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Ask HN: What are you favorite tiny tools?

40 points by seanlinehan ↗ HN
Everybody I know has a set of little software tools that they use that make their work either slightly easier or slightly more pleasant.

What are the tiny tools that you use for your work?

Some of mine:

Skitch -- Little Mac app that makes it easy to take screenshots and draw/write on them

Be Focused -- A simple Pomodoro timer for Mac

"Remove Stickies" -- A URL bookmarklet I wrote that removes all floating elements from a page

46 comments

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mikebos
Drafts 5 combined with workflow and Pythonista on IOS. For everything ranging from diary, personal crm, search adress/telephone number/e-mail in a given text, meeting notes and well almost anything. Very usefull combo
JHonaker
What actions do you have set up? Would you mind describing it in a little more detail? (Particularly the Drafts stuff)
mikebos
Sure.

Diary:

  - Python script that fetches the diary template and fills it with information like location
  - With x-callback-url it is sent to drafts
  - in drafts I can edit the rest and have an action to upload it to working copy
In drafts the action Call: With x-callback-url open pythonista and parse the text for a telephone number. Then that's sent to the call program

Drafts Meeting notes: Launch python script. Scripts get the template from working copy and fills it with date and through a popup a Title. Want to change that so you can select the meeting from the calendar and have it filled in. Then sends it back to drafts.

I have a vacation list drafts pulls from working copy.

In drafts I have shortcuts to add that draft to due, Things or mail/whatsapp it.

The drafts forums and resource directory are a good starting point. Once you add Pythonsita all bets are off it becomes the most versatile app on the phone. Working copy is nice to have so you don't have to deal with templates in java script code or with tags in draft itself. Apparantly a mac app is coming, currently a pc user, this would almost be enough to just get a mac :-)

superasn
Video speed controller chrome extension. It lets you speed up videos on any site. I usually watch videos at 4x to 6x speed now (in addition to saving time I feel that I don't get distracted / daydream as much).

Sadly it's like an addiction and now I even watch Netflix at 1.5X speed too (which makes it impossible to watch with family)

garyng
I have this extension too, I usually watch videos at 2x (a way to be "productive" while watching youtube videos ). But I wonder how can one watch at 4x/6x...
superasn
I think it's a matter of habit and the more you do it the easier it gets (like training a muscle). 4x is very useful when watching video tutorials (lynda, udemy, etc) and generally I'm able to understand everything including the audio.

6x is when I just want to see the slides and code but can't understand the audio. It's rare but sometimes very useful.

Kagerjay
The secret is captions. You speed read through videos. I still watch most dense tutorials at 2x speed though, and TV shows at 1x speed
jpincheira
Jumpcut — macOS menubar clipboard manager with keyboard shortcuts

Spectacle - macOS window resizer / manager

yesenadam
bash, AWK, sips. A couple of bash commands I use daily:

cdf - change directory to the folder open in (Mac) Finder

  cdf () {
    currFolderPath=$( /usr/bin/osascript <<EOT
      tell application "Finder"
        try
          set currFolder to (folder of the front window as alias)
        on error
          set currFolder to (path to desktop folder as alias)
        end try
        POSIX path of currFolder
      end tell
    EOT )
    echo "cd to \"$currFolderPath\""
    cd "$currFolderPath"
  }

  #dlm - "dlm filename" downloads filename.mp4 from URL in clipboard until its finished, resuming if interrupted
  fname=$(pbpaste)
  echo "Download $fname as $1.mp4 : "
  until curl -C - -kLo $1.mp4 "$fname"
  do
    sleep 5
  done
cuchoi
Where do you put this bash script?
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
JonathanMerklin
~/.bash_profile is the macOS equivalent of a .bashrc

It's also possible that the author is source-ing it (spelled that way intentionally :\) ) from another file in their .bash_profile

Note also that the author of the comment above was fast and loose with their description of dlm, and if you copypaste it as-written, it'll bomb. (Perhaps obvious, but you did ask where to put it!)

yesenadam
Ah thank u, yes, sorry. I have dlm saved as a shell script file. I didn't paste here the first-line bash shebang, which would have made that clearer.

Maybe I use most:

  alias ..='cd ../'
Then ".." moves up to the parent directory.
theknarf
I don't use finder that much. My workflow usually involves finding stuff in the terminal and then using `open .` to open it in finder if needed.

But that snipped was neet! So I'm adding it to my dotfiles.

schappim
I'm surprised no one has mentioned Alfred App https://www.alfredapp.com/

I cannot give it enough upvotes!

teknico
You could have added a description, though, so that uninterested people don't have to click the link. Here it goes:

"Alfred 3 for Mac

Alfred is an award-winning app for Mac OS X which boosts your efficiency with hotkeys, keywords, text expansion and more. Search your Mac and the web, and be more productive with custom actions to control your Mac."

orcs
Sounds like autohotkey.
enjayz
Avid fan of https://htmlcolorcodes.com/

However, since a while ago if you search "HTML color picker" google brings up a built-in color picker as the first result.

mstaoru
smcFanControl - makes my old '14 MBP with replaced-almost-everything tolerably warm.

menuBUS - for easy switching between built-in audio, Bluetooth, digital output + equalizing each of them in their own ways.

Spectacle - for window management and easy fullscreen, half-screen and whatever-part-of-screen shortcuts.

Karabiner - for complicated hotkey rebinding and controlling those Logitech presenter sticks where clever designer put a tiny "Close presentation and exit" key right next to "Next slide".

LICEcap - for capturing screen to GIF files for easy sharing.

cortinaone
+1 menuBUS is great. Too bad it's not being developed anymore.
tnolet
Was. A Licecap user too, but now switched to GIPHY capture. Recommended.
LVB
The ‘z’ directory switching bash script is usually the first thing I miss when away from my own environment: https://github.com/rupa/z
xelxebar
Not precisely a tool, but YouTube channels actually have RSS feeds associated with them:

    https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=<channel-id>
From your subscriptions page, you can even download an OPML with feeds for each channel. Most RSS will let you import this just fine.

As I love the cli, my preferred reader is newsboat[0].

[0]: https://newsboat.org/

wingerlang
Snappy - Let's you keep screenshot on-screen, annotate and so on.
ivanmaeder
Colour picker: https://sipapp.io/

Download videos from YouTube and other sources: https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/ (was the only way I could get a video from the BBC site recently)

Chrome extension for taking a screenshot of a full web page: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/full-page-screen-c...

Shameless plugs:

Script for renaming multiple files at the same time: https://github.com/ivanmaeder/vimv

Button in macOS Finder for creating a file in the current folder: https://github.com/ivanmaeder/finder-touch

That last one written in AppleScript which is craaazy.

filosofikode
- httpie -- command line HTTP client - bat -- A cat(1) clone with wings
rusinov
For Mac automation I use: Keyboard Maestro, Hazel, Automator, AppleScript. Not a tiny ones, though.
trevordixon
I run https://serveo.net. Lets you expose local services through a proxy server (a la ngrok), but uses SSH as the transport, so there's nothing to install.