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Ask HN: Little things/tools that improved your work or life lately?

75 points by rokhayakebe ↗ HN
I found that sometimes the little tiny changes have the biggest improvement in your work or life. For example yesterday I installed "Tab Mix" which forces FF to open external links in a new tab and take you there. +3 for me.

What tiny tools, hacks, changes do you know off that improved your work or life significantly?

139 comments

[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 191 ms ] thread
jackchristopher
It seemed more productive to smash my hands with a hammer than to Twitter. But I like the connections (and conversation) I'm making.

When I tried using it for news, I got bogged into the day to day hysteria.

kirubakaran
Every time I learn something about Emacs or incorporate someone's nifty elisp code, it pays off and keeps paying.

Latest:

  ; CSS color values colored by themselves
  ; http://xahlee.org/emacs/emacs_html.html
  
  (defvar hexcolour-keywords
    '(("#[abcdef[:digit:]]\\{6\\}"
       (0 (put-text-property
           (match-beginning 0)
           (match-end 0)
           'face (list :background 
                       (match-string-no-properties 0)))))))
  
  (defun hexcolour-add-to-font-lock ()
    (font-lock-add-keywords nil hexcolour-keywords))
  
  (add-hook 'css-mode-hook 'hexcolour-add-to-font-lock)
gruseom
Clever idea! Now I want to hear about some of your other favorites.
jacquesm
Until you pick one that has the background colour by accident!

Be weird to see that floating semicolon in there.

kirubakaran
The #rrggbb text is still displayed with normal text color. So it will never look like a floating semicolon. Try it. It is not even a problem when #rrggbb color is same as the foreground, as I have (global-hl-line-mode 1)
john7
Having someone else do my laundry for about a dollar a pound. No more buying detergent, waiting around, having to find change if you don't have your own washer/dryer, loading/unloading, folding, etc.
tome
I wish this kind of service was available in the UK. It doesn't seem to be a popular thing to offer, at least not in my town.
yangyang
Service wash at a laundrette. They're still reasonably commonplace I think.
_b8r0
If you check your local newspaper you'll find people offering ironing services, you should try ringing them up and asking if they'll do laundry as well, then you get your laundry washed and ironed.
hristov
Also you have an incentive to wear lighter, sexier clothes.
nfnaaron
Laundry: big time saver. I only use it occasionally (it's $/# where I go), because it seems extravagant to pay another human to handle my underwear all the time, but when I've run out of time it's great.

There were two in my local area, one laundry stopped offering the service. I assume the labor was too much to support the service, vs all other costs for that particular business. I expect this service to gradually disappear.

Windows desktop: I like http://virtuawin.sourceforge.net/ , provides multiple desktops. It's the only one I've tried that I didn't eventually uninstall in disgust.

dejb
Even better is employing a cleaner. 3 hours a week makes a huge difference for me. Even if you were only earning the same after tax as what you pay the cleaner it's worth it. I'd much rather work than clean.
saurabh
http://stereopsis.com/flux/

"it makes the color of your computer's display adapt to the time of day, warm at night and like sunlight during the day."

mcantor
Is this just a neat toy, or does it really help you sleep, concentrate & prevent eye strain? Anyone else here use it? Does it use brightness values that you'd expect, or is it sometimes too bright when it ought to be dim, or vice-versa?
grk
It takes a while to get used to, but once you do, it reduces eye strain a lot. Especially if you sometimes get too absorbed in work and forget that it's getting darker and it's probably time to turn the light on.
goodside
The brightness values are nowhere near extreme enough, and they're not adjustable beyond a few presets. The intent, which it does okay, is making your computer match the color tone of whatever your indoor lighting is, which makes the display more red than it makes it dark. But what you really want it to do is make the display dark enough that it won't keep you artificially awake late at night when the monitor is the only light source. On the Mac, the best tool I've found for that is Shades (http://www.charcoaldesign.co.uk/shades) which unfortunately doesn't have a timer. But binding to alt-space or whatever is pretty much just as good.

As a side note, the effect that monitors and other bright lights have on preventing sleep is the suppression of enzymes in the pineal gland that convert serotonin into melatonin about an hour before bedtime. There's a deletion mutation in the genes that code for one of these enzymes (ASMT) that's very common in autistics and relatives of autistics (which is a non-trivial subset of hackers/coders/geeks), so you might not be benefitting from the darkness anyway. You can solve the problem more directly and reliably by just taking melatonin supplements.

MikeCapone
Thank you. I've installed Shades and it seems good so far. I'll try it tonight to see if I find real-world benefits to it.
ahlatimer
Not to discredit shades, but I just tried it and it was giving me this annoying brightness flicker. I'd imagine it has something to do with my extra display, but without that display, what's the point? It's trivial to adjust the brightness on my MBP with the F1 and F2 keys.

I do end up adjusting the brightness of my displays as the night goes on, but I do it using a couple presets on my display.

goodside
I'm running Shades with two monitors without any problems. Did you have fl.ux running at the same time? If so, that'll mess it up.
avner
Basically, it automatically adjusts the RGB elements of your display to be more subtle on your eyes depending on what time of day it is and lighting conditions in your room. It does a fair job at it. I highly recommend it.
qeorge
I've been runnning it for about 3 months, and its great. Every once in a while I'll turn it off to work in Photoshop, and the brightness of the screen is jarring.

It fixed a problem I didn't know I had.

eshi
If your tasks don't require looking at a lot of images or color, nocturne for mac is another good tool.
dryicerx
Keeping a notepad by me at all times (I use a pencil sketch pad). Great for jotting down ideas, scratch area, doodle, design, plan. End of day, I quickly write down what I want to get done the next day. Productivity++
safetytrick
I use graph paper, I can't concentrate without something to write on.
yummyfajitas
Eproject (for emacs). Basically, lets me do things like "find file in current project" or "switch to buffer in current project".

http://github.com/jrockway/eproject/

Projects are found automatically by searching parent directories for _darcs or .hg. (This requires some additional configuration to make it work with anything.el, email me if interested, can't post since I'm not at my home computer right now.)

Aiox
http://www.autohotkey.com/ This is a great tool. You can easily configure short cut keys to do every day stuff, which would need several steps.
greyman
1. Evernote, the best notetaking software I know of - it starts to serve me as an universal "external memory". The most undervalued software in 2009.

2. Live Mesh - something similar to dropbox, for syncing files between computers, while also provides online backup for up to 5GB of data

3. Executor - application launcher for Windows, combines best stuff from Launchy and AutoHotKey. You can quickly start app by starting to write it's name or by assigned hotkey.

visitor4rmindia
I second Evernote :-) The free version is good enough but I felt it was worth shelling out the $45 for the premium upgrade.
greyman
Yes, the premium is much better, if nothing else, just being able to store any file type is worth that money, IMHO.
Eli7
Have you taken a look at Wiznotes? This is specifically designed for students however professionals are also finding it useful. It is not just note taking software, it is a productivity tool to help students succeed in their exams.

Eli Cohen Mesoraware (Wiznotes is a division of Mesoraware) (This was posted here because it is relevant to this article)

barredo
I'll say 1Password and The Hit List (both OSX software). They are totally worth the money.
petercooper
Seconding 1Password - a big game changer for me.
bombs
I've been using Wallet (http://www.acrylicapps.com/wallet/) on my Mac and iPhone instead of 1Password.

It might be a little less featured than 1Password, but it's also half the cost on the Mac and AU$1 cheaper on the iPhone.

visitor4rmindia
Screen: started using it because of this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=848821

Now I really cannot imagine working without it. The ability to detach and re-attach to named sessions is fan-tas-tic. Add the ability to run multiple named processes within each session and it makes working on multiple tasks during the day really pleasant. You can switch tasks and simply drop right back to the exact point you were working on whenever you continue.

mchadwick
http://ditz.rubyforge.org/

A self-contained issue tracker. I switched from hand-hacked TODO lists to Ditz a few weeks ago, and haven't looked back. I'm able to organize my tasks as I would a codebase (components, releases, comments, et cetera). I saw an immediate and sustained increase in my productivity.

Its tight integration with git is a huge plus.

bwr
rlwrap to fix the awful command line interface of sqlplus.
yangyang
I used to to use yasql as a sqlplus replacement, it was pretty basic but much better.
ams6110
sql-oracle mode in emacs takes away a lot of the pain of using sql-plus (if you're an emacs-er)
yangyang
org-mode for Emacs (http://orgmode.org).

It's made a big difference to my life. I've finally got a reliable place to keep notes, a good way to schedule stuff, nice todo lists, a quick way of publishing stuff to HTML / PDF, all accessible (and customisable) in a highly efficient way from Emacs.

spudlyo
Recently I've been having to do a lot of editing inside a Firefox text widget in order to update some Wiki documentation. The stupid mediawiki editor rebinds a lot of my emacs keys, which makes it really hard to for me to edit. I found this great firefox plugin called "It's all Text" that puts a little edit button at the bottom of every multi-line text input field in your browser. This button can be configured to shell out to Aquaemacs so I can do extensive edits there, and when I save it updates the browser's edit box. It's really made wiki editing a lot easier for me.
davidcuddeback
QuickSilver (http://www.blacktree.com/) -- Lets you do just about anything by just typing it on a Mac. For example, to email a document to a friend, I start typing the name of the document. It shows up, so I hit tab and type "email", hit tab, and type my friend's name and hit enter. That composes an email with the attachment and all I have to do is hit send.
safetytrick
Launchy on a PC is great, I miss Enso, it had more of the power of QuickSilver but its not very stable any more
ahlatimer
I also use Quicksilver pretty extensively. It drives me nuts whenever I work on another person's Mac, hit cmd-space and spotlight pops up.

Growl is also a pretty cool thing to have if you're on a Mac.

gruseom
I bound Super to the Fn key on my Macbook in Emacs.
weaksauce
What method did you use to do that?
gruseom
It turns out to be as simple as:

  (setq mac-function-modifier 'super)
I discovered this after spending an embarrassingly long time failing to figure out how to bind Capslock to Super instead. I thought that would be relatively straightforward given how often people talk about rebinding Capslock, but I couldn't figure out how to do it (from Emacs anyway).
gcv
After years of using Emacs, I only just discovered that incremental search works within the ordinary find-file (C-x C-f) function. Try it: C-x C-f, then C-r, and search for a piece of a filename you opened in the recent past. Try C-M-r, and it works with regexes, too.
drewr
Is this Emacs 23-only? I don't get that behavior with 22.3.2.
gcv
Possibly. I didn't find this trick until recently, and I switched to Emacs 23 pretty much right after it came out.
DavidSJ
I think you mean M-R to search previous input. This works for just about any interactive input.
gcv
No, I mean reverse incremental search. M-r doesn't show matches as you type (at least not with Emacs 23 and my setup), but C-r does.
ams6110
iswitchb-mode is a cool little thing I recently discovered. I somehow enabled it accidentally, was puzzled for a moment until I realized what it was doing, and now I love it.
zck
If you like iswitchb-mode, try out ido-mode (http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/InteractivelyDoThings). It's like iswitchb-mode, but it also works with C-x C-f. I assume it does more than that, but I haven't looked specifically for the differences. I don't think you should have both of them, though.
maxklein
1. Setting all the Step-Over and Step-Into shortcut keys to be the same in eclipse, Xcode as well as the Visual Studios

2. Going through my life-todo list and just getting rid of a lot of stuff that I am not going to ever do

3. Deciding that instead of the vague 3-4 foreign languages I wanted to learn in my life, I will just pick one and stick with it

4. Generally cleaning out the past - getting rid of peoples numbers I will never call, throwing away all old bank statements etc

5. Having a series of pictures of the concepts and figures that motivate me directly above my desk. In case you are curious they are all from movies (I have Mr. Glass, the Lina Leandersson Eli, Wei Tang as Wong Chia Chi, Omar Little, Alfie)

6. Using TheLastRipper with Winamp to play my songs, such that I discover new songs, but get to save those I like

7. Using XMarks

8. Synchronising my work across both of my computers (laptop, desktop) using Dropbox

9. Being sure to read every single night before I go to bed

saurabh
In gVim

au WinLeave * set nocursorline nocursorcolumn

au WinEnter * set cursorline cursorcolumn

Everything http://www.voidtools.com/ for searching files fast in Windows ( it makes use of the USN journal so doesn't need reindexing)

Reinteract http://www.reinteract.org/trac/ for hacking Python code. It can re-evaluate from where you made changes, so it doesn't run the whole program, just from where you changed something, I wish I could do something like this with IPython.

Xrefresh XRefresh can refresh browser as you modify source files http://code.google.com/p/xrefresh/

SharpKeys for remapping caps-lock to esc. http://www.randyrants.com/sharpkeys/

oh and do watch these in succession to feel better.

http://www.ted.com/talks/garrett_lisi_on_his_theory_of_every...

http://www.ted.com/talks/john_lloyd_inventories_the_invisibl...

http://www.whatthebleep.com/

MikeCapone
Quicksilver on OS X.

I know it's far from obscure, but if you still haven't tried it, it's worth it.

sidmitra
i'm on Win XP so:

1. PomoTime: One of the new things i'm into for productivity based on Pomodoro technique Although i don't follow it religiously, but i still get manage to get a lot more done than before.

2. Microsoft OneNote: i jot down almost everything and anything there before it slips my mind.

I am fan of lightweight apps:

3. VirtuaWin: lightweight multiple desktops

4. Q-dir: file mgr

5. Console: instead of cmd.exe

6. Locate32: i dont use content indexing stuff like Google desktop yet. I find them too heavy and also, i already have everything arranged in folders with relevant names. So searching by name is instant with this.

7. TeamViewer: a free app to share desktop. It found it a little bit easier/better/faster/lighter than VNC, DimDim.

8. Miranda: for twitter/irc/gtalk/yahoo

9. Most importantly, Executor: moved from launchy a while back.

saurabh
I highly recommend

MinTTY for Cygwin instead of Console2 for cmd.exe Everything instead of Locate32.

sidmitra
I can't do multiple tabs inside one window. The mess on the taskbar really hurts my eyes :-)