Postgres is my favorite piece of software. After that, I rather like the Fish shell.

One program that I love is Syncthing. Who would’ve guessed that the sentences “continuous peer-to-peer file synchronization” and “it just works” could ever appear together.

One that I certainly couldn’t recommend without caveats but nevertheless makes me very happy is the alternative Discord and Slack client Ripcord. It looks great and presents a remarkably better interface to these two proprietary services. Long may it live.

yt-dlp has probably saved me (and my kids) from watching hours upon hours of ads. The kids just watch the same things over and over again, anyway.

I’ll be That Guy™️: Emacs. It might stretch the definition of “almost without caveats” a bit thin, but that level of modularity and extensibility is my ideal — both as an end-user and as a software designer.

Tailscale: Securing access to my various servers and getting access to devices at home when away was always such a pain and slightly complicated in the past. Now it’s dead easy and I don’t have to think about it. It just works.

Shottr: I didn’t think I needed a screenshot tool before I came across Shottr, and now I use it all the time. It’s great for being able to preview screenshots, add markup, etc. It’s a really great little tool.

I keep a “gripes” file where I list all the things that bug me about the software I use.

At the top is a “hall of fame” section listing programs with only one or zero complaints.

• rofi
• mpd
• openssh (didn’t used to qualify but then they implemented include in their config file format)
• tmux/tmate
• pandoc
• erc
• exwm (simulation keys are the only thing that makes browsing the web tolerable)

Surprised this hasn’t been mentioned yet: UBlock Origin.

NetNewsWire.

As a hobbyist, I love Blender.

The basics of laying out objects by moving, scaling and rotating them feels fun. Using the same workflow to edit the shape/contours of an object feels like an amazing freebie. You can do a much harder thing in the same way that you were doing the easier thing.

After the basics, Blender is feature rich for all the different kinds of workflows you can imagine. You can manipulate how things look using a visual node based system. You can sculpt things. You can draw/paint textures. You can animate. You can generate things semi-programatically using modifiers or a visual node based system or if needed you can just automate things with Python.

I am sure there are gaps for professionals in different areas, but as a hobbyist Blender is an amazing piece of software.

NewPipe on Android. Recently I had to use YouTube on a friend’s iPhone and oh my goodness, how horrendous it is!

NewPipe is fantastic. You can even download videos for offline uses!

On the desktop, fish shell is great. The only thing I miss from bash is the “sudo !!” to repeat the previous command as root, but otherwise I love the sane defaults and all the little helpers. It’s one of the first things I setup on a fresh Linux install.

Scrivener. Easily the best long form writing software around, and unfortunately good enough to keep me locked into macOS on my laptop (Asahi seems stable enough though these days, so I’ll probably set up a dual boot soon. It’s not urgent though, as I have a fairly powerful Linux desktop for gaming and development that I can easily remote into with Tailscale, another great piece of software).

It’s proprietary, but the file format is simple enough (metadata in easy to understand XML, and content as RTF), that you could write a converter tool pretty quickly. I’m not remotely afraid of my files becoming inaccessible to me.

entr

esbuild gives you a lot of modern frontend web dev conveniences without buying into the whole JavaScript ecosystem. Out of the box you get minification, bundling, asset digesting, a dev server with live reload and (if you want) npm imports.

• Vim, without question, though I’ve been browsing some of the forks recently.
• Zsh. Very thankful that Apple uses it as default login shell now, since I’ve used as my Linux/BSD default login shell for almost 15 years.
• I am still attached to ag at the hip. It was the first thing I installed in my new Gentoo chroot, before even eix. I can’t manage to bring myself to switch to rg yet. That’s partially because we use rg at work and it feels weird using it personally.
• Speaking of eix, eix. If you are on Gentoo, it makes life a lot easier.
• At lower levels, the musl libc makes me glad, happy, and hopeful. I’ve moved all of my personal production systems to either Gentoo/musl, Void/musl, or Adélie. No more glibc anywhere.

I will say that I’ve been surprised by all the responses of Postgres. I didn’t even think of it. It is just always there, being a great database. So I’ll +1 Postgres.

If you can recommend it without caveat, then it’s not weirdly-fitting enough to be worth being a personal favourite!

I like how I can bend even the basic assumptions of StumpWM by adding customisations step by step, but I wouldn’t recommend it to a non-Lisper…

Does remind count if I like it as a backend but dislike its input syntax (and I generate the input files from another format)?

Does ImageMagick count if there are gripes but it’s just too useful (with a reasonable path between the easy cases that are made easy, and the complicated horrors that are still made possible)?

On the clearly good generic specific tool side…

• xdotool
• pv
• ncdu

Some gems I haven’t seen mentioned yet:

• Midnight Commander (mc): dual-pane file manager with included viewer/editor/diff tool. It’s showing it’s age, but extremely useful when I need to browse/search output from batch simulations at work (I made a cheat sheet for it) - I’m dreaming of building a more modern, more easily extendable clone using Textual
• xonsh: a Python-based shell which makes it much easier to do basic looping/conditionals right on the command line
• Fork: a nimble Git client for Mac and Windows
• rclone: I use it for cloud backups to pCloud
• Firefox: web browser that does care about privacy and is still has small but significant market share
• Skim: a better PDF viewer than macOS’s Preview
• macos Mail: no-frills, reliable mail client
• Bitwarden: password management
• Python (+ many excellent packages on PyPI): easy to overlook, but providing a very nice programming environment both professionally and for hobby projects

I have recently wrote a blog post titled “Work-related tech I use privately” on my software choices. Hope that plugging link here is ok.

https://wojteksychut.com/posts/work-tech-i-use-privately/

Hammerspoon is very good if you’re on a Mac. Just today I added a little call that updates a few things I’m doing to respond automatically to monitor add/remove situations — window placement, audio sources, all sorts of things. It’s like adding a layer of Lua underneath everything going on in the system, allowing you to tap into it and assign hotkeys, fix behaviors, whatever you need.

Even though I think our industry and its products are generally a wasteland, I was surprised to be able to come up with quite a few examples of great software when I started thinking about it.

PostgreSQL and sqlite are remarkable pieces of software.

I’d say VSCode is surprisingly good; it has problems but it’s something that seems like it can’t possibly function as well as it does so it’s notable for that at least. Dash is great for documentation. jq is cool for a bit of JSON processing. iTerm has been fading into the background and not bothering me for years. AdGuard just chugs away in the background and is quite good for my sanity.

Fastmail is pleasant to use and doesn’t seem to cause me any issues. Stripe is a good product with good UI for payment processing. Signal works well for messaging. Bear is great for my personal cross-device knowledge base. DuckDuckGo is a decent enough search engine without surveillance thrown in.

On the PL front, I have a soft spot for Elm - it influenced both the quality of compiler error messages and the front end frameworks.

There are also many small mobile apps and games that are useful and just work year after year.

What’s interesting is that the products from most of the industry behemoths (who should surely possess the capability to make good software) are comically bad. Even putting aside the downright evil aspects of surveillance and monopolistic tendencies, things like Google products, AWS products, Spotify, Twitter, Netflix are absolute rubbish – not in all ways of course, but in many important ways like UX or performance or reliability. Perhaps it shows that in order to become an industry behemoth, it’s necessary to focus on things other than software quality.

I keep recommending Kate editor for anyone who likes a good GUI editor: https://kate-editor.org/ It’s slowly becoming my favorite editor ever.

OpenMW is great for Morrowind fans :) https://openmw.org/en/

Mac Apps:

• Shortcat
• Affinity suite
• Maestal (macOS and Linux)
• OmniGraffle
• Mimestream
• Arq
• Preview

Unix, etc.

• zsh
• fzf and z
• cargo/rustc
• Emacs
• Nix
• QMK
• ZMK

Software I use that makes me happy (I work mostly on Linux, and occasionally mess around on macOS and Windows stuff):

• +1 to Tailscale
• sqlite
• Reaper
• Blender
• Zig
• workhorse libraries like numpy for numerical stuff, raylib for graphics programming, imgui for GUIs, streamlit for fast python prototyping
• utilities like fzf, fd, rg, rsync

The FLOSS that’s good enough to pay for is KeePassXC and Nix. Other than that, JetBrains IDEA.

trash-d is a small and simple trash/recycle-bin implementation designed to be a drop-in replacement for rm. I alias rm=trash and forget that it’s there until accidentally deleting something and knowing I can restore it.

Full disclosure: I am a contributor to this project.

Other things that I expected to see mentioned already, but have not been:

• bat, exa (hey, I like programs that fit in neatly with their environment and improve it)
• transmission-d
• mpv
• feh
• Hakyll
• GHC
• newsboat
• Unbound
• magic-wormhole
• WeeChat
• Jitsi Meet

I tried a ton of note-taking apps over time and still consider Obsidian the best.

Emacs for org-mode, eshell, eglot and the various modes. I use a custom build with GNUstep as it produces a portable app bundle which can be used without installation. The GNUstep build has been remarkably glitch-free.

Fossil is self-contained and almost perfect for personal projects.

Some of the other favourites include a bunch of old and obscure programs:

Berkeley par paragraph formatter - formats tight paras. Useful for margin notes in plain text files.

xnedit editor - classic NEdit modernized. Has an interesting feature that I use a lot: the secondary selection when dragged wades into the text and can be used to move narrow paras to the side to fake margin notes in plain text files (yes yes, woe to the poor ba$tard who has to make further changes).

sam editor - @lorddimwit’s much improved port of the sam editor from plan9. Great for working with lots of text: just sweep a rectangle anywhere within the window and put your text in. Remote editing over ssh works as well.

tt terminal - @leahneukirchen’s 9term clone. The “hold mode” is simple and clever.

• zathura pdf reader
• espanso automatic-as-you-type text expander
• tldr example-focused mini manpages
• snebu filesystem backups
• pgTAP database test harness
• pspg pager for tabular data
• redshift and similar (I’m using wlsunset on wayland)

already mentioned: Postgres, PostGIS, SyncThing, rofi, ripgrep, KeePassXC, jq, mcfly, mpv

Recently I had a shocking experience when I was searching for a simple static file server and couldn’t find a good one. That was until I found https://github.com/static-web-server/static-web-server

The old standbys of nginx/apache don’t have good defaults, are not memory-safe, and have super verbose config that has to be provided as a file which makes it annoying in Kubernetes (gotta have a mounted ConfigMap).

Caddy is the other big one, but the containerized version runs as root and not all config can be passed as flags, requiring that ConfigMap. It also feels a little too feature-rich for the Unix Philosophy.

There’s also sftp-go and filebrowser but shockingly neither of them let you download a file with an HTTP GET request at a reasonable path like “example.com/folder/file.txt”

So yeah I settled on https://github.com/static-web-server/static-web-server and have been quite happy with it!

The classics: PostgreSQL, OpenSSH,, sshfs, curl, OpenNTPD, nginx, tmux, sudo/doas, ffmpeg , fzf, ripgrep

Sometimes when I just want a plain simple graphical editor leafpad/mousepad

Something like vi(m), for example nvi on the command line

Clementine for music. Though I have to admit I rarely open it these days.

Redis, especially if you don’t overlook that you can make it an actual cache (eg set it to be an LRU cache) even though I haven’t used it in s long time. I hope the core is still simple.

OpenSMTPD, Dovecot

restic for backups

prosody (xmpp)

Tor, where I also hope it’s still good

i3 and i3lock

Fairmail for emails on the phone (used to be a huge k-9 fan until it would sometimes randomly, silently, without error not send/finish sending)

Conversations for messaging on the phone

Keepassxc as an offline password safe

ZFS for important data

And with some slight caveats: urxvt aka rxt-unicode

I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for tsort. But honestly, Postgres. Redis. mu is really good. I really loved Interface Builder and Project Builder, back in the day.

• transmission torrent client: it just works.
• photopea: great little image editor: I don’t install gimp anymore

A few hings not mentioned yet: percol, gron, httpie, redis, pgcli, cinamon desktop, winmerge, notepad++, notepad2, rectangle, deluge. And the best software ever written: Winamp

Right now? absolutely beeper. I know it’s “just matrix bridges” but it’s not. It’s amazing. You can even self-host the entire thing too.

Darktable. I’m a regular user and keep being impressive just how much thinking and science goes into it, and how high-quality the resulting software is.

Another two examples are Inkscape and Krita, although I don’t use either regularly.

Libsodium. Every time I’m forced to work with other crypto APIs, I realize how good I had it with libsodium.

One that surprises my is Infinity from F-Droid as a Reddit client as well as NewsPipe/Revanced for YouTube. These platforms are unbearable without ads dear to the sheer volume—to the point that I probably wouldn’t participate in them. On that note StevenBlack’s host block lists and μBlock Origin are the counterparts keeping the browser sane.

I’m pretty thankful for OpenWRT—though I would love if its packages, LuCi, and it’s configuration scheme were backed by Nix.

My heart also goes out to the great photography workflows provided by darktable, Hugin, DisplayCAL, colord, enfuse-enblend, panotools, ImageMagick, and all the graphics C libs. Here’s to 2023 as the year color management comes to Wayland.

[Windows] I’m using FAR Manager since 1997 and I can tell that no other software elevated my productivity this high yet. Fully customisable, plenty of plugins, open source, etc. I used as an “IDE” at some point (before Sublime).

Apart from that, for multi-laptop config (work + private) spacedesk and input director are life-savers.

I like Zeal, simple Qt program for offline documentation. Usually faster than searching for the online equivalent.

I can’t find the usability / UX of Paint.net anywhere in the Linux or MacOS world and it make me really sad / miss Windows often

I really like dropper ssh. Small, simile, and easy to install.

For my Mac, I use Uncluttered. A notepad, file holder, and clipboard manager all in one. Easily accessed with a swipe down at the top of the screen.

Bartender to hide the useful but not visibly necessary menu bar icons on the Mac.

Tinycal for a simple menu bar calendar. Opensource and free.

Hammerspoon for customizing the corner cases with simple Lua scripts.

Helix editor for terminal based text editing. Shen I ssh into someplace, Helix is my go to editor.

Visual Studio Code for everything else, except when I’m using Jetbrains IDEs.

Notion for notes/todos/links. Works really well, even if it isn’t offline-first, which I would appreciate.

Calibre for managing my growing library of e-books/PDFs.

rclone for backing up said library to the cloud.

Kdenlive. Impressive, stable, a pleasure to work with.

https://kdenlive.org

(and Emacs, of course)

Most of the software that I enjoy were already mentioned (some multiple times), so I won’t repeat those.

But I want to add the flashcard application Anki (mostly AnkiDroid). I’ve learned so much since I started using it. It’s been 7 years I think. I just keep adding little (very little) nuggets of knowledge all the time.

Like, just today, I added cards about WireGuard. Very simple cards, to remember things like “WireGuard uses keypairs”, “it doesn’t take care of key distribution”. It’s simple, but it means that next time I want to setup a VPN, I’ll have this less to learn on the spot. It reduces the activation energy if you will.

I must add: I mostly use Anki during “idle times” during the day.

copy and paste from my website (links here https://zachpeters.org/stack). i apologize for the formatting

Insomnia - Opensource API explorer
asdf - Manage multiple runtime versions with a single CLI tool
Logseq - Logseq is a privacy-first, open-source knowledge base that works on top of local plain-text Markdown and Org-mode files.
direnv - unclutter your .profile
Swinsian - Swinsian is a sophisticated music player for macOS with wide format suppor
Amethyst - A tiling window manager for macOS
iterm2 - a terminal emulator for macos
VS Code - My go-to code editor
Elixir - Elixir is a dynamic, functional language for building scalable and maintainable applications.
Phoenix - Build rich, interactive web applications quickly, with less code and fewer moving parts.
Tailwindcss - Rapidly build modern websites without ever leaving your HTML.
just - just is a handy way to save and run project-specific commands
visidata - Data exploration at your fingertips
topgrade - Keeping your system up to date usually involves invoking multiple package managers. This results in big, non-portable shell one-liners saved in your shell. To remedy this, topgrade detects which tools you use and runs the appropriate commands to update them
Dracula - Dracula PRO is a color scheme and UI theme tailored for programming.
Sumatra PDF - PDF, eBook (epub, mobi), comic book (cbz/cbr), DjVu, XPS, CHM, image viewer for Windows. Small, fast, customizable, free.
Scoop - Scoop installs programs you know and love, from the command line with a minimal amount of friction.
Lazygit - A simple terminal UI for git commands
Bacon - bacon is a background rust code checker
Memtest86+ - Memtest86+ is a stand-alone memory tester for x86 and x86-64 architecture computers.
Zellij - A terminal workspace with batteries included

What a nice thread. Using these makes me happy:

• Alacritty + tmux + bash 5 + vim
• GNU parallel <3
• pbzip2
• htop
• ag (“silver searcher”)
• jq
• Erlang/OTP
• OpenResty
• PostgreSQL + PostGIS + PostgREST
• Neo4J

• supysonic - a subsonic-compatible music server. Works flawlessly with dsub and others. I find a mysql db works better than postgres.

• tmsu - a a format-agnostic tagger. It doesn’t touch files; instead, it maintains its own separate database, and it can mount a virtual filesystem as well.

• bitwarden - a cross-platform, cloud-based password manager. The premium version is dirt cheap, only $1/month, and it can store TOTP keys. This makes my life easier.

• ventoy - A free multi-os EFI usb boot drive creation tool. This makes creating a rescue usb way easier - just flash ventoy, then mount the exfat partition it created, and copy iso files there. Easy peasy.

• mpd - a cross-platform music server. I’ve been using this for years; I don’t know of any other music server that’s as versatile.

• sonixd - a slick, cross-platform subsonic client. This lets me browse and play my subsonic library no matter what OS I’m using.

• wireguard - gone are the days of having to maintain a zillion files and dependencies just to run a VPN on my home network. Wireguard makes it simple and easy to set up a vpn tunnel.

• kdeconnect - seamlessly share your phones clipboard with your computer, and vice-versa, or ring my phone from my computer, or type text messages on my computer and send them on my phone.

• jdownloader - a big, full-featured download manager. It can even solve captchas for you.

• openbox - a floating window manager. Tiling WMs never clicked for me, and fluxbox was too crashy in the past.

Not sure if this counts, but I also really like twilio. It has a nice api, a variety of language bindings, a plethora of high-quality documentation, and fair, super-affordable pricing. This makes it possible for me to set up reminders for myself that send a text, and lets me call my phone from my computer if I have misplaced it.

1. Scoop - similar to apt on debian. While it is not as complete as apt and similar tools, it is good enough to give me a peace of mind on Windows. So much so that, I wrote about it.
2. DBeaver - great all round database management program.
3. gpodder - flawed, but good podcast player on Windows.
4. everything - the ultimate desktop search program that MS missed.
5. winmerge - nearly as good as the paid Beyond Compare.
6. barrier - free software kvm that is the spiritual successor to synergy
7. Agree with other popular choices - postgres, sumatrapdf, keepassxc, syncthing, yt-dlp

• Firefox with Bitwarden, duh
• Helix editor for coding
• Horizon EDA for absolutely delightful PCB design
• ab-av1 for easy and smart video conversion
• beets for managing a local music collection
• PhotoSync (both iOS and Android) for a proper mobile-devices-only photo workflow that does what I want exactly (sync from Actual Camera and phone to iPad, edit the RAWs, then dump everything onto USB SSD with datetime based filenames)
• Kalc is the best Soulver-like for Android that I could find
• Layout from Instagram for combining photos together – no ads, no signup, though not updated in years and right now Play Store says it can’t be installed on my device even though it is installed, huh
• PassAndroid is Passbook for Android, duh. For years I didn’t have a use for it, but a few days ago I went to the Paramore concert and it haven’t failed me :)
• MyTherapy is the pill reminder app for Android without ads and mandatory accounts but with great design and a lot of flexibility in scheduling

CPython. I’m currently reading CPython Internals, and while you can argue about the design of the language, the implementation is a joy to behold. It genuinely makes me happy to see a ~30 years-old C codebase that is so clean and to-the-point.

Splid is an app to let you easily split expenses in a group. No accounts, no hassle, just works.

• curl
• gitui
• helix
• htmltidy
• lighttpd
• make
• nnn
• ocaml (csexp, ezjsonm, markup, tls)
• peertube
• rapper
• rsync
• ssh
• sshfs
• tinycdb
• xmllint
• xsltproc

Sqlite.

sqlite

I think mcfly is my favorite piece of software right now. It makes shell history so much more useful.

I use Linux and I’m happy with most of the CLI/GUI tools I’m using.

PicoLisp as unique ecosystem.

good code absolutely exists these days; more of it than at any point in history.

code that is very high quality & i’m always happy to read through, in no particular order:

• golang
• openbsd - especially love referencing smtpd
• most hashicorp stuff, especially consul & nomad

there are a few proprietary apps that i think fit this category, but i won’t shill them here.

• nvi
• tmux
• go
• grep
• sqlite
• beanstalk
• nc
• tcpdump
• wireshark
• tailscale
• excel

Some of my favorites:

1. KDE. It just keeps on improving with features that and utilities that become indispensable. I love how the taskbar are so customizable. Dolphin and Ark are really great applications for file management.
2. CopyQ. Clipboard manager thats really powerful.
3. mpv. Plays everything from command line and no bezels.
4. TreeStyleTabs. Makes Firefox great at tab management.
5. Telegram desktop app. Messaging apps should be this fast.
6. Emacs.

cURL, nginx and PostgreSQL.

Special mention for GHC, the Haskell Compiler.

• Emacs
• SBCL
• Debian
• Go
• PostgreSQL
• OpenSSH
• uBlock Origin

Trello is incredible

https://github.com/Canop/broot

https://github.com/helix-editor/helix

still rofi, but more and more replaced by fzf scripts.

zsh

wezterm

i3wm

old&gold:

https://github.com/dharple/detox - would be good if it was a library, so that one could have one config, and have detoxing on the command line and in fileselector dialogs.

uchardet

GNU recode

bomstrip

GNU awk and mawk

Two pieces of software that I would recommend without caveat:

• Magit is a magical git experience. I’d recommend it even to people who don’t already use Emacs, and have no desire to learn/use Emacs for anything else.

• I got a 1Password Family account years ago and haven’t looked back. We have a shared vaults for our 11yo son’s accounts; and another for utilities wifi router, electricity, gas, water, broadband, grocery deliveries etc.

Gotta say magit is the best git gui out there and probably one of the best pieces of software ever written.

[Comment removed by author]

Karabiner

I had a good think, and my favourite piece of software by far is Obsidian.md, a close second is the IntelliJ IDEs specifically PHPStorm.

Outside of those I document the small amount of software I use regularly on my /now page.