Ask HN: What dev tools do you rely on that nobody talks about? Curious to find those hidden gems that boost productivity or make dev work more efficient. Mired in my own processes and need a change/shift. I'm hoping there's still some non-AI stuff out there that's delightful to use (in a nerdy sense). |
I love it so much that I pity people that use Bash, Zsh.
https://github.com/sharkdp/bat (nice coloured cat replacement)
https://github.com/abiosoft/colima (so I don't need docker desktop)
https://github.com/duckdb/duckdb (performant database that lets you directly query JSON, parquet, csv files with SQL queries and convert one to the other.
https://github.com/eradman/entr (rerun commands automatically when provided files change) (useful for rerunning test commands automatically once you save the file you're editing.
https://github.com/martinvonz/jj and https://github.com/idursun/jjui (Jujutsu VCS, been using it for three months and I really enjoy it)
https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazydocker (managing containers, images, volumes easily)
https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit (best tui for git and outside niche git commands, the fastest way to use git.)
https://github.com/jdx/mise (fast asdf, direnv, and task runner replacement) (install pretty much version of tool, language, env vars in a per directory level. (Or global if you want))
https://github.com/ajeetdsouza/zoxide (intelligent cd to move between directories incredibly quickly)
https://github.com/cantino/mcfly - fuzzy shell history (feels lighter than atuin to me, in rust)
https://github.com/watchexec/watchexec - rerun on file change, knows about .gitignore/.ignore etc (in rust)
https://github.com/jonas/tig - instead of lazygit, mostly for easier git log viewing for me as I use straight git most of the time
Otherwise a lot of crossover in what I use too.
2. https://github.com/casey/just for more structured scripting.
I'm not a dev by trade, so I did use AI as a power-tool to wrestle with the C++ and Electron parts. It turned into a bit of a rabbit hole—I ended up obsessed with keeping it entirely local/offline (no cloud APIs or telemetry) just to see if I could do things like local OCR in RAM. I ended up building two more tools to help me with making the one tool so it kind of spiraled into a small suite, but the main goal was just a no-frills utility that didn't require a login or a subscription just to crop an image.
It's like grep but faster and easier to use. I still use it all the time, even in the era of Claude.
I'm not sure it counts as a dev tool, but I use Nushell and I'm always surprised at how few devs know about it.
I’m working on mockaton, which is mainly a filename convention based router.
its low latency, can do multiple layers, and its easy to pick out a standard set of colours to draw with.
It lets me make good rhetorical diagrams, and I've also used it for drawing quick mockups to get genai to make webpages
also, Quip as a design document/review tool. Its fantastic having a design review where you get comment threads going along different parts of the requirements and design, that you can then focus on in discussion time. it also lowers the barrier to giving feedback, so newer devs can ask questions without feeling like theyre taking up valuable meeting time
Why not just devcontainers? I know its a PITA to setup on podman.
But here we go, Common Lisp for rapid prototyping at my FAANG job, so I'm actually paid to do that!!!
edit: minor typo
Copies it to your clipboard on osx. I use this a lot.
alias pbcopy='xclip -selection clipboard'
alias pbpaste='xclip -selection clipboard -o'
I'm sure Tmux can do it, but I really hate the Ctrl+B thing. Alt + Arrow keys are way more intuitive.
They are central to my personal dev tool
On the client, it uses sqlite. As of recently, it also keeps an in-memory Nucleo index to make fuzzy searching much faster