HN Explorer

Ask HN: What are your favourite tools to work with?

10 points by dutchbrit ↗ HN
Out of interest, what are your favourite tools to work with (on your server/desktop/phone etc...)? What do you use daily and what other tools come in handy for you from time to time. What could you not imagine living without?

And of course, always interesting to hear if there are any tools out there that you are looking for, but haven't found anything that fully fits your needs.

25 comments

[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 110 ms ] thread
drallison
I like pencil (or pen) and paper. Self-contained, portable, and broadly applicable to a variety of different problems.
nickthemagicman
Seconded, what you sacrifice in scalability, you gain in platform independence, 100% uptime, and low hardware failure rates.
HenryTheHorse
How's their Canine Disaster Recovery policy now? It used to be awful back in the day.
nickthemagicman
Yep elevated hardware is best practice solution for this issue. Also it has a known Feline attraction quality causing possible downtime due to sleeping cats.
[dead] mitesh27
google analytics, alexa
tvvocold
c9.io

Can not imagine living without Spotify : )

cweagans
You're the first person that I've ever heard of using a cloud dev environment for real work. Can you talk more about your experience and why/how you ended up with that solution?
tvvocold
Sure:

I think cloud dev ENV is the future, (You don't have to save your file on your laptop or dropbox, you got a Linux runing in the cloud(in c9.io, it's ubuntu 64 bit), and you can see your project running in the cloud.The most exciting thing is you can add your friends then coding/hacking together.)

macoughl
I use it for "real work" as well and love everything you mentioned but can also add a big one: Access your dev environment, anywhere.

Ex. I was at an old client's office catching up and a potential user (large agency) fell into the discussion and expressed an interest in my application. He liked it but wanted to see a few additional metrics, that while stored in the database, were not available in the view. I Jumped on a nearby laptop and added it for him in 5min.

His agency is currently in the beta. (probably would've still joined without things going down this way but you get the point)

siquick
Do any of the cloud environments allow an offline mode? e.g. for use on long flights
DaGardner
I always prototype stuff on paper with a pen; best way to use your entire desk(top) ;)
replete
Desktop:

-OSX (gestures and spaces work well, with a few niggles like OSX not showing the window when tabbing to a minimised window)

-TotalFinder (OSX finder enhancement, the visor lets you get a finder window with alt+`)

-TotalTerminal (OSX quake-style dropdown console terminal)

-Alfred (OSX fast-spotlight replacement with plugins)

Dev: -Gulp - great for frontend build once you know how everything works

knotty66
i3 Window Manager. I wish Apple would design a WM inspired by i3 but with the amount of polish they usually apply.
desbo
Mitsubishi Uni-Ball pens
AnimalMuppet
IntelliJ.

The bash shell and the Unix command-line tools.

As others have said, pencil and paper.

fuddle
My main toolbox is: Spotify, Intellij, Chrome, notepad and pen.
sebnukem2
notebook + pen, ssh, bash, Perl, Vim, IntelliJ, Eclipse, Firebug.
cweagans
osx, vim, alfred, git, and vagrant pretty much do it for me. Pretty much all of those things run well on Linux, though, so I'm considering switching.
rayalez
Lenovo Thinkpad X1(1st gen) running ubuntu - my god this laptop is gorgeous. Best purchase I've ever made.

Emacs with org-mode for all the writing, notes, organizing information. I absolutely love this editor, makes you 100 times more productive, and also very fun to learn and use.

i3wm - brilliant window manager, after using it for a while it's hard to imagine using anything else.

draw.io - cool tool for drawing diagrams and organizing information. Helps me to think.

pelican - python markdown static website generator. I was looling for a perfect blogging tool for a long time and this is it.

iPad mini with only 4 apps installed:

- Editorial - insanely good text editor. Supports markdown, python scripting with all kinds of extremely convenient automation, looks gorgeous. It blew my mind when I first installed it, after taking most of my notes on android I had no idea a text editor on a tablet can be that freakin good.

- iThought - great mindmapping tool, for thinking and coming up with ideas.

- Track & Share - super convenient habit tracking tool.

- iBooks

Basically I don't use an iPad for anything but writiing, reading and thinking. Don't even use a browser, and it is mostly offline. Perfect distraction-free tool.

Also old second-hand Nexus 7 I bought very cheaply, for watching tv shows, youtube videos, and browsing HN/reddit. It is very helpful to have a device for all the time-wasting activities. Every time I want to do something dumb I use nexus, that way it's not hard to avoid doing pointless things on my Laptop/iPad, which makes them into perfect devices for focus and productivity, and it is always clear whether I'm doing something useful or screwing around.

aprdm
vim sublime shell git