Ask HN: What are your must-have apps?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=589527

by PostOnce • 17 years ago

27 46 17 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

So, someone in another thread said something was one of their '5 must-have apps', and I was just about to ask what the other four were when I thought that now is as good a time as any to ask:

What are your Must-Have Apps? (can be more or less than five)

mahmud• 17 years ago

Nearly all of my "must have" apps run on either the Mozilla or the Emacs platforms. If you give me a java runtime, I know where to get a ssh applet and from there I will find my way home, including a remote emacs session running under `screen` :-)

Mozilla effectively functions as my desktop; I use firebug, scrapbook, chatzilla, Pencil sketching and prototyping GUIs, SQLite manager to design databases, and web developer plugin (along with things meant to keep the web safe and sane)

But other than that:

5) a PDF reader.

4) Skype.

3) Open Office, or similar package with good Arabic support.

2) the unix toolchain, including GCC.

1) A Common Lisp implementation (sbcl, lispworks, or CLISP.)

0) putty or any other ssh client. Without SSH I can't function.

[edit: readers may note that I treat GCC as a "tool" ;-]

vorador• 17 years ago

You should consider using irssi, (http://irssi.org/) a console irc client which is _way_ better than chatzilla.

makecheck2• 17 years ago

1. A text editor that is powerful, stable, and basically good for programming. I rely on "vim" almost always, but Xcode is a nice fallback.

2. A powerful terminal. On Linux, "aterm" is the best I have ever found. On Mac, I prefer MacTelnet but Apple's Terminal is pretty good.

3. A suite of infrastructure tools. I've been in the Unix universe for many years, so it's hard to imagine anything except the usual suspects: ls, find, grep, awk, xargs, etc. all joined through shells, Perl and Python. These are definitely "must have"; even if they don't qualify as a single app, they certainly qualify as a single entity I couldn't live without. (And having stumbled my way through Windows' inadequacies, I now know this painfully well.)

4. A web browser, and by extension, Google. I like OmniWeb the most, though I use Firefox at work. I've even been known to use Lynx, or the occasional automation through "wget". There is simply no faster way to get information anymore; I'm more likely to web search for tools than run "man" pages, even.

5. E-mail. I prefer a trivial "send" interface (I like basic command line "mail" sometimes, though "pine"/"alpine" are my favorite). I do use Thunderbird and Apple's Mail quite a bit. I am not a fan of overly complex tools, but the ability to tag and search/filter mail by tag is a really compelling Thunderbird feature.

duskwuff2• 17 years ago

Argh... you had me hoping there that MacTelnet might be an improvement on my beloved urxvt. Sadly, it isn't VT100-compliant: it fails to render my 'screen' status bar properly.

Who wants to write a better terminal app?

GeneralMaximus2• 17 years ago

There's iTerm for OS X (http://iterm.sourceforge.net/), although I find Terminal.app more than adequate.

makecheck2• 17 years ago

Its defaults might not handle it (I don't use "screen", I'm not sure). But there are lots of things you can change; something like line wrap would probably affect a status bar.

travisjeffery• 17 years ago

Emacs, Safari, iTunes, VLC and Terminal.app.

JoelPM• 17 years ago

1) Fluid. The ability to launch work GMail in one window, personal GMail in another window, and Lala.com in a third window and have them all running in separate processes that can't bring each other down has been a great help.

2) Eclipse. It's an 800lb gorilla but I've been using it for years (shortly after it was open-sourced). It can do Java, Scala, PHP, and many others.

3) TextMate. Because firing up Eclipse to write a Python or Ruby script is overkill. I also like that I can type "mate ." in the terminal and get the current directory in the project drawer.

4) Safari/Webkit. I used Firefox for a long time, but on the Mac it just can't compare to Webkit, especially once the Developer tools were introduced.

5) Terminal.app. I currently have 3 windows open for a total of 12 tabs. What I really mean is the unix under-pinnings, but Terminal.app is how you get to those.

Nothing very exciting in the list above, but those are the apps that I spend 90% of my time using.

skinnymuch• 17 years ago

Wow. Fluid is awesome. I lost a huge basecamp message I was about to submit yesterday and threw a fit that resulted in a broken monitor. Never again!

Thanks :)

brianto2010• 17 years ago

My top 5 are:

* Firefox

* Office Suite

* PDF Viewer

* Vim

* Winsplit Revolution

My other favorites (not "must-haves") are:

* Media Player Classic/MPlayer

* GNU Octave/Maxima

* Midnight Commander

mstefff• 17 years ago

desktop only right?

1) firefox

2) music player (itunes, rhythmbox, songbird, etc)

3) geany (or some other great code editor)

4) terminal (linux shell equivalent - does that even count?)

5) ssh/sftp client (ubuntu built-in works fine)

6) torrent client (ktorrent is great, miro for rss)

justlearning• 17 years ago

i believe you mean desktop apps? does browser count as app? if so, then all I need is chrome. I have several desktop apps created from chrome for various web apps. other than that,

skype,

intellij/netbeans/eclipse(one of them running)

notepad++ (anything and everything -editor)

sumatrapdf

dropbox

tiddlywiki

flashnote (for windows) else evernote

biotech• 17 years ago

- Putty/OpenSSH

- RealVNC

- VMWare Server

I love being able to sit at one [desktop] computer and control 6 others. Some run embedded software, some are servers, some are virtual.

cvboss• 17 years ago

1. FAR manager (this one tops them all, can do also SSH/FTP stuff, text editing, archiving etc)

2. Notepad++

3. Firefox

4. skype

5. eclipse

6. the bat

7. adobe photoshop

christefano• 17 years ago

  Quicksilver

The quick application launching and various file and text manipulation actions are great, but it's the multiple clipboards that I find invaluable. Being able to save and search through 500 clipboards makes Quicksilver the one greatest productivity tool I have.

  iTerm

Multiple profiles, full screen mode, sending commands to all open tabs, etc. make it a better terminal than Terminal.

  Adium

It doesn't have video chat yet but I don't mind. It does everything else I could want an IM client to do and the OTR encryption works right out of the box. Plus, the next version reportedly supports both Twitter and IRC.

  Navicat

It's the best tool I've seen for accessing remote databases (I use the MySQL version for Windows running in CrossOver). Sequel Pro and Querious both win on looks but Navicat has the features I need.

  Drupal

Drupal is known for being a good content management system but for me it's an absolutely great web application framework. It does nearly everything I need my websites to do, from running wikis and OpenID providers to large social networks, project management platforms, ecommerce sites and virtual worlds. The Drupal community is so large and diverse that the conferences, camps and user groups are the best I've seen around any industry or software project.

  Virtualmin and Webmin

These are web control panels like cPanel and WHM that are available as a free, GPL version or as a commercially supported "Pro" version. I think Virtualmin is a YC startup, too. Virtualmin and Webmin are occasionally a little rough around the edges but they have completely taken away the pain of administering my sites.

  GrandCentral

It used to be that using voicemail was a necessary time expenditure that nobody really questioned. GrandCentral saves me a lot of time I'd otherwise be wasting.

Here's a tip: don't upgrade your GrandCentral account to Google Voice unless you want the stuff that only Google Voice has (like voicemail transcription). All the GrandCentral-compatible tools like GrandCentral Dialer for the Nokia N8x0 tablets don't work with Google Voice yet.

swombat• 17 years ago

Re: iTerm, I used to use it, but then I figured out how to (ab)use Terminal and I'm now happy with Terminal.

Have a look at my tutorial on how to create and use multiple profiles on my geek blog: http://www.swombat.com/setting-up-terminalapp-with-tr-0

warfangle2• 17 years ago

Believe it or not? After attempting interface development on all three platforms, as much as I hate it and all of its idiosyncrasies, I fall back to windows on the operating system standpoint. Everything I need is there, and in some cases nowhere else (without running a VM).

- Visual Studio 2008 Express. has some of the best Javascript support out there. Sorry, but TextMate doesn't have anything to check for stupid syntax errors on the fly - and NetBeans is bulkier, imho. The only thing you're missing is third party add-ins, and I haven't found much use for them yet. If I need to step into some ruby, I'm fine with TextMate. It's not the best tool for JavaScript though.

-IE6 and

- IE7. Developing for them is an interesting challenge. And a necessary evil. Because you're developing on the same machine you're debugging IEx on, it's a lot easier to use Visual Studio to place breakpoints, watches, and so forth than to use the mostly useless default script debugger.

- Safari or Chrome.

-Firefox, with Firebug. And YSlow!. And the Web Developer toolbar.

- Pandora. (I find I only listen to my music collection when I'm commuting)

- Photoshop.

- Google Docs

- Skype

- Pidgin (ugh; it's horrible on all platforms...)

So as it happens, Windows unfortunately is the only platform I can run all my tools on. Sucks but there it is (I'd rather be on Ubuntu. I can do stuff like pin a stationary translucent terminal with no decorations to my desktop. And the terminal app for AWN is fairly spiffy for quick one-offs).

jpcx012• 17 years ago

Textmate has the awesome Javascript Tools extension http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200901/javascript_tool...

shift+control+v and it runs it through Doug Crawford's lint engine. It also has the option of running it on every file save.

Also, I'd suggest using IE8 instead of IE7. It has way way better dev tools, and built in support for IE7 (using the compatibility mode button). As for IE6, you should do us all a favor and drop support for that ASAP.

warfangle2• 17 years ago

No can do. 8% of our userbase still uses it. Not my decision to make, unfortunately.

I've used the javascript tool. "1 error, 2 warnings," with no explanations? I'd rather copy/paste the code into jslint and run it manually. It also doesn't find some of the things that the original jslint tool does.

Really, it's "awesome," but only if you haven't used something like VS's Javascript support. Sorry, but it's lightyears away. It's kind of like the difference between using nano and using gnome's default text editor...

kirubakaran• 17 years ago

1. e

2. m

3. a

4. c

5. s

huhtenberg2• 17 years ago

1. v

2. i

:-P

sharkbrainguy• 17 years ago

you should try 'm', it'll work really well with the rest of your tools.

peterbraden• 17 years ago

I think you mean:

1. v 2. i :wq

GeneralMaximus2• 17 years ago

I'm guessing you mean apps that allow me to be productive. Not considering Twitter and IM clients, here's my list:

* Terminal.app

* The Python interpreter (I use Python for things like automating tasks, renaming and reorganizing files and even as a simple calculator)

* TextMate

* A nice little todo app called Anxiety (http://anxietyapp.com)

* iCal

* A web browser. I prefer Opera, but I really don't care as long as it's not IE6.

* xPad (sweet and simple note taking program)

And, of course, XCode and Interface Builder for writing Cocoa apps.

There's only one app from Linux that I miss on OS X: AmaroK (or something equally powerful). I know I can get AmaroK on OS X, but there are way too many dependencies. I'm also not willing to sacrifice 400MB of disk space for a media player.

grah• 17 years ago

Quicksilver, Firefox, TextMate, Terminal & Adium.

lleger• 17 years ago

These are my top 10 in no particular order. They're basically what reside in my dock. I think you can really tell a lot about a person based on what apps they keep near.

1. Textmate 2. Transmit 3. Espresso 4. Adium 5. Tweetie 6. The Hit List 7. NewsFire 8. Safari/WebKit 9. Terminal + VIM 10. Pages

JesseAldridge• 17 years ago

1) Dropbox

2) Firefox (with StumbleUpon and AdBlock Plus)

3) Scite

4) Leo (http://webpages.charter.net/edreamleo/front.html)

5) My own tools

bcx• 17 years ago

1. terminal / putty 2. textmate / vim 3. quicksilver 4. firefox + firebug

Whenever I use any computer, I find myself installing all of these programs, in order to get anything done.

ashleyw• 17 years ago

1) Webkit (Safari)

2) Ruby

3) Terminal

4) Textmate

5) Photoshop

6) VMware (Windows Vista image running on 256MB RAM)

7) Spotify (used to be iTunes, but who needs that when you have practically every song you may want for free?)

intranation• 17 years ago

1. Firefox w/Firebug

I hate Firefox as a browser on the Mac, but as a professional front-end developer it's the most valuable piece of kit I have.

2. OmniFocus

It's pretty expensive but it's also really really good, and has industrial strength data integrity. Allows me to stay on top of everything at all times. The apparent high cost disappears when you realise that I use it all the time and am able to rely on it 100%. In fact it's my only app with "Start at login".

3. VMWare Fusion

Allows me run all kinds of virtualised environments (particularly copies of live environments, and Erlang development environments) as though they're local folders, which means I can use the OS X desktop toolchain to work on code, but use Linux for package management etc. Also for Windows, obviously.

4. DropBox

One of the best services on the Internet, bar none.

I haven't listed a text editor here as I use TextMate, but am not so attached to it that I couldn't replace it with something else.

ftse• 17 years ago

Textmate

Transmit

Sequel Pro

OmniFocus or OmniOutliner for GTD

I'm finding I use Nambu more and more for reading Tweets

noahlt• 17 years ago

1. emacs (incl. shell, irc, personal wiki) 2. firefox (incl. email, blog) 3. wmii (tiling window manager)

sherl0ck• 17 years ago

I really like wmii, but too bad, wmii doesn't playing nice with dual monitor. trying to setup for week with no result.

jpcx012• 17 years ago

1. Launchbar / 2. Fluid / 3. Firefox & Firebug / 4. Querious / 5. Photoshop

yason• 17 years ago

Emacs, Firefox, Python, Clojure, Totem.

fsilva• 17 years ago

For linux users, a very useful app: BasKet Note Pads. It's an organization tool, you write pages with notes, format text in those notes, dragndrop files into the page, and the killer feature: at any time you can capture a part of the screen and it goes directly to that page. (e.g. you can be writing notes about a PDF and capture text/a graph/an image from it, directly, in a second) I can't live without it. Out of curiosity, does anyone know similar apps? (in any OS)

link: http://basket.kde.org/

mping• 17 years ago

ClipX - ClipX allows for mulit copy/paste functionality.

sundarurfriend• 17 years ago

I too would highly recommend this app (it's for Windows by the way). It has made several things much easier - for one, I can now copy the different parts of a post (here or at proggit) at a go before replying, and paste them one by one as I need to cite them.

It can also save your file copy operations, so you can copy the same set of files to different places at a go and do many other things you wish Windows had native support for.

pasbesoin• 17 years ago

I use a similar program, Ditto (Windows only). Ditto is very configurable, including allowing one to specify what clipboard formats are captured. It uses SQLite for the datastore and supports searching of the clip history.

I agree with the parent; a clipboard manager is great for assembling information while minimizing context switches. In particular, I've worked in environments offering rather limited screen real estate. In those, Ditto helps keep me from overdosing on Alt-Tab. It's also useful for parking "I may need this" snippets for longer term reference. With the search facility, as long as I remember some aspect of the snippet, it's usually only a second or three away from my fingers.

huhtenberg2• 17 years ago

This sounds suspiciously like a very annoying and universally hated feature from Microsoft Office 2000.

http://www.google.ca/search?q=Office+2000+clipboard

:-)

wyclif• 17 years ago

vim + screen + urxvt

windsurfer• 17 years ago

1. gnu coreutils

It's a little more than 5, but they're all required :)

hboon• 17 years ago

1. OmniFocus 2. Safari 3. Xcode

8-bit_Blaster• 17 years ago

The following five programs are some of my favorite staples to install on a fresh copy of Windows XP:

1) Notepad++

My favorite free, open source text editor. Gets the job done.

2) Mozilla Sunbird

Sunbird helps me keep track of what I have to do with calendar and to-do list features. Open source!

3) Google Picasa

Whether on Linux or Windows, I have yet to find a photo organizer and image manipulator that is as easy-to-use and feature-packed as Picasa.

4) 7-Zip

When it comes to [un]compression I like this one because it can do 7Z, ZIP, RAR, and GZ. Also open source!

5) KeePass

Great way of keeping track of hundreds of silly passwords and software serial numbers. Open source!

Ask HN: What are your must-have apps?

Related Stories