Back in the day, I remember VLC being the first piece of software that really blew my mind. Being able to open any of the myriad video formats was (and remains) amazing.
Back in the day, I remember VLC being the first piece of software that really blew my mind. Being able to open any of the myriad video formats was (and remains) amazing.
I haven't used VLC in a long while, but I remember cases of it just not working. I stopped using it because it's pretty ghetto and pails in comparison to a more complete package. Certainly it's...
I haven't used VLC in a long while, but I remember cases of it just not working. I stopped using it because it's pretty ghetto and pails in comparison to a more complete package. Certainly it's the easiest media player to use, and it does some cool stuff, but it sucks at other stuff like hardware rendering and subtitle rendering.
I also distinctly remember is failing outright to render many video files that MPC with the K-Lite Codec pack would render flawlessly. VLC is the simplest to use, but I generally disagree with the 'it just works' mentality.
K-Lite codec pack is usually my go-to, but I've been using Kodi recently more often than anything else. I don't download as much questionable stuff anymore. I don't really pirate any media but I...
K-Lite codec pack is usually my go-to, but I've been using Kodi recently more often than anything else. I don't download as much questionable stuff anymore. I don't really pirate any media but I use Kodi for what I have left. If it's particularly challenging to Kodi, or is in need of enhancement, I use MPC with K-Lite.
I definitely don't subscribe to the 'if it ain't broke...' mentality for anything, I believe anything can be improved even if it's already good. I actually do have VLC installed on most of my...
I definitely don't subscribe to the 'if it ain't broke...' mentality for anything, I believe anything can be improved even if it's already good. I actually do have VLC installed on most of my computers, partially because it comes standard with most Linux distros, and partially because I just like having multiple media players installed for testing purposes. I don't think I would 'go back' to VLC, but I'll use it if I need to. A rare occurrence for me these days, but I still use it on occasion.
I'm actually I glad I don't rely on VLC for everything; while I was testing recording some video game gameplay with OBS, I would test the output files with VLC and they were extremely choppy. I tweaked setting after setting but it was still choppy. Decided to test all of the output files I had with MPC and they were very smooth where they were choppy in VLC.
I'm a huge, huge fan of LAMMPS, a molecular dynamics program. I think my favorite part of it is that it's built in a very modular fashion-- it is extremely straightforward to implement your own...
I'm a huge, huge fan of LAMMPS, a molecular dynamics program. I think my favorite part of it is that it's built in a very modular fashion-- it is extremely straightforward to implement your own functions, classes, etc. etc. that do not break the rest of the code (or even impact it.) Truly a work of art in the scientific computing community.
LAMMPS is difficult to use until you grok their language. The documentation is oftentimes dense and not newbie-friendly, but once you get some idea of what's going on and how to use it it becomes...
LAMMPS is difficult to use until you grok their language. The documentation is oftentimes dense and not newbie-friendly, but once you get some idea of what's going on and how to use it it becomes a very
powerful scientific tool.
Because some of the "official" packages are actually user-created packages that were integrated into the official code-base, the above re: the documentation is not always true. For example, the fix ave/correlate documentation is amazing. Others, not so much.
I've been struggling with it for three or four months now and am finally getting to the point where I can actually use it instead of just prodding around and guessing at what I'm doing.
A few suggestions: ripgrep - superb command line search tool. Best-in-class performance coupled with great documentation. requests - this Python module has one of the best APIs ever designed....
A few suggestions:
ripgrep - superb command line search tool. Best-in-class performance coupled with great documentation.
requests - this Python module has one of the best APIs ever designed.
Ubuntu Simple Scan - bit of an esoteric choice, but this utility was one of the first pieces of Linux software I used that really impressed me with its lightweight, do-one-thing-well design.
ripgrep is wonderful. The only thing that has me going back to grep (or, really, ag) is --passthrough. But for everything else it's phenomenal. At this point I've just started searching globally...
ripgrep is wonderful. The only thing that has me going back to grep (or, really, ag) is --passthrough. But for everything else it's phenomenal. At this point I've just started searching globally because it's so fast (rg ~/repos "foo")
Seconding Simple Scan, even though I spent about 24 hours figuring out why my scanner and computer weren't responding to each other, after working fine just before. It's so simple that it either...
Seconding Simple Scan, even though I spent about 24 hours figuring out why my scanner and computer weren't responding to each other, after working fine just before.
It's so simple that it either doesn't present a dialogue when running into an error, or when it does it only gives you the bare minimum of information, something like "Cannot perform scan."
The program wasn't at fault, it was the scanner itself. Simple Scan works like a dream!
Blender, for sure. It used to be that Blender simply couldn’t compete, feature or UI wise, against the big proprietary 3D modeling/animation software/suites (Autodesk, ZBrush, etc). Now the trend...
Blender, for sure. It used to be that Blender simply couldn’t compete, feature or UI wise, against the big proprietary 3D modeling/animation software/suites (Autodesk, ZBrush, etc). Now the trend has pretty much reversed and the others are struggling to keep up with Blender, especially in terms of community driven instructional content and documentation.
Similarly with Unity3D on the game engine front. It used to be a bit of a joke and only used by indie developers without the money to use anything else but they have now blown past the competition by such a huge margin I don’t know if anyone else can ever hope to catch up to them (maybe Amazon Lumberyard can, we’ll see). Once again in large part thanks to their focus on community and their more than fair pricing models.
Could you specify what you mean by 'best written'? Are you looking for comments on the actual code, or just the user's perspective on what the software does and how it goes about doing it?
Could you specify what you mean by 'best written'? Are you looking for comments on the actual code, or just the user's perspective on what the software does and how it goes about doing it?
Visual Studio Code. It's a powerful IDE that supports nearly any language. I mostly write JavaScript or TypeScript, but I recently needed to work on a Python project and it was great to be able to...
Visual Studio Code. It's a powerful IDE that supports nearly any language. I mostly write JavaScript or TypeScript, but I recently needed to work on a Python project and it was great to be able to use a familiar editor. It's highly customiseable and already has a pretty decent plugin ecosystem. It's very actively maintained, one of the few pieces of software where I take the time to read the "What's New" every time an update comes out. Some people criticise it because it's an Electron app, but it's the fastest Electron app I've ever used. (It actually runs faster than Visual Studio Community for me)
Seconding this. I used to use atom, but once I needed to do some TypeScript work, I switched to Code and haven't looked back. Do you have any suggestions for extensions you find useful? I'm mainly...
Seconding this. I used to use atom, but once I needed to do some TypeScript work, I switched to Code and haven't looked back. Do you have any suggestions for extensions you find useful? I'm mainly a go/TypeScript/JS dev.
I've used it for go also. I installed the recommend tools and it works great. That's just my opinion though. I haven't used too many IDEs as I generally like a pretty lightweight experience....
I've used it for go also. I installed the recommend tools and it works great. That's just my opinion though. I haven't used too many IDEs as I generally like a pretty lightweight experience. Although you could say electron isn't that light in itself :^)
eriklynd.json-tools egamma.npm christian-kohler.npm-intellisense eamodio.gitlens (Really useful if you work in a team, surfaces git blame and other information) SirTori.indenticator (Not really...
eriklynd.json-tools
egamma.npm
christian-kohler.npm-intellisense
eamodio.gitlens (Really useful if you work in a team, surfaces git blame and other information)
SirTori.indenticator (Not really necessary anymore since VS Code implemented this natively, but I prefer the way this works)
I used to have more plugins but I reinstalled Windows a few days ago, these are the ones I've found critical to reinstall since then.
I'm a dyed-in-the-wool FOSS advocate, but LibreOffice simply does not match Microsoft Office. Excel and Word especially are superb pieces of software - and LibreOffice pales in comparison. I use...
I'm a dyed-in-the-wool FOSS advocate, but LibreOffice simply does not match Microsoft Office. Excel and Word especially are superb pieces of software - and LibreOffice pales in comparison. I use LibreOffice anyway, because the advantages of using Linux over Windows outweigh the potential benefits of having a better office suite, but I would find it hard to argue with anyone who said "I can't switch to Linux - I need MS Office".
Until this year when I needed to start using Word as a requirement of school, I thought that LibreOffice and OpenOffice were on par with Microsoft's offerings. I was wrong, Microsoft Office is...
Until this year when I needed to start using Word as a requirement of school, I thought that LibreOffice and OpenOffice were on par with Microsoft's offerings. I was wrong, Microsoft Office is better in just about everyway other than price. I don't think most people need the special features that Word and Excel have to offer, and LibreOffice would suffice in most cases, but I wouldn't say that they are on par.
For my own uses, I don't really use either. I normally use Google Docs to make documents, although I do want to move away from it for privacy concerns.
From the Google cleanse thread on r/privacy: Free with premium options, like Protonmail. Account needed to edit and create. Multiple devices and editors at the same time. 2FA supported. Mobile and...
Have to agree here-- imo Excel is one of the greatest pieces of software conceived by humans. Sure, it doesn't match the convenience of Google Sheets for collaboration or the "moral victory" of...
Have to agree here-- imo Excel is one of the greatest pieces of software conceived by humans. Sure, it doesn't match the convenience of Google Sheets for collaboration or the "moral victory" of FOSS, but it's incredible.
I'm surprised I'd seen nobody mention vi/vim... what an incredible design! Alone the fact that it still remains relevant after 40+ years is incredible.
I'm surprised I'd seen nobody mention vi/vim... what an incredible design! Alone the fact that it still remains relevant after 40+ years is incredible.
I really love Phabricator: https://www.phacility.com/ Every day it surprises me with how well it handles many edge-cases that come my way, and how well thought-through it is
It doesn't necessarily have a huge impact but I love the Dolphin emulator for Gamecube and Wii games, including the excellent regular write-ups about changes being made.
I love illustrator. I used to be a Fireworks guy, but I've come to love illustrator even more. It's more soarse as far as raster image editing, but there's Photoshop for the
I love illustrator. I used to be a Fireworks guy, but I've come to love illustrator even more. It's more soarse as far as raster image editing, but there's Photoshop for the
I know Photoshop has pretty good compatibility with WINE. I just checkout out Illustrator and it seems it's had a terrible relationship with WINE for years :(
I know Photoshop has pretty good compatibility with WINE. I just checkout out Illustrator and it seems it's had a terrible relationship with WINE for years :(
I've been using Inkscape for a long time, mostly for making composite images that I post to reddit and imgur. It's free and works really well. It's also great for making high quality custom...
I've been using Inkscape for a long time, mostly for making composite images that I post to reddit and imgur. It's free and works really well. It's also great for making high quality custom graphics since it's png/vector based.
I used Etcher for the first time recently for a OS switch, and I was incredibly impressed. So much faster than any of the tools I had used for image flashing previously.
I used Etcher for the first time recently for a OS switch, and I was incredibly impressed. So much faster than any of the tools I had used for image flashing previously.
I think there can be many candidates for this through the years including stuff like vi editor or perhaps Photoshop on MacOS, or the awesome utility of Google Maps. But, hands down: Total...
I think there can be many candidates for this through the years including stuff like vi editor or perhaps Photoshop on MacOS, or the awesome utility of Google Maps.
For the maturity and longevity of the software, fair licensing, the absolute usefulness it brings to Windows' basic tools, and the clear contrast on any other platform that doesn't have a Total Commander type GUI file manager (try finding anything close to this on a Mac). Total Commander is the first app I install on a Windows computer and the last one I remove.
Agreed about vi/vim and Total Commander, but saying Google Maps is open source isn't quite true. I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure just the API and the SDK are available. You can't access the...
Agreed about vi/vim and Total Commander, but saying Google Maps is open source isn't quite true. I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure just the API and the SDK are available. You can't access the proprietary functions that you're interacting with, with either of those.
Hands-down the standard UNIX(-ish) toolset – grep, awk, sed, sort, cut etc., and its extensions like the moreutils. I’m still too stupid to properly use them, but ever since I actually tried, it’s...
I’m still too stupid to properly use them, but ever since I actually tried, it’s a marvel how efficient they are and how great it is to pipe one into another.
For example, here’s a (crappily written) script that I wrote using those tools to help me analyse source code origin at work.
VLC. It just works.
Back in the day, I remember VLC being the first piece of software that really blew my mind. Being able to open any of the myriad video formats was (and remains) amazing.
I haven't used VLC in a long while, but I remember cases of it just not working. I stopped using it because it's pretty ghetto and pails in comparison to a more complete package. Certainly it's the easiest media player to use, and it does some cool stuff, but it sucks at other stuff like hardware rendering and subtitle rendering.
I also distinctly remember is failing outright to render many video files that MPC with the K-Lite Codec pack would render flawlessly. VLC is the simplest to use, but I generally disagree with the 'it just works' mentality.
What do you prefer?
K-Lite codec pack is usually my go-to, but I've been using Kodi recently more often than anything else. I don't download as much questionable stuff anymore. I don't really pirate any media but I use Kodi for what I have left. If it's particularly challenging to Kodi, or is in need of enhancement, I use MPC with K-Lite.
Would you retry VLC or is it more of the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" kind of thing with K-Lite and Kodi?
I definitely don't subscribe to the 'if it ain't broke...' mentality for anything, I believe anything can be improved even if it's already good. I actually do have VLC installed on most of my computers, partially because it comes standard with most Linux distros, and partially because I just like having multiple media players installed for testing purposes. I don't think I would 'go back' to VLC, but I'll use it if I need to. A rare occurrence for me these days, but I still use it on occasion.
I'm actually I glad I don't rely on VLC for everything; while I was testing recording some video game gameplay with OBS, I would test the output files with VLC and they were extremely choppy. I tweaked setting after setting but it was still choppy. Decided to test all of the output files I had with MPC and they were very smooth where they were choppy in VLC.
I have not tried Soda Player, but I'll look into it. I'm always up to trying new things.
I'm a huge, huge fan of LAMMPS, a molecular dynamics program. I think my favorite part of it is that it's built in a very modular fashion-- it is extremely straightforward to implement your own functions, classes, etc. etc. that do not break the rest of the code (or even impact it.) Truly a work of art in the scientific computing community.
I'm not generally a big fan of OOP, but it makes a hell of a lot of sense for MD. Is LAMMPS nice to use or is it just nice to write modules for?
LAMMPS is difficult to use until you grok their language. The documentation is oftentimes dense and not newbie-friendly, but once you get some idea of what's going on and how to use it it becomes a very
powerful scientific tool.
Because some of the "official" packages are actually user-created packages that were integrated into the official code-base, the above re: the documentation is not always true. For example, the fix ave/correlate documentation is amazing. Others, not so much.
I've been struggling with it for three or four months now and am finally getting to the point where I can actually use it instead of just prodding around and guessing at what I'm doing.
A few suggestions:
ripgrep- superb command line search tool. Best-in-class performance coupled with great documentation.requests- this Python module has one of the best APIs ever designed.Ubuntu Simple Scan- bit of an esoteric choice, but this utility was one of the first pieces of Linux software I used that really impressed me with its lightweight, do-one-thing-well design.I can second ripgrep – it's become my go-to searching tool, it's very good and very fast.
Thirded. Love me some rg.
ripgrep is wonderful. The only thing that has me going back to grep (or, really, ag) is
--passthrough. But for everything else it's phenomenal. At this point I've just started searching globally because it's so fast (rg ~/repos "foo")Seconding Simple Scan, even though I spent about 24 hours figuring out why my scanner and computer weren't responding to each other, after working fine just before.
It's so simple that it either doesn't present a dialogue when running into an error, or when it does it only gives you the bare minimum of information, something like "Cannot perform scan."
The program wasn't at fault, it was the scanner itself. Simple Scan works like a dream!
Blender, for sure. It used to be that Blender simply couldn’t compete, feature or UI wise, against the big proprietary 3D modeling/animation software/suites (Autodesk, ZBrush, etc). Now the trend has pretty much reversed and the others are struggling to keep up with Blender, especially in terms of community driven instructional content and documentation.
Similarly with Unity3D on the game engine front. It used to be a bit of a joke and only used by indie developers without the money to use anything else but they have now blown past the competition by such a huge margin I don’t know if anyone else can ever hope to catch up to them (maybe Amazon Lumberyard can, we’ll see). Once again in large part thanks to their focus on community and their more than fair pricing models.
Could you specify what you mean by 'best written'? Are you looking for comments on the actual code, or just the user's perspective on what the software does and how it goes about doing it?
I think both are legitimate answers for this question!
Yeah, why not both? Could be 'best written' or could be usability (or both).
Visual Studio Code. It's a powerful IDE that supports nearly any language. I mostly write JavaScript or TypeScript, but I recently needed to work on a Python project and it was great to be able to use a familiar editor. It's highly customiseable and already has a pretty decent plugin ecosystem. It's very actively maintained, one of the few pieces of software where I take the time to read the "What's New" every time an update comes out. Some people criticise it because it's an Electron app, but it's the fastest Electron app I've ever used. (It actually runs faster than Visual Studio Community for me)
Oh, and it's completely free.
Seconding this. I used to use atom, but once I needed to do some TypeScript work, I switched to Code and haven't looked back. Do you have any suggestions for extensions you find useful? I'm mainly a go/TypeScript/JS dev.
Is Code superior as an IDE or specifically as a JS IDE, in your opinion?
I've used it for go also. I installed the recommend tools and it works great. That's just my opinion though. I haven't used too many IDEs as I generally like a pretty lightweight experience. Although you could say electron isn't that light in itself :^)
I used to have more plugins but I reinstalled Windows a few days ago, these are the ones I've found critical to reinstall since then.
Thanks!
LibreOffice (libreoffice.org) blows Microsoft Office out of the water in my opinion.
I'm a dyed-in-the-wool FOSS advocate, but LibreOffice simply does not match Microsoft Office. Excel and Word especially are superb pieces of software - and LibreOffice pales in comparison. I use LibreOffice anyway, because the advantages of using Linux over Windows outweigh the potential benefits of having a better office suite, but I would find it hard to argue with anyone who said "I can't switch to Linux - I need MS Office".
Until this year when I needed to start using Word as a requirement of school, I thought that LibreOffice and OpenOffice were on par with Microsoft's offerings. I was wrong, Microsoft Office is better in just about everyway other than price. I don't think most people need the special features that Word and Excel have to offer, and LibreOffice would suffice in most cases, but I wouldn't say that they are on par.
For my own uses, I don't really use either. I normally use Google Docs to make documents, although I do want to move away from it for privacy concerns.
Have you looked at Zoho Docs?
I have a very passing knowledge of Zoho Docs, in that I've seen it mentioned a few times. Can you give me an elevator pitch on it?
From the Google cleanse thread on r/privacy:
Free with premium options, like Protonmail.
Account needed to edit and create.
Multiple devices and editors at the same time.
2FA supported.
Mobile and Web Apps (Although their iOS app is laggy.)
Have to agree here-- imo Excel is one of the greatest pieces of software conceived by humans. Sure, it doesn't match the convenience of Google Sheets for collaboration or the "moral victory" of FOSS, but it's incredible.
I'm surprised I'd seen nobody mention
vi/vim... what an incredible design! Alone the fact that it still remains relevant after 40+ years is incredible.I really love Phabricator: https://www.phacility.com/
Every day it surprises me with how well it handles many edge-cases that come my way, and how well thought-through it is
It is also the only php codebase that I have ever seen that I wanted to mess about with. It's a treasure.
Is there an easy way to learn it? I know KDE uses it extensively, but it seems to have a steep learning curve.
It doesn't necessarily have a huge impact but I love the Dolphin emulator for Gamecube and Wii games, including the excellent regular write-ups about changes being made.
Oddly, Adobe illustrator. Been using it since v5. I love how logical it is.
I love illustrator. I used to be a Fireworks guy, but I've come to love illustrator even more. It's more soarse as far as raster image editing, but there's Photoshop for the
This is the only thing keeping me from fully switching over to Linux. Nothing truly matches Illustrator or more importantly the CC ecosystem.
I know Photoshop has pretty good compatibility with WINE. I just checkout out Illustrator and it seems it's had a terrible relationship with WINE for years :(
I've been using Inkscape for a long time, mostly for making composite images that I post to reddit and imgur. It's free and works really well. It's also great for making high quality custom graphics since it's png/vector based.
Etcher. It makes flashing OS images to SD cards or USB drives super simple.
I used Etcher for the first time recently for a OS switch, and I was incredibly impressed. So much faster than any of the tools I had used for image flashing previously.
Etcher is awesome!
I think there can be many candidates for this through the years including stuff like vi editor or perhaps Photoshop on MacOS, or the awesome utility of Google Maps.
But, hands down: Total Commander
For the maturity and longevity of the software, fair licensing, the absolute usefulness it brings to Windows' basic tools, and the clear contrast on any other platform that doesn't have a Total Commander type GUI file manager (try finding anything close to this on a Mac). Total Commander is the first app I install on a Windows computer and the last one I remove.
Agreed about vi/vim and Total Commander, but saying Google Maps is open source isn't quite true. I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure just the API and the SDK are available. You can't access the proprietary functions that you're interacting with, with either of those.
The OP asked "(open-source or otherwise)" - so I didn't chose any of those based on whether open source or not.
Hands-down the standard UNIX(-ish) toolset – grep, awk, sed, sort, cut etc., and its extensions like the moreutils.
I’m still too stupid to properly use them, but ever since I actually tried, it’s a marvel how efficient they are and how great it is to pipe one into another.
For example, here’s a (crappily written) script that I wrote using those tools to help me analyse source code origin at work.
I don't know if it counts because it is a web app but I think lichess.com it's the best online chess platform.
SeriesGuide on android. Intellij for desktop