Ask HN: What tools are you a 10/10 on?

90 points by itsdrewmiller ↗ HN
Curious what tools you use that you absolutely adore. For me I sing the praises of slack, calendly, zoom, excel, and triplebyte to anyone who will listen.

172 comments

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1Password, all day every day
Outlook (the desktop native app). Evolution comes vaguely close, but other than that? Every single client, desktop or native, just seemed insufficient. Especially if you need your calendar to be integrated into the email client.
The app Everything, it’s search as it should be on windows.
I've found my general file organization suffered with this but my naming of files improved dramatically! Great tool.
Raycast. It’s a joy to use and build extensions for.

Also Supabase, especially due to being open-source (but im still waiting for their dashboard to be on GitHub so I can fix a few pet peeves…)

Zotero. It's like a open-source second brain for me, and saved me a lot of boring reference management by hand.
Try Obsidian
I feel like they fill separate niches. I really enjoy Obsidian for notetaking, but the Zotero collector for web browsers that saves and organizes all your references is a godsend. Granted, this feature might be in Obsidian but I'm not too familiar with the plugin landscape for it.
if you like obsidian and zotero, try logseq!
I second this. I use it with Working Copy app to sync notes to a git repo.
Zotero rules. Actively encourages me to research.
- vim: same editor & keybindings on every machine - postman: api testing

- saleae log analyzer with logic2: protocol analysis, message decoding, etc

React. I can build anything in it with great test coverage and code reuse.
Xyplorer - File Manager replacement for Windows (using everyday since ~2008)
Electric drill with torque selector.
I'm still surprised how much more I use my impact driver than my drill (with torque selector).
I used to only use a drill, under the theory that I merely had to select an appropriate torque level to avoid stripping the screw, so why use two tools? And yet, even with an appropriately sized pilot hole, I would have to put a suspicious amount of force into it to keep the bit from jumping. One day I realized: Sure, you can't lower the torque on an impact driver, but the impact action means it doesn't need to apply as much torque as a drill does to do the same job. It is seemingly calibrated to the perfect amount of torque to keep the bit from jumping, and the impact action does the rest without you having to apply undue force - it can just take a couple seconds longer is all. I was dismissing the right tool for the job due to an unwarranted confidence in my own understanding of the tradeoffs involved in the physics.
Ok, you convinced me.

Then again, I sometimes use a drill hammer to hang up pictures, just because it’s easier to extract from the cupboard.

Oil-impulse driver for the best of both worlds.
absolutely necessary
Photoshop, Blender.
No tool excites me. Every tool is a cope.
> Every tool is a cope.

To what?

• GridPane

• Notepad++

• VS Code

• Github

• Random Wikipedia Page on New Browser Tab

• 1Password

• Asana

• ShipStation

• Google Voice (since 2010, which oddly hasn't been killed by Google yet)

Anything by Jetbrains. Takes so much crap out of my day.
PostgreSQL, one of the few tools that has been worth all the time I put into learning it.
KeePassXC + KeePass2Android
Redgate SQL Toolkit. Great for schema updates and deploys.
Oh man I didn't list it but Redgate makes SSMS like 1000x better.
Mac apps MeetingBar and itsycal to keep on top of remote meetings
Superhuman. Livegrep. Basically nothing else? Almost all other software is so slow as to be unusable or made for such narrow usecases that I cannot use it.

I love Zig but this post isn't about programming languages and even if it's super great it's clearly beta software and you hit problems related to that regularly.

ssh

I use it all the time to connect to my home server, works like a charm !

This. SSH is one hell of a gateway drug to get people into linux ;-)

Like a swiss army knife.

Typora for oncall notes - it seems to be the one markdown writing app that lets me paste screenshots in so they will save to disk and render inline with the notes I'm typing.
mutt
How so? I'd love to use it, but I could never get the installation working for multiple accounts.