What are the best niche software tools you're using?

I have one that is such a specific niche, it's only used by me and the 4 other coworkers I wrote it for: PySQLQuery... A very creative name if I say so myself.

It is a dead-simple, GUI menu-driven SQL script execution program. It maps folder structure and SQL files into a dropdown menu:

Reports -> Performance -> Slowest Queries.sql

Then it runs the query and dumps the result into a barebones table below it. It seems so minor, but when you have dozens of apps on a centralized database that you need to assist with, and have hundreds of well-organized scripts for issues, going through loading windows, or even a CLI to pull them up is so annoying.

It's got a real basic markup syntax for descriptions and prompting for bind variables, something like:

-- Person Lookup
-- DESC: Checks person example
-- PROMPT: Enter person ID
-- BIND: id
select * from person where person_id = :id:

Whole thing is under 2000 lines of Python leveraging PyQT, a database engine I don't recall (SQL Alchemy?), and absolutely no good coding practices. I wrote it back as a junior dba about 14 years ago now and I think I modified it twice since then.

It's so janky, but it's fast and let's you chain through 10 diagnostic scripts much faster than typical methods.

I started using Zen as my main browser. It's a Firefox fork, so anything that works with Firefox works with Zen. It's got a better UI, vertical tabs - but I just hide all the panels and only have a clean preview of the page that has worked very nicely for me.

I use a program called Image Splitter that does exactly what it sounds like. You tell it how many rows and columns you want and it divides an image up. It's not something a lot of people need to do but it saves me tons of time.

I have to do this a lot for work, so it's a handy $3 tool that saves me a) the time of writing a solution myself as an Automator action or terminal script and b) having to maintain said solution across OS upgrades.

I use numbat pretty frequently. It's kinda like a scripting version of Qalculate. Here are two interesting features which are pretty unique:

The whole system of physical dimensions and units is specified Numbat's standard library, which is written in the Numbat language itself. It is therefore easily extensible by providing a init.nbt file. For example, a single line (unit bathtub = 150 L) is usually enough to add a new unit.

With its static type system, Numbat already enforces correctness of your calculations on a physical dimension level. But some checks can only be made at runtime. Numbat provides an assert_eq procedure that allows you to check for exact equality using assert_eq(12 ft, 1 in) or approximate equality using assert_eq(c, 300_000 km/s, 1% × c). This can be useful to make sure that intermediate results do not change during a restructuring of your calculation.

https://numbat.dev/doc/example-xkcd_2812.html

I use a few things on Mac (some also on Linux) that are probably a little bit niche even if some are quite popular.

The first is Alfred
Mac only. It does a lot of different things, but the part I use most is Snippits. These are just macro expansions. I use it all the time because I do docker and kubernetes commands that are hard to remember.

The second is Rectangle
Mac only. This is a window management tool that is helpful if you use multiple monitors. I constantly use the hotkeys to move windows between monitors.

The third is Bruno.
Windows, Mac, Linux. This is an API client. It's an open source alternative to Postman that doesn't require logins and isn't enshittified yet like Postman is.

The fourth is Obsidian
Windows, Mac, Linux
This has replaced Notepad++ for me. It's ambitious in that it has a lot of plugins. I don't use most of them. The part I like is that it operates on plain textfiles and uses non-proprietary markdown format so I can use between machines and can read the files with any text reader.

I've been using LTspice for circuit simulation, and despite how old-school it looks, it works absolutely flawlessly. Works on Linux (through Wine), has a pretty robust set of components, can't complain at all.

I'm also using CoreCtrl to manage my GPU/CPU fan curves, since for some reason, the ones I set on BIOS don't stick, and my stock GPU curve is horrendous. Simple to use, requires very little set up.

For music, Strawberry is a fairly feature-complete player, stable, and really lightweight. It picks up album art automatically, and worked flawlessly with my music collection.

Does Emacs count? It certainly feels niche these days. :-) Besides the mundane use as a programming editor, I use a number of its features and third-party packages for other things:

• Org-mode: Mainly note for taking during meetings, todo lists, and keeping a log of weekly accomplishments for work, plus sometimes for notes when tracing through an unfamiliar codebase (with hyperlinks straight to lines of code).
• Calc: Simple calculations, mostly, but with the occasional bit of symbolic algebra, calculus, and vector math.
• Dired: Writeable dired for bulk renames is killer.
• Calendar: Basic date lookups.
• Ediff: I used to use xxdiff as my graphical diff tool, but that's no longer really maintained. Emacs's ediff is a reasonable alternative.
• Magit: I mostly do all my Git use through Magit now. I use to hate Git largely because of its CLI (nothing against DVCSs - I was a long time Mercurial user, and used Monotone before that), but thanks to Magit, I actually kind of like Git now. Magit's a big part of what led to me giving in and converting my personal repos from Mercurial to Git.

The other big tool I use a ton is ImageMagick. Graphics programming is a big part of what I do for a living and for my hobbies, and it's nice to have a big toolbox of image manipulation actions that I can script, or drop into a Makefile.

Speaking of graphics, I also really like TEV as a lightweight, cross platform image viewer. It's simple and fast, gives me non-smooth zooming to let me pixel peep (zoom in far enough and it automatically shows pixel values), etc., let's me subtract an image against a reference to highlight differences in false color, etc. Despite the name, it'll read a lot more than just EXR images, though I mostly just use it on PNGs.

I use hledger for budgeting! It’s a plaintext accounting tool (which just means all the data is stored in text files, which I find convenient because I can (a) easily back them up, (b) edit using my text editor if choice (vim), and (c) all of my data is mine, not shared with any third party or cloud service.

I don’t like budget apps that sync to my bank account, because I don’t like them having that access, whether it not it’s “secure”.

While I could download statement CSVs and import them, I actually just add all of my transactions in manually.

I use it for envelope style budgeting, with “virtual accounts” acting as envelopes. I have actual bank accounts at a couple different institutions, and doing it this way, I can see how much is in each physical account, but also virtually combine that money when making my “envelopes”. So even though I might have $7 at Bank A and $5 at Bank B, I can track that as $10 for groceries and $3 for savings, but also still easily see where my money actually is, to ensure I don’t overdraft.

I have a pretty bad setup I could automate easier (and I’m barely scratching the surface of what I could do with it), but I did set myself up with tab-completion for common expenses so it only takes me 15 minutes on the weekend to update and see how I’m doing.

I also have a python script I found and then heavily modified for generating some useful graphs and charts, in addition to the built-in tabular reports I can look at.

I've no clue how fringe these are, so forgive me if I'm not cool enough to post in this thread ;-)

• Chocolatey - basically apt-get for Windows. Pretty much any software package you can think of.
• Wincompose - have preached the benefits before. Gives the Linux compose key in Windows. (I map my caps lock key)
• Radarscope - I pay $15/mo for the pro package and I get kickass weather radar. Pro level stuff. but it is the premier such app, so it may not count. But not a whole lot use it.
• Raidrive is fun - the free version allows mapping up to 8 drives. Most connections you can think of from Google drive to OneDrive to SSH/SFTP and many more - map to a drive letter in Windows.
• Synergy to share mouse/keyboard across multiple local machines
• Sizer which allows keyboard shortcuts to resize windows to sizes and locations you set up

Everything else I use that I can think of is more mainstream than those. Glad to give more info on any of interest :)

Using asdf to manage a bunch of different versions of python/go/etc throughout different projects I need to touch on at work. Saves a lot of time not having to learn 5-7 different runtime managers.

Learning mise to do everything asdf does but faster, and with more things it can mange: env vars/tools/libraries/etc...

I ditched vscode for Helix, using Zellij as a multiplexer to give myself a terminal within the same window.
I tried some of the various neovim "distros", but generally I found them overwhelming, and after spending a little bit of time trying to setup my own, I landed on something that was pretty similar to Helix out of the box.

It's got quite a few quirks, and is not as feature rich, but it does everything I need to do.
LSP setup for my main work project (typescript / Vue3) took a little bit to get working, and it has some flaws, but I've really enjoyed it overall.

Other than that, I use chezmoi to manage dotfiles and LogSeq as a general "everything else" tool, though mostly it's for jotting down quick TODO items.

In the past I've self hosted Kanka as a world building tool for RPG campaigns which can integrate with various VTTs - I'm a fan of Foundry personally.

I could probably list things all day as I think of them, I'm a big fan of anything that can be self-hosted.
I'll finish with Wanderer though, which is a self-hosted trail database.

Instead of paying for clown storage I use SyncThing. It syncs files/folders using local wifi, no server in the middle. It works really well. It makes owning a pile of laptops/devices something great because I can sync my current work project folders.

• XIV on Mac: the Mac version of Final Fantasy XIV is essentially a WINE wrapper. The XIV on Mac team maintains a more cutting edge version that delivers significantly better performance, such as using MoltenVK well before Square Enix got on board. The gap narrowed a little with the Dawntrail expansion, but it's still a very noticeable improvement.

• Vital: This can technically be run standalone as an app, but it's mostly designed to be loaded into a Digital Audio Workstation as a VST plugin. Vital is a wavetable synthesizer that is free-to-cheap, and rivals popular options like Serum. You can reasonably create all kinds of sounds with it, from analogue synth staples with its basic oscillator shapes to dubstep growls and FM donk basses. It's very visual, with animations on different components and routing that's drag and drop, so it's excellent for learning.

I have always used something like VScode for working on projects. I usually bounce between VScode, jetbrains, and other things like zod. But I always wanted a separate program for opening single code files. If I double click a file, I basically never want it open in VScode, Xcode, jetbrains, etc. So for a long time I just configured TextEdit to open code files. But that means I don’t get code formatting/colors/multiple cursors/etc. I have casually been on the lookout for a program that can fill this role. I don’t want it to have a projects screen, recent files, or anything else. Ideally the window should just have code and maybe line numbers. I finally found it.

BBEdit. Apparently this is a long running Mac application going back decades. I am a pretty new to macOS, so I didn’t hear about it until recently. Or, more accurately, I did hear about it, but never tried it for various reasons. It is fantastic. I had to configure it to open files in new windows instead of tabs, but that was simple to do. I can absolutely recommend trying it out.

On another similar thread here a few months ago I was made aware of Silverbullet as a markdown based personal style wiki and fell in love with it. Thought I might want to mention that here as the reason for using uFocus was similar to why I liked silverbullet, the low friction of it. It's just a page with Markdown and linking. It has the ability to do more stuff, I believe they are even starting to let you write lua in there also, but I'm loving it just for the ease of use. I'm a person who has a lot of .txt files floating all over for that low friction editing, and this one fills in that spot while offering some additional organization and linking that help out without getting in the way.

I have not 100% switched off yet but I've been able to migrate over to using it for personal notes at home and enjoying it a lot.

I use Atuin for shell history and it’s freaking awesome.

I am thinking about trying out Zed as a daily driver (I am a developer). What's your experience?

Here are a few rich terminal apps that I really love:

• glow for previewing markdown files
• jless for previewing JSON and YAML
• broot is a pretty cool file explorer
• tokei for counting lines of code in a repo