Ask HN: What perfect software did you discover of recent?
41 comments
The tools I personally use and could not live without are:
ncdu - disk usage stats
KeePassXC - Offline password manager
Pi-Hole - Ad blocker
Thorium - Great ungoogled browser with a lot of tweaks
ImgBurn - Burn utility for windows
Immich - self hosted image backup (not perfect, but better than anything else)
Preview - macOS Preview app, never found anything better on other systems (I miss it on Linux)
Mail - macOS Mail app, never found anything better (I miss it on Linux)
TestDisk/photorec - forensic recovery toolQuicklook on windows is just like macos preview
If you have a Mac, Rectangle on is an excellent open source solution for window management. It’s almost like I never left windows with some bounces sprinkled on top.
- https://rectangleapp.com
- https://rectangleapp.com
I would also recommend Raycast. It’s a launcher, but it can also windows management - and so much more.
https://www.raycast.com/
https://www.raycast.com/
I use Alfred which is also great. https://www.alfredapp.com/
This is great, thank you.
Beyond Compare — a visual diff tool. It’s so freakin good.
https://www.scootersoftware.com
https://www.scootersoftware.com
If you ever end up in a software project where you're helping maintain 100s or 1000s of "diff the output file against the expected file" style regression tests, and some of the files you're diffing are CSV files or so on, beyondcompare has some features that can help a lot. e.g. it can do CSV-aware diffing & help you suppress irrelevant details such as row order (supposing you don't care about row order), or you can mark the timestamp column as irrelevant and ignore differences from that column only. Often files differ superficially as streams of bytes but might be equivalent at a higher level (in terms of the data encoded in the bytes of text) & beyond compare can help with some of this.
If you're in a team with this kind of semi-automated semi-manual regression testing workflow for changes, where there's human-in-loop engineering effort to review regression tests that indicate 'there's some difference between actual output and expected output' and decide if the new output is "OK" or not, the cost of a beyond compare license likely pays for itself in less than a month in terms of freeing up hours of engineering effort.
That said, you can often do better than this by investing engineering effort to build a custom domain-specific file normalizer / differ tool, to e.g. deserialize values, normalize them to eliminate irrelevant details, compare them for equivalence in a domain specific way, show actionable diffs when they differ, which might give a much better result than a high quality general-purpose tool beyond compare.
If you're in a team with this kind of semi-automated semi-manual regression testing workflow for changes, where there's human-in-loop engineering effort to review regression tests that indicate 'there's some difference between actual output and expected output' and decide if the new output is "OK" or not, the cost of a beyond compare license likely pays for itself in less than a month in terms of freeing up hours of engineering effort.
That said, you can often do better than this by investing engineering effort to build a custom domain-specific file normalizer / differ tool, to e.g. deserialize values, normalize them to eliminate irrelevant details, compare them for equivalence in a domain specific way, show actionable diffs when they differ, which might give a much better result than a high quality general-purpose tool beyond compare.
There is also https://meldmerge.org/ which i've used on Linux and Mac before.
Does meld include any sort of git browser to dig into old commits of the same file? The ability to pick a file and compare it's states is a pain point I find with git UI apps. For example, TortiseGit will do this but it requires some painful non-intuitive menus and right clicking to resurrect the older data
I don't believe meld embeds any git specific support, but if you configure git to use meld as the tool for diffing and merging, then when you use the git CLI to display a diff, it should invoke meld
e.g. in the CLI you might do something like `git diff commit_a commit_b -- some/path/in/repo` to show the diff from commit_a to commit_b limited to some path
Refer to the "configuration" sections for
e.g. in the CLI you might do something like `git diff commit_a commit_b -- some/path/in/repo` to show the diff from commit_a to commit_b limited to some path
Refer to the "configuration" sections for
https://git-scm.com/docs/git-difftool
https://git-scm.com/docs/git-mergetool
Seconding meldmerge. Not paying $70 (BeyondCompare) for what meldmerge does just as well and for free.
Glamorous Toolkit (https://gtoolkit.com/) and the underlying Pharo (https://pharo.org/). Writing Pharo code (a modern implementation of Smalltalk) in the GT environment is the most fun I've had programming in years.
CleanShot X for Mac. One of the more intuitive UIs I've seen and just works, works well, and is feature rich.
Flameshot[1] is free.
[1]: https://flameshot.org/
[1]: https://flameshot.org/
I use it 50 times a day and love it.
Vaultwarden - self-hostable Bitwarden, written in rust, compatible with all official bitwarden clients
ncdu - disk usage stats
fzf - fuzzy finding for everything in your shell
helix - tui editor, basically a mix of (neo)vi(m) and kakoune, with batteries included i.e. LSP support, written in rust, and you don't need to configure much
zfs - not really software, but a filesystem
jellyfin - self hostable media server, i.e. streaming movies and music, which automatically fetches metadata for your movies and music
ncdu - disk usage stats
fzf - fuzzy finding for everything in your shell
helix - tui editor, basically a mix of (neo)vi(m) and kakoune, with batteries included i.e. LSP support, written in rust, and you don't need to configure much
zfs - not really software, but a filesystem
jellyfin - self hostable media server, i.e. streaming movies and music, which automatically fetches metadata for your movies and music
A few months ago, I discovered Mac Whisper, thanks to fellow hn user[1]. This is great and works perfectly. I take stream of consciousness notes with a lot of silence. This transcribe these notes and let me search through my notes with simple text search.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37777259
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37777259
any comparable ios app ?
Slideshower - it solves my problem - how to easily run a randomised photo slideshow on macOS - perfectly.
(Disclaimer: I've developed it to solve my problem but it seems that there are many people having the same problem...)
https://slideshower.com
(Disclaimer: I've developed it to solve my problem but it seems that there are many people having the same problem...)
https://slideshower.com
Doesn't lithium has a bug when you highlight your text it highlights everything in that paragraph sometimes ?
It actually works well for me. May you need to update it?
Gnu Icecat, so far the only one that does not connect to anything except what the user types in address bar.
Shottr [0]
Screenshot utility for Mac. It's free but it works so well I recently purchased a license for like £6.
[0] https://shottr.cc/
Screenshot utility for Mac. It's free but it works so well I recently purchased a license for like £6.
[0] https://shottr.cc/
Have you compare Lithium to Google Play Books ? how is the font is it good ?
I prefer Moon+ Reader, it has text to speech too.
Lithium is light years ahead.
Does lithium work on the boox devices?
I honestly don't know about Boox devices.
But I think it should work if you can install it from the Playstore.
But I think it should work if you can install it from the Playstore.
https://contexts.co/, to fix the alt-tab behavior on MacOS
I use use alt tab on macOS: https://alt-tab-macos.netlify.app/
Alfred App. Couldn't use a mac w/out it.
https://www.alfredapp.com
https://www.alfredapp.com
Have you tried Raycast?
Things 3 for task management. No subscriptions and it isn’t bloated with too many features like other todo apps.
Wireguard, ZFS, Restic, Vaultwarden, Synology DSM, Docker, Proxmox.
lotus 1-2-3
Is this a serious comment? If so, why lotus 1 2 3 over the trillions of other more modern spreadsheet applications?
Monodraw for diagramming.
Well... I'm not sure about perfect but:
- LocalSend
- Autokey
- Solaar
- Kitty
- Atuin
- LocalSend
- Autokey
- Solaar
- Kitty
- Atuin
What services or products would you describe as perfect for your needs?
The first was Arbitrage Calculator [1]. Its. A tool I used for sports betting Arbitrage to compute the arbitrage conditions & payouts.
The second is Obsidian [2] This has completely replaced Google Keep as my notes taking app.
The third has been Lithium [3]. I currently do 90% of my book reading in this app. The ergonomics of epub copies is just perfect and this is a perfect epub reader.
Fourth is Scrivener. [4] Planning to write by first book with this. It's just perfect.
Last is Button Down [5] This allowed me to add a subscription page on my statically hosted blog. And the minimalistic nature of the service made it perfect.
[1]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ajinkyamankar.surebetarbitragecalculator
[2]: https://obsidian.md
[3]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.faultexception.reader
[4]: https://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener/overview
[5]: https://buttondown.email/