Ask HN: What software sparks joy when using?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40062263

by newswasboring • 2 years ago

39 103 2 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I've spent my last few hours working with Jira-Align. I am beginning to hate computers at this point. To up lift my mood I'd like to use something which sparks joy. Does anyone have any suggestions?

austin-cheney• 2 years ago

Open Media Vault, Photo Prism, VLC, WinAmp, Flashpoint, eXoDOS

hkt2• 2 years ago

A lover of the old school. I'll never forget how much winamp kicks the llamas ass.

torunar2• 2 years ago

+1 for WinAmp (version 2.9 specifically). Runs without issues on every single Windows OS I've been using through my life (98, XP, 7, 8, 10), supports obscure file formats through plugins, has everything that's needed for music player and no blot whatsoever.

klez• 2 years ago

Nothing comes to my mind that is not a game, sorry.

hkt2• 2 years ago

Cozy (audio books for Linux)

youtube-tui (allows local management of YouTube saves and playlists, written in the frankly lovely ratatui framework)

Iotas (nextcloud enabled notes software)

lelanthran2• 2 years ago

My default setup for writing C[1] literally puts me into a good mood when I start it up.

Full-screen uxterm, with vim with 3 splits, LHS for a terminal. Multiple tabs when necessary, proper syntax highlighting (I use a monochrome/shades of grey color scheme), with Guake mapped to ctrl-~ and 9 workspaces arranged in a 3x3 grid.

gaws• 2 years ago

proper syntax highlighting (I use a monochrome/shades of grey color scheme)

Let's see it.

lelanthran2• 2 years ago

> proper syntax highlighting (I use a monochrome/shades of grey color scheme)
Let's see it.

https://pasteboard.co/pfI4JQY7pBlr.png

blowski• 2 years ago

I really enjoy writing code, especially when learning something new, or feeling mastery over what I already know. JetBrains IDEs help with that a lot and I genuinely love it.

Claude or ChatGPT let me bash out my frustrations.

But, honestly, when I feel like that it's often best to get away from the computer entirely. Go for a walk, read a book, spend time with friends, do some old fashioned craft - whatever floats your boat.

freetime25• 2 years ago

JetBrains is definitely one of my favorite software companies.

anjork• 2 years ago

vim

sam_lowry_• 2 years ago

Yup, especially vim mode pretty much everywhere.

Dunno how people edit code without vim.

sourcecodeplz2• 2 years ago

Sublime text, Windows, Steam, VLC, OBS, Winamp, Chrome, 7-zip, Snipping Tool

anonymoushn• 2 years ago

What did you do to your Windows?

robertlagrant• 2 years ago

I'd suggest not software at all.

sourcecodeplz2• 2 years ago

Yes, pen & paper ftw. Get some stamps and envelopes too, then start playing chess via correspondence.

aloisdg• 2 years ago

lichess.org would be my pick. Awesome software

0xEF• 2 years ago

Might as well bring back play-by-post Dungeons & Dragons while we're at it.

I know it's still going in a more modern capacity on myth-weavers.com and other sites, but I miss the mail version, chore that it was.

gryn• 2 years ago

Nit really spark joy but more if a relief from everything that seems to need a database is obsidian and the community plugins. Your database is your markdown files which mean I don't have to rely on it can edit the files from terminal when I want.

onion2k• 2 years ago

whimsical.com is a really nice diagram builder that just works. Everything is intuitive. I've built some reasonably complex diagrams in it without every needing to refer to a help page. It's great.

I'll also give Excel a shout. It's brilliant. The learning curve is steep, but once you're there it's a joy to use.

eternityforest3• 2 years ago

Excel was the peak of programming by end users. One of the only apps ever to create a model that gives users that much power to do things on their own.

I rarely use it since I don't generally work with that kind of arbitrary data hands-on much, and I don't tend to use a lot of math outside of code, but whenever I do it's usually great

zarzavat• 2 years ago

Not current by any means but the original TextMate. Beautiful in its simplicity and you felt like you were using the editor of the future, which you were because everybody uses TM grammars now.

arespredator• 2 years ago

HashiCorp Nomad

uniqueuid• 2 years ago

What consistently amazes and pleases me is software that cleverly uses algorithms and data structures to prevent complexity. In particular, everything CRDT-like still seems like magic to me.

So I'm unreasonably excited by bittorrent, storage based on consistent hashing, and rsync (rolling checksums are just amazing).

Interestingly I hate distributed consensus with a passion because it always seems to achieve the opposite - causing more complexity.

blueappconfig• 2 years ago

Starting Blender and changing to Cycles render mode and seeing how the shadow falls over the items you place has always felt special to me.

Euphorbium• 2 years ago

Most adobe products.

achenet• 2 years ago

the Helix text editor.

the fish shell.

atuin.

Linux with Sway window manager.

strogonoff• 2 years ago

Sourcehut, Superkey (if I don’t want to use the mouse then I don’t have to), Orion (browser), Zulip (Web, their mobile app can be frustrating).

Y_Y2• 2 years ago

Monty Python's Complete Waste of Time

https://www.mobygames.com/game/1975/monty-pythons-complete-w...

abhinavk• 2 years ago

Is there something like /r/eyebleach for software where you can go at the end of day? That being said, the best would be no screen at all and some greenery.

vasco• 2 years ago

The hack for that is walking the dog after work.

rom16384• 2 years ago

Deluxe Paint, Turbo C, Krita

davikr• 2 years ago

I will never go back to using Windows Explorer & Taskbar after downloading Altap Salamander and StartAllBack. Also, "Everything" for searching.

justusthane2• 2 years ago

Everything is so great. In addition to my local drive at work I also have it set up to index a huge network drive, and I can actually find things.

hilux• 2 years ago

I remember first using Expensify after years of wrangling various ERP monstrosities. Serious joy.

mmikeff3• 2 years ago

In a similar vein, I had a Pleo payment card at a previous job, and the speed with which it notified me on my phone when I had paid on the card, prompting me to take a picture of the receipt, always made me smile.

More often than not the notification came through before the receipt had even printed.

andrewstuart• 2 years ago

ChatGPT.

freetime25• 2 years ago

ChatGPT is amazing. Even when it is completely hallucinating, the fact that it can do so with such a nicely worded response just puts a smile on my face.

eternityforest3• 2 years ago

Poetry, Pipx, VSCode, pre-commit, ruff, MyPy, Make(When used for non-C related stuff).

Recent GIMP versions, Realthunder's fork of FreeCad, PrusaSlicer, neofetch, Ardour, SculptGL, Vorta/Borg, Git Cola

cynicalsecurity• 2 years ago

What do you like about VSCode?

eternityforest3• 2 years ago

It's incredibly feature rich and doesn't require a ton of time investment to set up. The command pallet lets you have quick access to things you don't use that often that I'd otherwise forget in the months between uses.

It handles pretty much everything about development. I can have my terminal in the bottom, any problems detected in the current file on the right. It's a perfectly good Git merging tool too.

The debugger is very easy to use, and it's got a ton of extensions that are easy to manage. It's even got settings sync in the cloud to keep track of it.

freetime25• 2 years ago

Never tried PrusaSlicer (only ever used Cura), but every time I go to 3d print something I am just astounded at how well slicers work at converting random 3d models to series of g-code instructions. Feels like magic.

cies• 2 years ago

I really like to use Elm (yes the compiler and ecosystem around it). Good feedback when somethings goes bad, simple enough to learn in a weekend and allows me not to use JavaScript (which to my is a total kill-joy).

drewcoo• 2 years ago

cowsay always makes me smile.

torunar2• 2 years ago

WinAmp and MPC-HC are still my go-to zero-bullshit solutions for playing video and music. Inkscape and Dia manage to amaze me even after 15 years of working with them.

Ada (is programming language a software?) is my most recent discovery and I haven't experienced such pure joy of working with a programming language in, like, 10 years.

kadkadels• 2 years ago

I will be in the minority here but I really like Windows 10. Might be stockholm syndrome from work.

What exactly you might ask, well, just ... how it looks, for example. Still modern. I like the search bar. Dicking around in the registry. It's weird antics, like Win32 file namespace API not allowing folder names to end with a space but the file system supporting it so you end up with some weird behaviour if some scanner manages to create a folder with a trailing space and then you end up with two folders, one with a space at the end and one without, and you can't delete the one with the space without looking up \\?\

Stockholm syndrome.

(I also like Linux)

kyriakos• 2 years ago

I will admit I like windows 11. After replacing the start menu with startallback everything seems to just work and let me get work done.

okaleniuk• 2 years ago

I like writing HTML + vanilla JavaScript with zero dependencies in any simple text editor. Notepad++ on Windows, gedit or vim elsewhere.

signaru• 2 years ago

While Python may be an easy language, Javascript may be the easiest to get things running. It's just there before you even start downloading what other languages need. Just press F12 and REPL away. I use the JS console as a calculator on steroids among other things. It's nice that it has the C family syntax, which lets me interactively test expressions before using them on non-browser code, without the prerequisite of projects, files or other boilerplate.

huseyinkilic• 2 years ago

Total Commander, and Midnight Commander. We all do love exploring files, don't we?

Y_Y2• 2 years ago

Honorable mention to ncdu

voxadam• 2 years ago

Dark Sky, both on my phone and on the desktop, prior to Apple's acquisition were always enjoyable to use.

Transit.app was once quite simple and elegant, though, that's less true these days.

Jellyfin may be a little rough around the edges but it works well with almost no intervention on my part.

uBlock Origin, I can't even imagine the web without it.

joshstrange3• 2 years ago

Carrot Weather [0] is probably the closest I’ve come to Dark Sky. I also used WeatherNerd till it shut down.

[0] https://www.meetcarrot.com/weather/

blue_pants• 2 years ago

My weather app of choice is Today Weather. Its UI strikes a good balance between being informative and clean looking (and it can be customized a bit too)

https://todayweather.co/

freetime25• 2 years ago

Been a few years since I’ve used it (I’m back on MacBooks - the hardware is too nice), but Ubuntu has always felt great to me right out of the box. Of course the “Ubuntu” experience depends on the work of untold thousands of other developers - but they do a great job packaging it all together into a coherent and frustration-free experience IMO.

s4i• 2 years ago

Google Earth is often a nice balance between usefulness and delightfulness.

tietjens• 2 years ago

Feedbin sparks joy for me. Also Firefox's Pocket. Aboard is also a new web app I like a lot too. All reading based, or for collecting future reading.

joshstrange3• 2 years ago

In no particular order:

Prologue [0] - iOS Audiobook player, used Plex as a media source

Overcast [1] - iOS Podcast player

CleanShotX [2] - macOS screenshot/video/gif capture with annotation

Drafts [3] - iOS/macOS note taking tool

Paprika [4] - Cross platform recipe app

YNAB [5] - "You Need A Budget" - web/mobile budgeting app

1Password [6] - Cross platform password manager

Carrot Weather [7] - iOS weather app

Color Slurp [8] - macOS color picker tool

Phoenix [9] - macOS scriptable window manager

Alfred [10] - macOS app launcher

Bartender [11] - macOS menu bar organizer

Coderunner [12] - macOS tool to run snippets of code in a number of supported languages. Great for testing something quickly

DaisyDisk [13] - macOS disk space analyzer

iTerm 2 [14] - Rock solid macOS terminal

JetBrains IDEs [15] - Cross platform suite of IDEs

Rocket [16] - macOS emoji quick substitution tool

Transmit [17] - macOS SFTP/FTP/S3/etc tool

VLC [18] - Cross platform video player

CarbonCopyCloner [19] - macOS disk cloning/backup tool

Pixelmator Pro [20] - macOS photo editor

Preview [21] - Built-in macOS image/pdf viewer

QuickLook [22] - Built-in macOS file preview tool

[0] https://prologue.audio/

[1] https://overcast.fm/

[2] https://cleanshot.com/

[3] https://getdrafts.com/

[4] https://www.paprikaapp.com/

[5] https://www.youneedabudget.com/

[6] https://1password.com/

[7] https://www.meetcarrot.com/weather/

[8] https://colorslurp.com/

[9] https://github.com/kasper/phoenix

[10] https://www.alfredapp.com/

[11] https://www.macbartender.com/

[12] https://coderunnerapp.com/

[13] https://daisydiskapp.com/

[14] https://iterm2.com/

[15] https://www.jetbrains.com/

[16] https://matthewpalmer.net/rocket/

[17] https://panic.com/transmit/

[18] https://www.videolan.org/vlc/

[19] https://bombich.com/

[20] https://www.pixelmator.com/pro/

[21] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preview_(macOS)

[22] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quick_Look

supertron2• 2 years ago

Wow this is almost a list of everything on my machine.

Great list. I second these recommendations!!

Special mentions for: Alfred, Bartender, Daisy Disk and ColorSlurp

freetime25• 2 years ago

I’ll add Rectangle (window manager) as a great utility for Mac. The free version works great and doesn’t nag me at all to upgrade.

https://rectangleapp.com/

joshstrange3• 2 years ago

Rectangle (and Magnet) are both good but I find their vertical monitor support lackluster. I know Magnet sort of supports it but I don’t like its hotkeys. Phoenix is great cause I can do whatever I want/need. I have a hotkey that reorgs all my windows where I like them and even accounts for the 2 different locations I work at. That coupled with displayplacer makes moving between different setups a breeze.

If you don’t have vertical monitors then yes, rectangle/magnet are awesome.

zelphirkalt2• 2 years ago

Emacs org-mode

mmikeff3• 2 years ago

I really like Things 3 on Mac and iPhone for recording and managing my Todos

mmikeff3• 2 years ago

Having smart plugs that are controlled by voice is satisfying. "Hey Siri, turn the Christmas tree lights on"

supertron2• 2 years ago

This might sound hyperbolic but as a .NET developer JetBrains Rider is a real joy to use IMHO. I think being paired with an M1 Mac is probably part of what makes the experience great for me.

That IDE/hardware combo beats anything I've ever developed on in my career. By a long way.

Shameless plug but I mention it and a few of my other favourite software tools here:

https://supertron.dev/tools

The other "sparks joy" software I use regularly are Sketch - which after a lifetime of using Adobe products felt like a breath of fresh air when I switched to it - and Proxyman which is hands down the best HTTP interception/proxy software I've used on the Mac (and iOS).

IAmGraydon• 2 years ago

Ableton Live

sedatk• 2 years ago

Visual Studio Installer: The way how installer downloads and installs packages in parallel is a joy to watch. It makes me feel valued as a user. Great time savings. I know that's not unique to VS installer, but that's what I use it the most.

brettkromkamp• 2 years ago

Blender (https://www.blender.org/), by a wide margin, is my favourite piece of software. It's so apparent that the team behind it is passionate regarding what they are doing and highly skilled, as well. Each release brings both large and small improvements. What's more... it's open source.

TowerTall• 2 years ago

kais power goo

runiq• 2 years ago

You oughtta go touch grass, friend. Trust me

vmfunction• 2 years ago

Beautiful Dorena, but doesn't run on new mac os any more.

fotcorn• 2 years ago

Regolith Desktop (https://regolith-desktop.com/). A fully preconfigured Tiling Window Manager based desktop environment for Linux.

Uses i3 on X11, sway on Wayland.

No more fiddling with config files to make basics like system settings actually work under i3.

alganet• 2 years ago

Desktop: VLC, Transmission (torrent client), Hydrogen (drum machine), DaVinci Resolve, VirtualBox, Inkscape, Encarta, Google Earth, curl, 7-Zip, Sticky Notes (macOS), World Clock (macOS).

Web based: The Pirate Bay, Wikipedia, Nebula, phpBB, Internet Archive.

Android: Google Maps, Musician (tuner & metronome app), Hacker's Keyboard.

Probably left a lot of good ones out.

gryzzly• 2 years ago

IA Writer, workflowy

xtiansimon• 2 years ago

I like to draw, so— Adobe Illustrator was a joy for me back in the day. Fast. Today, if I need to make a drawing, I like google draw.

That said, these days I’m making custom scripts in Python and I love Click for CLI. I love solving problems with scripting.

Everything else is just a struggle to get something done and go home.

KronisLV• 2 years ago

Kanboard: https://kanboard.org/ is a lightweight Kanban project management tool, it might not have every feature under the sun but it's the most snappy project management tool I've ever used, looks simple and runs well. I honestly love it, what a nice thing to have.

MobaXTerm: https://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/ this one is a bit more Windows centric but I ended up paying for it and replaced mRemoteNg and PuTTY with it, it's even better than Remmina or whatever Linux has to offer - you can manage SSH/RDP/VNC/... sessions, input across multiple sessions side by side and it just simplifies things a lot (jump host support, a port forwarding too and so much more).

GitKraken: https://www.gitkraken.com/ also a piece of software that I paid for, this one actually makes using Git pleasant, feels better to use than SourceTree and Git Cola (even though that latter is wonderfully lightweight, too) and honestly I prefer that to the CLI nowadays.

Most modern text editors and IDEs: I personally pay for JetBrains IDEs but also like Visual Studio Code as a text editor and both have helped me immensely, they're reasonably performant when you have the RAM, look nice, often give you suggestions about how to improve your code and also have a plethora of plugins in their ecosystems. Nowadays I unapologetically use LLMs as well and overall it feels like I have these great tools and cool autocomplete (that is sometimes a bit silly and wrong) at my disposal, that makes me happy.

Kdenlive: https://kdenlive.org/ imagine if there was a successor to Windows Movie Maker, though something that gets most of the important stuff out of Sony Vegas, except is also completely free and works on most platforms. Kdenlive is all of that and also somehow quite pleasant to use, I actually prefer it to DaVinci resolve. There is a bit of a learning curve to any piece of software like this, but everything mostly makes sense in this one.

Linux Mint with Cinnamon: https://www.linuxmint.com/ as far as desktop OSes go it's familiar (Ubuntu without snaps by default), whereas the UI feels both snappy, doesn't use too much resources and is actually pretty to look at.

Gitea: https://about.gitea.com/ I still use this for my personal Git repositories and integrating with CI systems and it's lightweight, looks good and just feels pleasant to use. Previously I self-hosted GitLab and constantly ran into resource exhaustion as well as doubts about the next update is going to corrupt all of my data and break (it did), so now I use Gitea instead.

Drone CI: https://www.drone.io/ a container native CI solution that I can also self host. It's container oriented, integrates with Gitea nicely, is similarly nice to GitLab CI and doesn't cause me headaches like Jenkins would.

Docker: https://www.docker.com/ yes, even Docker desktop. It just makes working with containers really pleasant and predictable, even when something like Podman also exists (and also is great). I don't know, I feel like Docker really saved me from having brittle legacy environments, even self-contained containers with health checks and resource limits with still the same brittle code inside of those make me feel way more safe.

lcordier2• 2 years ago

i3, vim, Obsidian ;)

lcordier2• 2 years ago

sxiv

rickydroll• 2 years ago

excalidraw (simple, flexible drawing tool)

chatgpt

copilot

anbardoi• 2 years ago

For iOS apps:

Feeeed - completely customizable RSS reader with no data collection.

Widgy - Custom widgets on iOS. Not talking like "mmmm widget green now" I'm talking custom javascript in the widget, API calls, custom symbols, colors, transparency, sizing, whatever you need. The complexity of photoshop almost.

iSH: Alpine terminal emulator. Its surprising what you can do with it.

For desktop:

Tesseract: FOSS OCR(optical character recognition). Can convert text on images to actual encoded text.

OpenRGB: FOSS interaction with a diverse set of RGB devices

MultiMC: Minecraft Java edition custom launcher

iroddis• 2 years ago

Modern software? Not many. Excalidraw and Shottr (screenshots) are so easy and intuitive, I really appreciate them.

Historically: BeOS, WebOS from Palm, and any BBS software ever. The joy of hearing people call in never faded, even as the world moved on.

10729287• 2 years ago

Remember the Milk. There’s something very satisfying adding tasks within only one line with its syntax. I also like how it never tries to impose it flows and how much it’s customisable to your needs. Very simple yet Powerfull. Last but not least, team never feel the need to add the new hip features or just change everything to justify subscription. One of the best app I ever used.

RudyStone• 2 years ago

Fish shell

BBEdit

SimCity 2000

Old issues of Wired (pre-9/11, let's say)

justusthane2• 2 years ago

- Visidata

- z (https://github.com/rupa/z)

- fzf

- vim

- Fastmail

- WireGuard

- draw.io

- PowerShell (it’s difficult to overstate how much PS has improved Windows system administration)

- Microsoft PowerToys

- WSL (alternating joy and extreme frustration)

- Home Assistant

- Airfoil

whereistejas• 2 years ago

- social media -> are.na, posts.cv

- arc

- shots (camera app for ios)

locopati• 2 years ago

Todoist most of the time (there's the occasional moment of frustration when I'm trying to custom filter something complex and i wish they'd make multiple selection easier but those are both minor)

Charlie_e• 2 years ago

Obsidian is the first that comes to mind, offline-first but with vault sync is a wonderful experience. Other than that, Tableplus is far above other other database management gui Ive used, Zellij+Helix is a great combo, and I havent used it much I found Godot really intuitive and user friendly.

snapplebobapple2• 2 years ago

I really liked obsidian but i switched to silverbullet a couple months ago and havent looled back, might be worth checking out.

sowbug• 2 years ago

Desktop Linux. It stays out of my way and just works.

Apple has almost never been an option for me because I like being able to run software on diverse hardware.

Windows gets more inscrutable and annoying every time I'm asked to do family tech support. I can't believe how many ads are baked into the current version of the OS.

I'm not a gamer, so the lure to tolerate Windows for a single app has never been strong for me.

srhtftw• 2 years ago

Things that make my mac more usable for me in no particular order:

    visidata - https://www.visidata.org
    just - https://github.com/casey/just
    ripgrep - https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep
    macports - https://www.macports.org
    sloth - https://github.com/sveinbjornt/Sloth

karmakaze• 2 years ago

Ableton Live. It's amazing how good UI/UX can be for non-computer-field workflows. Maybe I appreciate it more because I wouldn't be able to organize it all so neat & compactly.

And even better than that are hardware synthesizers with all the direct control knobs to fully and dynamically shape the sounds that come out. I also prefer them because looking at an Ableton screen feels too close to my day job.

It's pretty much the same story as in cars: software with a touch screen can only get so good--with a physical UI it can be better.

schmookeeg• 2 years ago

Microsoft Publisher is mine. Think it, put it on the page, now you're a desktop publisher. I preferred it to Word for the longest time, for even the most banal documents, because I had pure control over layout.

I wish it was ported to Mac.

ElectronBadger• 2 years ago

Bitwig, SublimeText, Tusky (Mastodon client for Android), Midnight Commander, my highly customized i3 setup.

gxonatano• 2 years ago

I'll play. My favorite software, in order:

1. Linux

2. Emacs (with org-mode, org-roam, and other plugins)

3. Nushell

khaledh• 2 years ago

JetBrains IDEs + iTerm2 + GitHub

snapplebobapple2• 2 years ago

Hyprland for a tiling window manager, nixos sometimes but that one also sparks mass frustration just as much as joy

thiht• 2 years ago

I actually love Notion. I’ve used dozens note taking app and Notion is the only one I managed to stick with because of its flexibility and general aesthetic. Its block system is amazing.

zelphirkalt2• 2 years ago

Git when it unexpectedly merges everything correctly automagically.

traches• 2 years ago

My sway, terminal, neovim setup is so goddamn /comfy/ I love it

kkfx• 2 years ago

Emacs, with EXWM for most of desktop usages (float windows support suck)

pschuegr• 2 years ago

https://www.reddit.com/r/outside/

in seriousness though this is a great question and i look forward to the answers. i could not think of one.

maybeben• 2 years ago

nothing from freedesktop.org

overengineer• 2 years ago

Micro text editor https://github.com/zyedidia/micro

MS Paint

Ask HN: What software sparks joy when using?

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