Ask HN: What's a new developer tool you recently started using? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's a new developer tool you recently started using?

8 pointschandler76713 comments

I always like learning about new tools and never know what I'm missing out on. Share some tools you've recently started using.

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Some new diff tool https://github.com/dandavison/delta I just wanted to do a diff inside a bash script and ask the user if it looked ok, found this one.

Dash - An offline documentation browser for MacOS. These days, I found that online searches is a bit wasteful–I never have time to configure specific site- search in Alfred. Kinda useful for languages like Go, Common Lisp and Clojure.

VMs - Specifically with Parallels Desktop. I'm a bit fed up with MacOS packagers. I prefer having a small VM, where things are at least consistent. And no risks of NPM contaminations.

I just started using chezmoi, a cross-platform dotfiles manager. Would highly reccommend chezmoi if you're looking for a reliable dotfile manager.

How is this better than using git?

chezmoi actually uses git to manage the dotfiles, see https://www.chezmoi.io/user-guide/setup/#use-a-hosted-repo-t....

I see the comparison page, seems to be a better answer for what I was looking for: https://www.chezmoi.io/comparison-table/

Hm, it seems like most of what chezmoi does, I don't really need, compared to a private git repo.

Lima - pretty smooth way to develop on a linux vm on macOS. I connect it via SSH to VS code, and performs quite well on M1/M2 MacBooks.

How does Lima compare to something like Docker Desktop?

recently came across Orb, it's a linux VM cum docker runtime. VM boots in seconds, access any folder on Mac as linux folder

https://orbstack.dev/

I have been poring over a large amount of data for debugging purposes recently and discovered “facets” which provides a quick and easy way to compare and explore datasets.

https://pair-code.github.io/facets/

It's kinda silly, but I like "frhed" for Windows. It's a small fast hex editor. I tried more advanced editors but found myself going back to frhed because it opens instantly and never complains, it just opens any file and lets me get to work.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/frhed/

On a similar note I also use Notepad2 which hasn't been updated in years, but is a no-BS upgrade from Notepad that also will open just about anything very quickly. I use it more than Notepad++ because of the balance between simplicity and function, and it never gives me popups to update.

https://www.flos-freeware.ch/notepad2.html

Notepad2 is a classic.

I tried DBeaver recently and thought it was pretty nice. I tried it as an alternative to Beekeeper.

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