any default AWS credentials configured: I always specify an AWS_PROFILE manually when it's needed ;)
Fish + Starship (<a href="https://starship.rs/" rel="nofollow">https://starship.rs/</a>) + z (<a href="https://github.com/jethrokuan/z">https://github.com/jethrokuan/z</a>). For me it is a really nice configuration, fast do do stuff & visually pleasant (it influences my comfort & motivation).
GitHub Actions. While it is not the only CI tool, its low barrier to entry does magic. I use it for tests & deployment (of anything, including the smallest personal projects), taking periodic screenshots of my websites, and building PDF files from its LaTeX source.
mpv, mpvacious [1], and anki<p>I've been learning spanish, and since hitting the intermediate stage outside of talking I mainly watch spanish shows or dubbed shows (Star trek TNG). I can create flash cards of difficult to understand phrases, or new words in seconds.<p>I usually still edit them slightly depending on my purpose for the flashcard, but having > 2000 cards right now, I can't imagine what doing this by hand, or manual review would have cost me.<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/Ajatt-Tools/mpvacious">https://github.com/Ajatt-Tools/mpvacious</a>
Ninite's automated installers [1].<p>This one tool has saved me hundreds of hours back in my support days (both at previous sidejobs and family members' houses) in downloading, installing, and _updating_ basic applications. I could leave the tiny Ninite executable on their desktop with the instruction to just run it once a month and it would keep all their stuff up to date.<p>[1] <a href="https://ninite.com/" rel="nofollow">https://ninite.com/</a> Install or Update Multiple Apps at Once
k9s makes me feel like (and look like to my coworkers) a k8s wizard, the parenthetical especially when I'm sharing my terminal and zipping around using keyboard shortcuts<p><a href="https://github.com/derailed/k9s">https://github.com/derailed/k9s</a>
The pure power of ripgrep + emacs to speed up refactoring _probably_ offsets the lots of game time i've spend diddling with my editor.<p>at least that's what i tell myself.
Easily <a href="https://vanyalabs.com/" rel="nofollow">https://vanyalabs.com/</a> (Access your FHIR API Data)<p>My own app, not even at the Alpha stage, has already saved me and my team 100s of hours of parsing JSON results in Postman.
The Singer spec <a href="https://www.singer.io/#what-it-is" rel="nofollow">https://www.singer.io/#what-it-is</a>, for data ingestion and loading<p>1. open source<p>2. hundreds of pre-built taps and targets (for apis and databases)<p>3. supports incremental and full refresh<p>4. don't need to write any SQL and it creates and loads tables for you<p>Stitch, Meltano, and (sort of) Airbyte also use it
Things - its a light weight todo app with just enough features to make it useful. I tend to use it for a dev log to keep track of what I'm working on, keep notes, and finally mark something as complete<p><a href="https://culturedcode.com/things/" rel="nofollow">https://culturedcode.com/things/</a>
Short chrome browser extension I wrote some time ago that rewrites normal urls to videos like this:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvPPXbo87ds">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvPPXbo87ds</a><p>into embedded video urls like this<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/embed/jvPPXbo87ds?autoplay=1">https://www.youtube.com/embed/jvPPXbo87ds?autoplay=1</a><p>bypassing ads and running video in full browser window.<p>Since I watch a lot of youtube I think it might have saved me 100 hours of waiting so I can press Skip Ad button.<p>I probably should just use AdBlock but where's the fun in that.
Dune (<a href="https://dune.build/" rel="nofollow">https://dune.build/</a>) is the preeminent build tool for OCaml development. I don't love its input syntax (s-expressions), and I sometimes miss the ability to write high-level functions to reduce boilerplate (especially for unit tests), but it <i>always</i> gets the dependencies right, and it's fast. This is in stark contrast to some of my experiences with various other build systems, and I am super happy that the default option for OCaml build systems is so good.
JetBrains CLion.<p>I used to program in Vim/Neovim. Using a full-blown IDE is a real productivity boost when programming in for example Rust, which is what I write the most, and use CLion for the most.<p>CLion has Vim emulation also. So I still have normal mode, insert mode, and most other main features of Vim that I know and love :)
The fish shell (<a href="https://fishshell.com/" rel="nofollow">https://fishshell.com/</a>) and its fantastic auto-completion. It now replaces bash as the default shell on all my machine and is the first program I install when connecting to a fresh cloud instance.
Not really a program, but this year the Tabu [0] heuristic saved me at least on that order of time. I work on combinatorial optimization problem (think traveling salesman), typically we use local search heuristics like simulated annealing or parallel tempering that work well but require a lot of hyper parameter tuning. Tabu is super simple, has very few parameters to tune, and works great.<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabu_search" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabu_search</a>
Greenshot - free, lightweight and just the right set of features for marking up screenshots and making new UI mockups based on existing screenshots of apps. I've tried a lot of other alternatives but they were either too complicated to use or lack a key feature.
I'd say that Charles Proxy (<a href="https://charlesproxy.com" rel="nofollow">https://charlesproxy.com</a>) is my "secret sauce."<p>It allows me to quickly evaluate server interactions in my software, without having to program in all kinds of logging.
On windows, <a href="http://symbolclick.com/index.htm" rel="nofollow">http://symbolclick.com/index.htm</a> is great for XML and JSON viewing. Use it pretty much everyday. Really love the way it display data in a table format.
Text Blaze (YC W21) has saved me about 50 hours over the past 18 months. They reduce repetitive typing across websites. For example if you have a common format for bugs you're filing, or LinkedIn messages or emails that you're sending, you can use Text Blaze to write most of the text for you. If you've used Superhuman snippets, this is similar but more powerful, and it works across the entire web instead of just email.<p>Time savings screenshot: <a href="https://imgur.com/a/KjFhWRH" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/a/KjFhWRH</a> (Disclosure: I liked the product so much that my fund ended up investing.)<p>Website: <a href="http://blaze.today/">http://blaze.today/</a><p>Chrome extension: <a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/text-blaze/idgadaccgipmpannjkmfddolnnhmeklj" rel="nofollow">https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/text-blaze/idgadac...</a>
I work as a consultant and have to do a timesheet. I use an old app called TimeSnapper that records screen grabs every few seconds. Works brilliantly for timesheets and has saved me numerous times.
My most time saving programs didn't change in several years:<p>Slickrun, floating command line for Windows
<a href="https://bayden.com/slickrun/" rel="nofollow">https://bayden.com/slickrun/</a><p>Autohotkey - shortcuts, text expander and scripting for everything
<a href="https://www.autohotkey.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.autohotkey.com/</a><p>Total Commander, still the best file manager on Windows
<a href="https://www.ghisler.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ghisler.com/</a><p>CyberChef - The "Cyber Swiss Army Knife" - single file web app for all kinds of conversions, encryption, encoding, compression and data analysis
<a href="https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/" rel="nofollow">https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/</a><p>Adminer - lighweigt database manager
<a href="https://www.adminer.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.adminer.org/</a>
Karabiner for key remapping has been instrumental for me. I use it for a "hyper key" on CapsLock to provide Vim-like movement keys, text selection, app-specific bind overrides, etc. There is also a library out there for configuring it with TypeScript (Deno).<p>Hammerspoon for window management is also amazing, though I recently switched to Phoenix because it can be configured in TypeScript. It allows me to have hotkeys to swap to specific apps or toggle between groups of apps.<p><a href="https://github.com/esamattis/deno_karabiner">https://github.com/esamattis/deno_karabiner</a><p><a href="https://kasper.github.io/phoenix/" rel="nofollow">https://kasper.github.io/phoenix/</a>
Excited to see Steampipe shared here - thanks zJayv! I'm a lead on the project, so sharing some quick info below and happy to answer any questions.<p>Steampipe [1] is open source and uses Postgres foreign data wrappers under the hood [2]. We have 90+ plugins to SQL query AWS, GitHub, Slack, Kubernetes, etc [3]. Mods (written in HCL) provide dashboards as code and automated security & compliance benchmarks [3]. We'd love your help & feedback!<p>1 - <a href="https://steampipe.io" rel="nofollow">https://steampipe.io</a>
2 - <a href="https://steampipe.io/docs/develop/overview" rel="nofollow">https://steampipe.io/docs/develop/overview</a>
3 - <a href="https://hub.steampipe.io/" rel="nofollow">https://hub.steampipe.io/</a>
GoAccess: <a href="https://goaccess.io/" rel="nofollow">https://goaccess.io/</a>. I don't miss Google Analytics at all.<p>Loom. It's not open source I don't think but I'm digging it and excited when a public domain competitor comes out.<p>Our <a href="https://scroll.pub/" rel="nofollow">https://scroll.pub/</a>. It's far beyond markdown at this point. I am able to not only write better but also maintain thousands of pages of content by hand (well, most of the credit for that belongs to Apple M1s, Sublime Text, git, MacOS, and Github). The stuff we are doing with it now would just not be possible with anything else, and what we're coming out with next year is super exciting. It's all public domain.
* <a href="https://virtualenvwrapper.readthedocs.io" rel="nofollow">https://virtualenvwrapper.readthedocs.io</a><p>also alias to create jupyter kernel for activated environment:<p><pre><code> mkkernel() {
if [ -n "$1" ]; then
KERNEL_NAME=$1
elif [ -z "$VIRTUAL_ENV" ]; then
echo "Pass either kernel name as argument or activate virtualenv"
return 1
else [ -z "$1" ]
KERNEL_NAME="$(basename $VIRTUAL_ENV)"
echo "No kernel name provided, using name from virtualenv $KERNEL_NAME"
fi
pip install ipykernel
python -m ipykernel install --user --name=$KERNEL_NAME
}</code></pre>
Cleanshot X<p>I'm a product designer. I spend a significant amount of time taking screenshots—dropping them in Figma, slacking them to PMs and annotating them for engineers. The tool keeps screenshots suspended on your desktop until you decide what to do with them—save, annotate or copy it to clipboard. It doesn't save the screenshots if you don't want it to, so it prevents a ton of clutter.<p>Not to mention it has video recording that I frequently use to create video walkthroughs for features I'm working on.<p>The tool is a pretty expensive Mac App, but worth every penny.<p><a href="https://cleanshot.com/" rel="nofollow">https://cleanshot.com/</a>
<a href="https://grep.app/" rel="nofollow">https://grep.app/</a> and <a href="https://cht.sh/" rel="nofollow">https://cht.sh/</a> for quick reference.
Assuming python sqlite is being dumb with regards to transactions and functions and that simple optimizations aren't just futile efforts from ignorance and narcissism has saved me 100s of hours in runtime alone.<p>Also the commonality of fast networks really hit me this year. I was using free wifi at a small coffee shop in Tokyo and was transferring files to my apartment in Los Angeles at ~20MB/s. That's faster than my local LAN was 15 years ago over 5,000 miles of ocean, so cheap that they give it out for free if you buy a coffee. Absurd
During my freshman year of college, I was in a general chemistry class. Halfway through the semester I wrote a little Python script that encoded mass of a whole bunch of (not all of) elements and wrote some functions to calculate mass of compounds plus a few other useful quantities. Homework was online so I didn't have to show work - I would just type in the compound and whatever I wanted to calculate. If not 100 hours, it saved quite a bit of time!
Windows.
I used Mac OS X a few years. But in my opinion Mac OS X is (or was, back in this time) PITA. Switching back to Windows has definitively saved me hundreds of hours!
Flying Logic<p>Aeon Timeline<p>ObservableHQ - particularly the discovery that I can use most of it locally and privately for free. I've tried with quarto so far, but I think there are other ways too.<p>What I want is a way to instantly switch between dag and tree data structures: graph for visual editing, tree for easy data entry. So something that would analyze/cluster intelligently to minimize links when converting to tree, for when children have multiple parents.
clickhouse-local[1] saved me countless hours.<p>I'm using it for format conversion, data processing, querying external data, as a calculator, etc...<p><pre><code> clickhouse-local --input-format Parquet --output-format JSONEachRow --query "SELECT * FROM table" < data.parquet > data.jsonl
cat books.ndjson | clickhouse-local --query "SELECT author, avg(rating) FROM table GROUP BY author"
clickhouse-local --query "SELECT * FROM url('https://datasets.clickhouse.com/hackernews.native.zst') LIMIT 10"
$ clickhouse-local
ClickHouse local version 22.13.1.1.
milovidov-desktop :) SELECT extractTextFromHTML(*) FROM url('https://news.ycombinator.com/', RawBLOB)
</code></pre>
[1]: <a href="https://clickhouse.com/docs/en/operations/utilities/clickhouse-local/" rel="nofollow">https://clickhouse.com/docs/en/operations/utilities/clickhou...</a>
Vim, and it probably saved me way more than 100 hours. I use for coding (C++/JavaScript), for writing academic publications (dissertation/papers) and for writing e-mail (through mutt).<p>I've used it so much that it is second nature at this point, and moving to any other editor without my ever growing set of macros, etc would significantly impact my productivity.
* text-based ERD diagram: <a href="https://quick-erd.surge.sh" rel="nofollow">https://quick-erd.surge.sh</a>
with cli to auto generate incremental knex migrations<p>* array-like proxy-based ORM: <a href="https://www.npmjs.com/package/better-sqlite3-proxy" rel="nofollow">https://www.npmjs.com/package/better-sqlite3-proxy</a>
the schema and typescript definition can be generated from erd text in above format<p>* a composible and typescript-friendly json parser for data validation: <a href="https://www.npmjs.com/package/cast.ts" rel="nofollow">https://www.npmjs.com/package/cast.ts</a><p>I'm not sure if they save 100 hours but they're definitely timer savers for me as an educator that need to create lots of web projects frequently.
Docker. Shipping every single script along with all dependencies saved me from hundreds of hours of fixing stuff after updates. And I don't mean production stuff, just helper scripts and programs that I'd normally use a few times a year and which don't need the latest security (let alone feature) updates.
Red Gate's SQL Prompt for SQL Server Management Studio. Saved countless hours in very small increments: <a href="https://www.red-gate.com/products/sql-development/sql-prompt/" rel="nofollow">https://www.red-gate.com/products/sql-development/sql-prompt...</a>
the moonlander keyboard and its customization software have been my biggest time saver this year. it's worth the hype, the price and the time investment learning to use it effectively. 100 hours maybe... but I bet I've saved 100 miles of finger travel distance and half a million key presses by now
For me, Docker and Terraform. Packaging software easily and swapping it without too much hassle has saved me hours of pain.<p>Same with Terraform. The provider ecosystem is so extended that you can just grab them and make infrastructure rapidly, instead of using some cloud-specific language and syntax
I'll join those who benefit from personal workflow automation. I use<p>BASH
Alfred
Applescript
NodeJS
bbedit<p>in a zillion combinations to make things fast and easy. I have a bad memory so I have tons of BASH aliases and .bashrc terminal reminder files. I use Alfred, for example, to record 'time clientA 1 do an hour of work' in a tenth of a second. I use Alfred and AppleScript to shuffle windows around as I focus attention or finish things. bbedit's find/replace/regex stuff is better than anything I have ever seen. I use it to munge files in crazy ways. I have a set of files that act as a NodeJS ad hoc workspace. (Need to change the GUID on the records in a tsv file? Not a problem.)<p>And when I do something that has ongoing value, Alfred and/or bbedit give me a way to add them to the toolkit.
BetterTouchTools and Karabiner Elements for macOS.<p>With a swipe of four fingers, I can turn a set of windows into a tiled configuration by "shoving" them where I need to go.<p>When I press Caps Lock, which I've rebound in Karabiner to F16 and then bound F16+various modifiers to Activate/Hide Application in BTT, I can switch between IntelliJ, Chrome, Figma, Slack, Notion, so fast that I feel like I have 3x as many monitors as I do - which, whether paired with actual monitors or on the road, is absolutely game-changing.<p>Knowing that I can context-switch immediately and get everything I need on screen, just so, lets me wear a lot more hats than I otherwise could have. There's an argument that I'm able to deliver results at a level as if I had 100 more hours every month!
I have an extremely useful (for a very specific need) vba module collection for excel spreadsheets - I have often considered rewriting in an app, but the graphing outputs always kill my interest. I use it whenever I’m working after 20 + yrs , there are now a few proprietary packages that do the same, but are very easily misused, so even I use them for clients I still work from my own rather archaic vba assisted spreadsheet. I used vba because the calculations I was doing simply exceeded the abilities of spreadsheets - too many lines, it’s was an unusual discovery when I realised that my spreadsheet wasn’t fully evaluating the data set - handling just numbers and a vba module has never presented a problem.
Don’t know if this has been mentioned yet — for those dealing with tabular data I highly recommend visidata— you can just “vd file.csv” and it shows you a table view in your terminal, with lots of super useful keyboard actions to sort, move, filter etc.
bourne shell (now bash) has saved me tons of time. It's ridiculously easy to glue stuff together...like migrating 10k videos from one video CMS to another, with custom fields etc. How do you drive that? bash scripts driving node, curl, and a few other programs.
tmux. I only discovered it in the last several weeks so it hasn't saved me 100 hours yet, but it very clearly will. It has completely changed the way I work. Now I mostly work with just one large terminal window and I hardly ever touch the mouse anymore.
<a href="http://freedom.to" rel="nofollow">http://freedom.to</a><p>Block websites so you can focus on work. Different blocklists and different sessions makes it easy for me to stay focused during the week. Best investment in myself I ever made.
JASC Paint Shop Pro 7.04 from 2001. Still by bitmap editor of choice. Unfortunately all versions after that were crap and the 7.04 lacks alpha channel support when copying to or pasting from the clipboard. But man, am I fast with that tool.
clickhouse-local is a really good tool for analyzing local data, as it supports a wide range of data formats and it's really fast. It can save you a lot of time, because there is no need to install a batch of packages to use it or setup a database server. Just download a binary/install one package and enjoy. It has developed rapidly in recent years and continues to improve.
<a href="https://clickhouse.com/docs/en/operations/utilities/clickhouse-local/" rel="nofollow">https://clickhouse.com/docs/en/operations/utilities/clickhou...</a>
VSCode / IntelliJ / Netbeans / Eclipse - it is crazy how much time a decent IDE with refactoring support can save. (And still many on HN hate on them. I am fairly sure that for most people that spend lots of time on vim had spent as much time as they spend to get good at vim at learning and customizing a normal, good IDE, they'd have much better return on investment.)<p>Git / SVN / CVS - never having to worry about if I can undo my way back to the last combination of files that worked its a superpower that we mostly take for granted, but I was over 20 when I learned it.<p>JUnit - again, being able to experiment fearlessly.
The combination of TypeScript, VSCode and GitHub Copilot is just a joy to work with.<p>The are valid criticisms of Coplilot around copyright but I'm not using it to generate whole algorithms. It just knows your code and what you are trying to do.
PHP Propel 2.0<p>It’s a small ORM with nice features and it saved me a ton of time.
Just generate the classes from the database. Very fast to iterate from.<p><a href="https://propelorm.org/" rel="nofollow">https://propelorm.org/</a>
RipGrep has been a huge time saver. I work in huge legacy code base. Lots of modules, lots of content, lots of scripts. Sometimes I can just go to parent directory with all repos and search with RipGrep if ever needed.
Mailstore. It's an email archiving program, and saves a ton of time in searching for emails at our company by allowing you to search all emails in every email address for what you're looking for.
McFly[1] is a terminal history search replacement that is more context aware. The only downside is I am probably not memorizing the commands I use as much as I should.<p>Flycut[2] has certainly saved me a lot of time and changed the way I write code. Have a good clipboard history has really changed my flow.<p>[1]: <a href="https://github.com/cantino/mcfly">https://github.com/cantino/mcfly</a>
[2]: <a href="https://github.com/TermiT/Flycut">https://github.com/TermiT/Flycut</a>
On my work there is a utility that sends my shell history from all my terminal sessions and pcs to centralized database as I run commands, enabling search and cross reference. That saves tons of time. I haven’t bothered to set similar things for my personal use but I’m sure they do exist too.<p>Tmux + tmux continuum is another utility that saves many hours. I use it only on remote machines though.<p>Ffmpeg cli for fast lossless cutting of video. (Apparently there is nice gui for that, never tried though)
Dual-pane file managers like Midnight Commander. Been using these since the days of Norton Commander on DOS; I even wrote my own for Unix/DOS in those days before Midnight Commander came out and I got lazy (<a href="https://github.com/gramster/gc3">https://github.com/gramster/gc3</a>). I would live in Midnight Commander if not for the constant “the shell is already running a command” bugs.
Emacs (with evil). Macros save my life. Pressing some keys, I can modify large blocks of code in complex ways. Other way, I would need to write some python script.
I would say NetNewsWire or any RSS reader.<p>The idea of having all news (Youtube, Twitter, blogs etc.) centralized in one app saved me a bunch of seconds every day looking for new content.
Automa [0] is just another no-code extension to automate web browser. I used it to scrape excel files from the website of an open-end fund, which does not expose public API for its daily NAV historical data. This extension not only saved me time to manually point and click 1000s of url, but also give me a reason to procrastinate teaching myself selenium.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.automa.site/" rel="nofollow">https://www.automa.site/</a>
Terraform: mainly because my organization used to make everything manually, using boto3/sdk scripts, and poorly tested/constructed cloudformation templates
bash_completion: I can imagine life without it. It's got a pretty nasty api to set it up if you have to but most things are done for you.<p>If you create your own clis in the format<p><pre><code> appname mainoperation flags args/files
</code></pre>
writing bash_completion scripts is easier.<p>I believe git, yum, apt clis are popular for this reason.<p>I can't imagine the amount of time wasted if bash_completion didn't exist. I would have probably wasted 10000 hours writing guis.
The jetbrains IDEs for various languages, but especially CLion and PyCharm.<p>Beyond Compare, to compare differing versions of large codebases, which - for reasons I won’t go into, are just stored in filesystems, rather than accessed via some version control platform like git.<p>Sublime Text, because multicursor, and fast searching of large codebases, the ability to edit everything, the plugin api, and just blazing performance on massive codebases.
Gong.ai - transcribes Zoom and Google Meet calls with very high fidelity, and identifies which callers are talking and suggest tips to your sales, customer success, and demo staff on how to improve their presence in online meetings and phone calls. <a href="https://www.gong.io/product/" rel="nofollow">https://www.gong.io/product/</a><p>This is the SaaS I'm most excited about this year.
Flexelint. The compilers have gotten better over the years but I wouldn’t consider doing C/C++ development without it.<p>It has saved me hundreds of hours of debugging since I first started using it in 1990. The very first day it found a ‘write past end of array’ in some code written by a Pascal programmer which was doing a[sizeof(a)] = ‘\0’; that would have stymied us for days.
For me it was definitely Emacs and ORG mode. I use this combo to create presentations (pdf + reveal.js), write notes (org-roam style), do project management (ORG mode at its best), collect small code snippets (literal programming in ORG mode), almost everything...<p>As for a large code base I found ripgrep + rg.el (the interface in Emacs) to be pure gold!
I am going to go with <a href="https://github.com/unoplatform/uno">https://github.com/unoplatform/uno</a> (cross-platform UI for anything from Linux/Windows/Mac on desktop, iOS/Android, or Web. Kind of like Flutter, just for C# devs.
For me it’s github copilot. It produces bad code frequently and often code that looks good at a glance, but is bad. So I treat the output with extreme prejudice. However, I think it saves me a few hours a month on average. Maybe not 100 in a year, but in two or three years, certainly. It saves me much more time than my IDE does (JetBrains + vscode).
Switching to Vscode saved me a lot of time, especially the multi cursor behavior. I was using VIM, Tmux and iTerm before. Remote development is a breeze, connections and sessions are never lost. Many extensions get better and better, even a hated maintenance task is easier if you have a nice and easy language integration.<p>Docker, but these days I take it as granted.
CUE Lang (<a href="https://cuelang.org/" rel="nofollow">https://cuelang.org/</a>) for me. I had to build this massive clinical data collection system in REDCap and it's kind of a nightmare system to use.<p>So I wrote a script in CUE to programmatically build my REDCap data dictionary to support flexible inputs.
I’ve found Wallaby (<a href="https://wallabyjs.com/" rel="nofollow">https://wallabyjs.com/</a>) to be a great addition to my tool chain over the last year.<p>It is an automated test runner for JS / TS code with a great integration with ides. It has made writing tests and refactoring so much more productive.
K9s - <a href="https://k9scli.io/" rel="nofollow">https://k9scli.io/</a> Terminal (ncurses?) Kubernetes client<p>Bash “wait” command to do multiple things in parallel without extra _stuff_. Eg<p><pre><code> (
dothing.sh &
slow_stuff.sh &
more.sh &
wait
)</code></pre>
I have used this software for almost 2 decades. I find it incredibly helpful on Windows computers as an alternative to Windows Search. I think of it as Grep with a UI.<p><a href="https://www.mythicsoft.com/agentransack/" rel="nofollow">https://www.mythicsoft.com/agentransack/</a>
Great question, have enjoyed reading answers. For me, a clipboard manager has easily saved me 100+ hours of work time (I use CLCL and Clipy). A close second was upgrading my hardware - image editing which previously took minutes on my 2014-era machine now takes seconds.
ZTreeWin - <a href="http://www.ztree.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.ztree.com</a><p>This is a updated win32 version of XTreeGold if anyone ever used that back in the day. Allows many file system operations (view, copy, sort, tag) based on keyboard shortcuts in a text-console view.
AHK - Auto HotKey<p><a href="https://www.autohotkey.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.autohotkey.com/</a><p>It’s really a time saver as a launcher, running little scripts, asking input and doing whatever after works, calling native DLL Windows functions….
It’s a big helper of your own workflows
Sorry to talk shop:<p>* All time King keeps on giving: MS Excel<p>* MS Visio… last good Sequence Diagrams etc<p>* Adobe Illustrator… keep visual scrapboards<p>* Perl one liners with cygwin getclip/putclip<p>* DBeaver SQL gui<p>* StreamDeck with Autohotkey custom actions<p>* SimpleNote - your notes everywhere when you need them for creation, reference and search
FSearch is a fast file search utility, inspired by Everything Search Engine.<p><a href="https://github.com/cboxdoerfer/fsearch">https://github.com/cboxdoerfer/fsearch</a>
Kanmail.io for managing your Gmail in kanban board style
<a href="https://kanmail.io/" rel="nofollow">https://kanmail.io/</a>
Windows: Fluent Search. Blown away it's not a part of Windows - <a href="https://fluentsearch.net/" rel="nofollow">https://fluentsearch.net/</a>
vimv<p>You invoke 'vimv' in a directory and the resulting editor is a directory list for your pwd ... and you can edit it as a text document.<p>When you save and exit, all of your file (re)naming is committed to the directory.
Not at 100 hrs yet but fastlane is getting there.<p>I set it up for making screenshots, building, sending to slack & submitting an app to App and Play Store. Saves time by minimising boring work, double win.
Obsidian!<p>My new job is a matter of surviving a TON of information sent by a ton of different people each day.
And Obsidian has been the tool to organize that information deluge.
I'm sure both vim and the Glasgow Haskell Compiler have saved me hundreds of hours. One puts the text in the file, and the other makes sure the text makes sense.
I used Dynobase for roughing out a DynamoDB project this year. It's the best and only real GUI for DynamoDB at this point. Many, many hours saved.
macOCR, a tool to get any text on your screen into your clipboard.<p>It could be an image, some app or website that has disabled text selection, a pdf, image based email signature etc. I made this for myself, copying text out of everything, it turns out a few other people also like it...<p><a href="https://github.com/schappim/macOCR">https://github.com/schappim/macOCR</a>
ddterm (a quake terminal for gnome) is my favorite time saver. f1 dropdown, open a bunch of tabs and run mosh terminals for managing remote servers, name them appropriately and the spaceship is ready. Any time I need to access a remote, I press f1 and switch to its tab within seconds.
macOS and its integration with mac touchpad. I used Windows and Linux on several laptops and none was so well designed to switch between desktops and searching for windows. Ah and M1 speeds (unless you count updates and installing Xcode but you can't have everything).
sed(100+ hours), vim(1000+ hours), perl(10,000+ hours), emacs, jq, XML::Simple(Perl library), javascript console in browser, Ctrl-R(bash command)<p>If you know Perl you get instant access to many many powers which you otherwise have to use 10s to 100s of tools to get it done.
warpd avoided me spending a lot of time going from the keyboard to the mouse,for simple point and clicks. Honestly it is super useful.<p><a href="https://github.com/rvaiya/warpd">https://github.com/rvaiya/warpd</a>
miniforge, no need to deal with conda environments anymore. <a href="https://github.com/conda-forge/miniforge">https://github.com/conda-forge/miniforge</a>
Coherence <a href="https://docs.withcoherence.com/" rel="nofollow">https://docs.withcoherence.com/</a><p>we're saving our customers (and ourselves) hundreds if not thousands of hours by not having to write and maintain glue code for their dev tools
systemd-nspawn, f that hype train around over engineered container solutions.<p>Also WireGuard. Who has the mental stability to setup OpenVPN or similar these days, even with things like Openswan? Yuck.
termius - new terminal app. I can save hosts, chain together hosts and then easily connect. sftp built right into it. honestly, it feels like cheating in terminal.
- Listary: a launcher (double press crtl to open)<p>- silversearcher ag<p>- total commander<p>- Obsidian<p>- chrome extension: "I don't care about cookies" will remove all the annoying gdpr cookie popups.<p>- espanso : highly customizable text expander (eg type :myip to replace it with your current ip using your fav scripting language)<p>- sqlyog : sql client with awesome power features I never seen before: eg schema and data comparision between 2 db sources.<p>- manictime: a time tracking software which also takes screenshots. You can then go back and see what you did and how long.
I've easily saved 100 hours already using ChatGPT. If you haven't heard of it already, this is, in my personal opinion, superhuman general AI with almost no limitations except that it might not be free forever and it likes to stay SFW. For example, if you ask it to list "What pieces of software that most users don't use is most likely to save me 100 hours - keep your answer brief and specific" you get the response at the bottom. Interesting answer that opens the door to more specific questions. If you want to achieve a task quickly, just ask ChatGPT how to do it. Give plenty of instructions on the kind of response you're looking for.<p>Here's a specific example of how ChatGPT has saved me time: I asked it to make some text I wrote shorter and more likely to succeed, and it suggested eliminating the entire second half of it as it takes away from my point and isn't likely to achieve the result I want. That actually ended up saving me the work associated with the entire second half of my proposal.<p>Others have had it make recipes and meal plans, by just listing what they had at home and asking it to list recipes using those ingredients. It is superhuman in many of its abilities.<p>I would write a caveat but don't feel like it. I'll just ask ChatGPT: "I consider you almost superhuman but in no more than 15 words summarize the caveats or ways in which it would be wrong to consider you superhuman. Be extremely brief and specific, get right to the point."<p>it's answer: "I am a machine learning model and not a human."<p>So, there's your caveat. It's a machine learning model and not a human.<p>---<p>*<p>[Prompt: What pieces of software that most users don't use is most likely to save me 100 hours - keep your answer brief and specific.]<p>It's difficult to determine what specific software may save you 100 hours without knowing more about your specific needs and workflows. However, here are a few suggestions for software that may be helpful in increasing efficiency and saving time:<p>Task management and productivity software: Tools like Trello, Asana, and Todoist can help you organize and prioritize your tasks, set deadlines, and track progress. These tools can help you stay on top of your work and reduce the time you spend on tasks that don't align with your goals.<p>Text expansion and automation software: Applications like TextExpander and Alfred allow you to create custom abbreviations that expand into longer phrases or blocks of text. This can save you a significant amount of time if you frequently type out the same phrases or long emails.<p>Text and code editors: Advanced text and code editors like Sublime Text, Atom, or Visual Studio Code can save you time by providing features such as syntax highlighting, code completion, and project management. These tools can help you write and edit code more efficiently and make it easier to navigate large codebases.<p>File management software: Applications like Hazel and Dropbox can help you automate file management tasks, such as organizing and renaming files, and keeping your files synced and backed up. This can save you time and reduce the risk of data loss.<p>It's important to keep in mind that the software that will be most helpful in saving you time will depend on your specific needs and workflows. It may be helpful to spend some time identifying the tasks that take up the most time in your work and looking for tools that can help you streamline those processes.