Ask HN: What’s your favorite developer tool of all time and why?

vscode is great

The ALE [1] project. Not only for it's being a vim plugin, but because they have a pretty comprehensive list [2] of linters per programming language / tools; If I have to edit some ruby / terraform / go code tomorrow, which I never did before, I don't need to do much research ALE takes care of it and helps me learn better the best practices.

[1]: https://github.com/dense-analysis/ale

[2]: https://github.com/dense-analysis/ale/blob/master/supported-...

Vim. Operating systems (Linux) aside, it's the only tool I've been using for nearly three decades, and I still use it more today than any other piece of software short of a terminal. At its core, it's the same as it was 25 years ago.

macOS and Emacs. I only use one of them as an OS though ;)

Sublime Text for initially allowing me to get into programming (with zero experience, code looks scary; it's even more scary without syntax highlighting) and then PyCharm/IntelliJ for improving my productivity on large projects (wish I would've started using it sooner).

macOS and Xcode because it pays all of my bills and makes me the most money.

As a Windows developer, I love Visual Studio.

whiteboard

GitUp because it makes rewriting git commits really easy! It's a graphical tool that's not just a wrapper around the CLI tools. It's incredibly powerful yet comes with all the amenities of a GUI tool (pressed wrong key by accident? Just undo with cmd-Z). It's the only graphical Git tool were I really feel in control.

Visual Studios

Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code. Because I mainly work on the .NET Stack with things like ASP.NET(MVC, Razor Pages, Blazor) and Xamarin. I use VS Code mainly when I'm doing Web Development stuff like HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.

Eclipse....

From days of symbian carbide, CDT and Android debugging I always used and loved Eclipse. I always loved its interface and gazillion plugins and tools built around it.

Sublime Text was MAGICAL for me as a teen learning to code for the first time. It ran so fast on computers that couldn't practically run Visual Studio. Most of my introduction to programming happened through this text editor. I don't use Sublime much anymore but it was a huge influence on my development as a programmer.

Pen and paper, or whiteboard. It's very important and valuable to think with ink, to see it expressed.

Chrome dev tools because debugging in any language I'm familiar with (other than Elm) is a pain but dev tools makes it palatable.

Terraform because infrastructure as code is soooo much better than clicking buttons in some half-baked UI.

QuickCheck, which is a property-based testing tool for Haskell. Property-based testing is great, if you're unfamiliar you should check it out.