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What are the top five software apps you benefit the most from?
Can be mobile, desktop or web. Please exclude social media and web browsers themselves.
Can be mobile, desktop or web. Please exclude social media and web browsers themselves.
file-latest-final-FINALnonsense. Git is pretty nice though once you get the hang of it.Git is so ingrained in my way of life that it didn’t even occur to me as one of mine.
Update: Honourable mention to LibreOffice, which lets me avoid MS Office.
I need to use at least three graphics editors to cover all my needs:
Krita has also been maturing nicely, I think its featureset will someday eclipse GIMP, if it hasn't already.
I believe Krita is explicitly only focusing on drawing & other creation functionality instead of editing existing stuff. Which is a shame considering it's UI/UX is way better than it's competitor with the same functionality (that aren't paid closed-source stuff)
No doubt, but it's only a matter of time IMO.
I use it for image editing and stuff (mainly cutting stuff out for emojis or shitty memes with my friends). It's definitely weird at times - the UI is tricky for that kind of stuff cause it's definitely not built for it - but it does the job just fine. I got fed up with Paint.NET and was looking for an alternative I could easily get through WPM; I don't remember if I looked for GIMP, Ibguess I'd probably forgotten about it
Honorable mentions
I decided to try 1Password because of a cross-promotion with Fastmail as part of my long quest to remove Google from my life. At first I thought it was dumb to pay for a password manager when there are so many options that are free but the actual password manager software is leagues above any other implementation. In particular it has one killer feature; it contains an OTP generator that is compatible with Google Authenticator which you can access on any device, and it will autofill the current value instantly.
Give Bitwarden a try. It's free, open-source, has syncing (free) and just added support for fastmail masked email generation https://bitwarden.com/blog/use-bitwarden-to-generate-email-aliases-with-fastmail/
Also has the TOTP generation that you mentioned :)
Bitwarden is fantastic. I moved over from LastPass a couple of years ago and couldn't be happier
I honestly probably should have given them a look over before I decided to go with these guys, but unfortunately I've already paid for this year for my entire family and aren't likely to change for a while.
Sweepy looks like something that might help me and my partner out. I'll give it a try, thanks for sharing!
I tried so very hard to get my partner on board with Sweepy, but he refuses to download the app onto his phone. So instead we split up our tasks, and only the ones I'm responsible for go into Sweepy, and he manages his... however he does, haha.
I spend most of my time in a Windows environment so all mine will target that. No strong opinions on platforms outside of use what works for you, I've just sunk the time in with Windows.
It has support for Everything, if that's of any use to @rogue_cricket .
Ctrl+Shift+fto start an Everything search in the current folder, Ctrl+1-6 to change the display mode of folders, etc.Do you find you still use Notepad++? Since I got VSCode I don't think I opened Notepad++!
Not who you asked, but I use both so here is my 2¢. I use VSCode for most things these days, but still use Notepad++ for particularly large files which VSCode sometimes struggles with. For quickly taking notes or throwing together a draft, Notepad++ is also generally superior as well since it loads instantly, whereas VSCode can take a bit of time to start up.
I do, for similar reasons to cfabbro. It's handy as a place to dump notes that persists, do a quick find-replace, or open something like a large xml/json/etc., that VSCode would want to handle in a different and slower way. Occasionally useful for avoiding one-admin-instance-allowed.
Conceptually I like having different tools for different purposes, and light-weight fast editing and feature-rich editing are distinct to me. If I'm editing a script with a VSCode extension for hints/formatting/whatever I'll use that as a handler, but for something like a .toml config file I'll usually just want something quick and simple.
I'm intrigued by autohotkey. Can you recommend some resources where I can read up on its uses? The first thing that comes in mind is auto-expanding my email and address while signing up for stuff, but that is not enough to justify a continuously running software that hooks my keyboard.
Is it powerful enough to automate some copy paste jobs like string splitting etc? What are your few dozen other things?
Despite the name, AHK is essentially a complete automation suite (with weird syntax). Aside from re-binding keys & combinations, it can, for example, call into arbitrary DLLs because why not, along with less interesting other stuff. And those are only the things it comes with by default. It also has a surprisingly large community that make it do other things
AHK is how a lot of especially less technical people automate things on windows. Processes, repetitive tasks, or even just creating shortcuts for commonly typed messages or key combinations.
The docs or Github awesome-list might be good places to get an overview.
A couple things I've used it for (skipping the ad hoc dozens):
WindowSpy.ahkthat comes with it to try to find controls or AHK names, use a fuzzy search for graphics, read from a memory offset, etc.hotkey-->start typing-->fill blanks if there are any-->do something with found/filled command) for a sibling. Demo shows:Anything you want to do with string manipulation is possible (and a lot of it may already be out there), but AHK may not be your preferred tool, or may just get used on the front-end. The syntax can be awkward and I wouldn't consider myself skilled with Autohotkey. That's never prevented me from getting some use from it.
One of the handier things if you're playing around with it is mapping a key to reloading (e.g., Win+Backtick would be
#`::Reload).An
#If [condition]directive is also handy for having app/condition specific hotkeys.If you wanted to use Interception to remap something like a bluetooth remote you can do that. If you wanted to have a keyboard use a second set of characters when Caps are on:
I find stuff like a quick date/time hotkey, or adding a fake "paste" where it isn't allowed to be helpful:
If there's concerns about the footprint or safety of AHK, I'll mention it's very light-weight, is open-source, and has been around for decades.
My answers are pretty staid, I suppose.
ed - I usually don't need anything fancier. I'll break out nano if I don't want to futz about trying to figure out how do do something in ed. I'll break out my copy of Ed Mastery by MWL if I am in more of a futzing-about mood.
mpv - I get distracted by music easily and so don't often listen for stretches longer than an album, so cmus doesn't get much play for me. mpv is also my go-to video player.
uBlock Origin - necessary if I want to browse the web and remain sane.
mupdf - lets me look at pdf files and search through them. If I really need to scribble on them I use xournal++.
yt-dlp - my setup gets easily overwhelmed by streaming video, so this is a necessity if I want to keep up with Sumo, learn things through video, or look at the Twitter videos my friends send me.
Zoho. It's a browser-based office suite, totally cloud based, and it's vastly improved my productivity (admittedly, I'm being productive at non-productive tasks, but still.)
Spotify. I binge podcasts while I'm doing other things, and it's widely supported enough that I have a decent chance of finding them there. Bonus points for being an insomniac that has largely conquered the issue thanks to pink noise and rainfall playlists.
Discord. I think everyone is aware of what it is, but what it does for me personally is phenomenal. My partner and I have separate "offices" (it's a room that our computer lives in, but there's no good word for that.) We use Discord as an intercom system. And as a bulletin board. And as a peer-to-peer video stream.
Bluestacks. There's a handful of mobile games I enjoy, but I don't enjoy using a phone for them. Bluestacks is a fantastic Android emulator that lets me run mobile apps on my desktop (or, in this case, laptop.)
Foxit. I loathe Adobe (and in particular, Acrobat) so having an awesome free PDF reader is essential.
Bonus Round! Roll20. I love tabletop gaming, but there's not always a good group in your locale. Roll20 + Discord is 95% of the way to actually sharing space at a table.
Zoho actually has a lot of products under their belt; the company I work for uses their Zoho One subscription (which gives you access to essentially all of their apps) as the basis of an ERP system. They move insanely fast, and the stuff they let you do grows at a mind-boggling rate. And yes, that does mean that some things occasionally break, but they have fairly decent service to fix the things that go wrong. The only thing I don't really like about them is that it's all proprietary SaaS - but if there's a right way to do that, they're the ones doing it.
Bitwarden a free, open-source password safe that is supported by its paid tier. They don't do anything weird with free users' data or anything, and it runs on everything: Mac, Windows, Linux, browser plugin, Android, iOS. It changed how I handle passwords, and I'm very grateful for it.
Steam: Steam beats GoG for the convenience factor, especially cross-platform from Windows to Linux, and now portably with the Deck, but at the core of all of it is Steam. If Valve disappeared tomorrow I'd probably play fewer video games.
Renoise: I started making electronic music in 2006/2007 and had a pirated FL Studio license. I felt guilty and went to Buzz Tracker as it was free and powerful, and it changed how I approached music. It also broke piano-roll editors for me. As soon as I had a job I bought Renoise to work with, and haven't looked back. They're slower on development, and Renoise is essentially a labor of love at this point, but I can't imagine I'd be making music right now without it.
Spotify: I love being able to think of an artist and listen to them immediately. It keeps my musical taste/listening from getting stale because I can always pivot into something new and interesting.
I'm going to stretch here and make it a software project: QMK: Aside from leading to a fun hobby building funky keyboards, it has allowed me to save a ton of desk space by having keyboards that can do everything with a minimal amount of space taken up. I could easily live on a Planck, but use a 5x12 keyboard for the number row for games.
I love Bitwarden. I don't even know the password to the majority of my accounts anymore. I find it's much more secure that way.
I mostly use my computer for watching shows and making noise. So here's a top 4 list of the audio software I use the most with the video player I usually use.
Studio One - Audio recording software. I started back with Cakewalk ProAudio in the 90's and have used most DAWs. For audio recording I find S1 has the most compatible workflow to how I think. S1 struggles with lots of midi tracks though (large orchestral templates over roughly 80 tracks).
Izotope Ozone, Neutron, and Neuron- Fantastic multi-effects/ Mastering multi-effects for audio. For individual effects I prefer Fabfilter, especially their EQ Pro Q3.
BIAS FX2 - The best sounding guitar multi-effects app I've found so far.
East West Hollywood Orchestra - Orchestral Synth. The sounds are kinda old but they updated the player. For the price point you can't get a better deal. Tons of instruments, an orchestrator, and it sounds really good for scoring. It's only competition at this price point is Spitfire Audio's BBC Orchestra. Which I have as well. It's more geared towards classical, has less instruments, and in Spitfire fashion, the delays for when a note starts are not consistent. And the horns are a bit soft as well.
MPV - a simple open source video player
I work in video production and Izotope’s products are amazing. Well worth the high prices (especially when I’m not the one footing the bill!) On more than a few occasions, their audio clean up tools have saved my bacon. I’m always astounded at how good their background noise removal tools are.
What a great question.
Looks like we have very similar taste in apps!
It seems so! Did you try Nota? I can't believe it's not more popular.
I've been using Obsidian for that kind of thing (Markdown wiki database), so I don't think it would really fit into my current workflow. Looks like it's request-only beta, too, which I usually don't bother with. iA Writer is my go-to for editing little random Markdown notes on my phone.
I'm googling these to learn more, but can you give a short bit on what they are and how you use them? Trying to figure out how they might fit into my workflow.
Sure thing! I used both extensions as a way to compartimentarize (I don't know if this word exists in English) my browsing experience.
Multi-Account Containers allows you to use every tab as "a new session". That lets you log in with accounts (google accounts for instance) in every tab and not connecting your search history with your work or personal google accounts.
Conteinarise let you identify "personas" or "containers" for different uses. For instance, you can have a "Work" container just for work related stuff keep you logged in your work credentials in Google, Github, trello or whatever. Conteinarise let you customize it even more in simple terms like this:
That implies than every time you open a chess.com domain or subdomain, it will open on a "chess" tab, etc.
The English word would be "compartmentalize" =)
And thanks for the description! I have to rethink my browsing with containers in mind...not sure if I need the multi-account containers since I don't usually have multiple accounts - but splitting into different containers for things like finances or video game stuff might be useful.
The word is "compartmentalize" in english.
Please flag this as noise, if you would.
Emacs times 5? :P
The other 4:
You're supposed to talk about software packages, not operating systems.
Obsidian (all platforms) (https://obsidian.md/)
I use it to plan my day, keep organized, journal, take notes, etc. I've loaded it up with a handful of modifications that make it into a really nice multi-tool for storing and organizing basically any kind of text.
Everything (Windows) (https://www.voidtools.com/support/everything/)
Fast indexed search of Windows files, I use it multiple times a day.
PodcastAddict (Android app)
There are probably better apps out there, but I'm grandfathered in on the "pay for it once" plan so I can use it ad-free without a subscription. I find it easy to keep track of what I've listened to. Sometimes it struggles a bit to add new stuff, though.
BetterSnapTool (Mac, app store)
I use Mac for work and desperately missed snapping windows to the edges of screens as you can with Windows. Previously I had used Spectacle, but not only is BetterSnapTool cheaper, I find it works better.
Google Calendar (multiple platforms)
As much as I would like to move away from Google, I still feel this is the best calendar app for me and it's not even close. I have very poor short-term memory so the instant I make a future plan, I pop it in there.
I'm curious if you and @TemulentTeatotaler have tried Notion, and how would you say it compares to Obsidian.
I have tried Notion, although it was a while ago and I ended up maxing out the free plan before I looked for an alternative and found Obsidian.
I think even if both were completely free I would still pick Obsidian. The community plugins and customization are key for me, I have a ton of custom shortcuts, automated templates, and so on. Additionally, I like that my notes are only saved to 'the cloud' if I expressly set it up that way, rather than it being a core part of the product. They're just markdown files on my computer. If I want to make them accessible from anywhere all I have to do is pop that folder onto the syncing service of my choice - although Obsidian Vault is optionally available as well. I've even heard of some people using GitHub repos which is neat.
Caveat: Notion may have changed since I used it, it's been a few years.
The free plan is much more generous now. Mostly limiting large file uploads. :)
I haven't used Notion so I can't give a comparison. Outside of some minor performance complaints (I fall back to something like Notepad++/Typora for lightweight editing) I haven't felt much was lacking in Obsidian, but that may be the case with Notion as well.
I've never heard of Obsidian, but first glance it appears to be sort of similar to Microsoft OneNote, although maybe a bit more flexibility. Do you have any experience with OneNote, and how it compares?
They're very different, even though they're both note-taking and sorting applications.
Obsidian is based entirely around the Markdown file format, so all the notes are easily written in that format. Mixed media can be inserted but it generally conforms to the limits of text files (i.e. pictures go between paragraphs). With OneNote, mixed media is king so text and pictures are effectively treated equally and can be moved around and manipulated however you like.
Obsidian is essentially about creating a collection of interconnected text files, whereas OneNote is more about recreating the notebook experience, complete with tabs and a huge amount of space to do what people now refer to as whiteboarding. In terms of how one interacts with the software, Obsidian is used more like Notepad whereas OneNote is more in line with Powerpoint or Miro.
The big sell of Obsidian and many of the note-taking apps like it that work similarly (there are many markdown-based note-taking tools now), is that the ability to interconnect notes results in a graph view.
As a software engineer this alone might be enough to get me to try it out. It annoys me to no end how difficult Microsoft makes it to nicely format code in my notes.
Unfortunately I have not used OneNote! Although from a quick glance at the OneNote page, it looks like they really push their mixed-media approach. I believe there may be a plugin which allows for a limited "canvas", but Obsidian is definitely made for text and wiki-style [[links]] between text (technically markdown) files.
Electron!
...OK, that's technically a web browser. Let's see... I still use notepad2-mod, which I've always liked for its extreme simplicity and distraction-free interface.
Universal Media Server is a very good, and once again relatively uncomplicated way to deliver media to your TV.
foobar2000, the ultimate, extremely versatile audio player for desktop with a ton of extensions but that gives you the choice to have an interface as stark and straightforward as you want.
Blender is too good not to mention. It's not every day that you have a free open source project that's also the best way to do something, in this case 3D modelling and manipulation. It's not perfect, but it's very good.
And I suppose I have to list PuTTy?
Will mention the ones I haven't seen, these are all for macos since I have a pretty simple Windows setup:
I'm pretty basic, so I don't have a bunch of magical tools that I'm always using. But I did just finish a longish personal project that needed specialized tools, so I'll talk about those instead.
OpenSCAD - I don't know why exactly, but I just can't wrap my brain around the UI of the popular CAD programs. But I do consider myself a half-decent programmer and I have a high school understanding of trigonometry and boolean logic, so OpenSCAD is perfect for me.
SuperSlicer is my choice of slicer mainly because Cura's UI is terrible and their rendering engine on MacOS is really poorly optimized, leading to slideshow levels of performance. While Superslicer doesn't have all of Cura's capabilities, it does have a much more sane UI as well as nice features like built-in calibration tools.
Cheap digital calipers technically aren't software. They say that there is a way to interface them with a computer so you can capture the readings directly but I never did this. It would have honestly been too precise; a lot of things needed to be rounded up or down a bit to ensure everything fit right.
Printables, where I'll be uploading my project files as soon as I can be arsed to shoot some pictures and finish a write-up.
Gollum - A git-based wiki. I often find myself sitting at someone else's computer and needing to reference something. I use Caddy as a reverse-proxy which provides authentication. Obsidian and Logseq are awesome, but I always find a wiki to be more useful. I access my Gollum instance several times a day. Since the wiki content is simple Markdown stored in a git repository, content can easily be manipulated by scripts and other automated processes. For example, I generate wiki pages containing important system log events and a daily fortune. This all runs merrily on a Raspberry Pi on my desk.
Sublime Text - In a perfect world everyone would have a favorite text editor. Sublime is lightning fast, opens enormous files, and has a huge library of extensions. If you're a heavy git user, this pairs very well with Sublime Merge. I keep portable versions of both on a flash drive because it makes me feel better.
Blink Shell - An iOS/iPadOS shell and SSH client. Integrates with the iOS filesystem, has built-in VSCode capabilities, and Mosh support. Good stuff.
PCalc - A truly terrific calculator for iOS. A standout in a crowded category.
Pocket Casts - I love podcasts, and I love podcast apps, but I love this one the most. I'm not aware of a more flexible podcast manager. I use the iOS and web versions currently - my experience with the Android version ended a few years ago.
I wasn't aware of Sublime text. Downloading it now. Thank you.
https://handmirror.app/ - Just a quick camera preview app to make sure I know what I look like before joining a video call.
https://soulver.app/ - A cross between a spreadsheet and a programming language
https://rogueamoeba.com/soundsource/ A much better volume mixer replacement for Mac
Ableton Live - For making music
Raindrop.io for saving bookmarks etc
Gnumeric and LibreOffice Calc which I use for simple invoices to get paid and keep track of hours (because, for some reason, MS Teams SUCKS and can't tell you when you joined online meetings).
Notepad++ which I keep a huge, unstructured, mess of notes from online meetings, stuff I'm researching, people I'm talking to, etc etc. It's awful. Do not recommend.
To try to fix my Notepad++ problem I'm moving to Zim Desktop Wiki. I'm not sure if it'll fit my needs yet, and this is the kind of thing where I need to have more discipline than I actually have, so it's probably not going to fix it. But it's worth a try.
What’s an app?