The Best Software For Every Need

Software: Obsidian.md

Need: Knowledge management system.

Other programs I've tried: Roam, dynalist, tiddlywiki, lightweight or physical note taking systems.

If you're not using a personal knowledge management system I highly recommend you read about what they can do for you, possibly under "zettlekasten" or "digital gardening". I wish I'd started earlier. Obsidian.md is sadly closed source, but it works entirely on standard markdown with locally stored files. It has a thriving thriving plugin community supporting things like sql queries of your notes, kanban boards, and spaced repetition.

[[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8778747-secular-cycles][Secular Cycles]]
:PROPERTIES:
:authors: [[https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/11018.Peter_Turchin][Peter Turchin]], [[https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4173368.Sergey_A_Nefedov][Sergey A. Nefedov]]
:rating: 4.17
:ratingCount: 118
:reviewCount: 21
:pageCount: 360 pages
:publicationDetails: Published August 1st 2009 by Princeton University Press (first published January 1st 2009)
:genres: [[https://www.goodreads.com//genres/history][History]]
:genres+: [[https://www.goodreads.com//genres/economics][Economics]]
:genres+: [[https://www.goodreads.com//genres/non-fiction][Nonfiction]]
:genres+: [[https://www.goodreads.com//genres/politics][Politics]]
:genres+: [[https://www.goodreads.com//genres/philosophy][Philosophy]]
:genres+: [[https://www.goodreads.com//genres/sociology][Sociology]]
:genres+: [[https://www.goodreads.com//genres/culture][Culture]]
:genres+: [[https://www.goodreads.com//genres/society][Society]]
:genres+: [[https://www.goodreads.com//genres/history][History]]
:genres+: [[https://www.goodreads.com//genres/world-history][World History]]
:genres+: [[https://www.goodreads.com//genres/anthropology][Anthropology]]
:genres+: [[https://www.goodreads.com//genres/humanities][Humanities]]
:isbn: 9780691136967
:visibility: folded
:END:
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
Many historical processes exhibit recurrent patterns of change. Century-long periods of population expansion come before long periods of stagnation and decline; the dynamics of prices mirror population oscillations; and states go through strong expansionist phases followed by periods of state failure, endemic sociopolitical instability, and territorial loss. Peter Turchin and Sergey Nefedov explore the dynamics and causal connections between such demographic, economic, and political variables in agrarian societies and offer detailed explanations for these long-term oscillations--what the authors call secular cycles.

/Secular Cycles/ elaborates and expands upon the demographic-structural theory first advanced by Jack Goldstone, which provides an explanation of long-term oscillations. This book tests that theory's specific and quantitative predictions by tracing the dynamics of population numbers, prices and real wages, elite numbers and incomes, state finances, and sociopolitical instability. Turchin and Nefedov study societies in England, France, and Russia during the medieval and early modern periods, and look back at the Roman Republic and Empire. Incorporating theoretical and quantitative history, the authors examine a specific model of historical change and, more generally, investigate the utility of the dynamical systems approach in historical applications.

An indispensable and groundbreaking resource for a wide variety of social scientists, /Secular Cycles/ will interest practitioners of economic history, historical sociology, complexity studies, and demography.
#+END_QUOTE

Software: Anki

Need: Remembering anything

Other programs I've tried: Supermemo, Mnemosyne, Quizlet

Anki is a free and open-source flashcard program using spaced repetition, a technique from cognitive science for fast and long-lasting memorization. What makes it better than its alternatives are the countless plugins that can customize your learning experience and the fact that you can control the parameters of the algorithm.

Software: Pycharm, and other jetbrains IDEs https://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/

Need: Programming environment

Other programs I've tried: Vscode, atom, sublime, etc.

Jetbrains ides make so many things easier that I would have a pretty bad time if forced to work without them. In particular their debuggers probably save me hours of pain every week. I also appreciate the perpetual license, where any version owned for at least a year is kept for life.

Software: VsCode

Need: Code editor for Javascript + Python + Misc. file editing 

Other programs I've tried: Notepad++, Vim (I never became fully proficient), Sublime text,  Webstorm

I tried a lot of code editors over the years. VsCode isn't perfect, but it's been the best experience I've had so far. The plugin system seems the best of what I've observed so far. Some of the Jetbrains editors are also really good (like Webstorm), but I really liked how I feel quite comfortable making VsCode a good IDE for basically any language in a few minutes, and I like a lot of the remote desktop stuff that is built into the editor.

If you use cut (or awk or sed for cutting), try https://github.com/sstadick/hck

If you use less or cat for source files, try https://github.com/sharkdp/bat

If you can't ever remember the syntax for xargs (sorry, don't have a 2nd other program), try https://www.gnu.org/software/parallel/

If you're using standard command like tools for munging CSVs (like cut, grep, sed, etc.), try https://github.com/BurntSushi/xsv

If you use grep (or ag) try https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep

Each of these programs only improves quality of life a little, but they make doing simple things without leaving the shell so much easier.

Software: excalidraw.com

Need: quick diagramming

Other programs I've tried: draw.io, miro

Miro is great for involved, collaborative diagramming with a team when you want to build out a design or idea in great detail, but sometimes you just want to quickly sketch something that looks good and share it with a co-worker.

My go-to software for this is excalidraw. It's limited to shapes, lines, and text (no fancy UML), but if that's all you need to get your idea across it's extremely quick and easy to use.

Requests thread

Software: Microsoft Edge

Need: Web browser

Other programs I've tried: Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Vivaldi, Brave

I've stuck with Edge for about a year. I tried it out because they switched over to the Chromium rendering engine and I wanted to see what the fuss was about.  I'll tell you my main reasons for continuing to use it but note that these can exist in other browsers but don't work exactly like I want.

• Collections. This features lets you add web pages and snippets of information into persistent collections of info.  Good for when you're researching a specific subject. I use this either for small projects or as a lightweight interim step before moving stuff into my main research gathering tools.
• Vertical tab stacks. Instead of tabs along the top of the window, I have it set to put them on the side of the window. The bar containing them collapses down into just the favicons and autoexpands to a configurable width showing the page titles when I mouse over.

Web browsers are kind of weird.  They're all incredibly capable and needs-fitting and I would be very happy using any of them. Because of this I considered not posting about it at all, but in the end I decided "web browsers are all really good, but Edge has these features" is useful information.

Software: Ommwriter

Need: Editor for focused writing

Other programs I've tried: Google Docs, Focuswriter, VsCode, Scrivener, Writemonkey, Evernote, Roam

Ommwriter's design is maybe my favorite design of any software application out there. I sometimes just go into the program to relax and destress from a busy day, even if I don't have anything in particular to write. It's a really incredibly immersive experience that makes it a lot easier for me to work on writing tasks that require a lot of focus and that I easily tend to bounce off of.

Edit: I have switched to Samsung's App "Reminder", due to it being better supported and having additional features.

Software: Notification Maker (Android)

Need: Get periodically reminded to do certain things / tasks (e.g. taking Vitamin D3 daily)

Other programs I've tried: Any calendar or To-Do List app

There are a lot of things that I have to do regularly, but are hard to keep track off. In my calendar they would drown out the important events and in my To-Do Lists, they were not salient enough. This app allows me to create recurring notifications and set them to appear at specified times. Its ideal for keeping track of which supplements / medication you should take at what time and also perfectly suitable to be reminded to switch out contact lenses monthly or wash your bed sheets.

Software: BetterTouchTool

Need: Keyboard shortcuts and window-size management for MacOs

Other programs I've tried: Alfred, Karabiner

I set up BTT on every Mac as the very first software I install. I basically don't know how to use a Mac without shortcuts than I can use to resize windows to the left or right half of the screen, or full-screen them on the next monitor. Doing that with BTT has always been a super painless experience.

More recently I've also used BTT for more advanced keyboard shortcut creation, like a keyboard shortcut that brings up our internal analytics page, or pastes my current clipboard into my Roam daily notes. It also has great screenshot-editing tools that are built in, as well as a clipboard manager, which are the other two pieces of software I would otherwise need to install separately.

Software: emacs

Need: Code editor (and personal information management system, and the only good git ui, and an email client, and...)

Other programs I've tried: Sublime Text, Atom, VsCode, vim

Why emacs is the best: Emacs can be whatever you want it to be. It can do everything and anything, all in one unified space where all your keybindings work, all your plugins work, etc. There is literally nothing you can't change about it, and people have created many "modes" for it that do a lot of things. In particular, org-mode renders all of those todo apps pointless, because it's way better, and really the only viable option for personal information management. If you would rather a ui for git than just use the command line, magit (an emacs mode) is also your only viable option.

Don't bother with it though if you don't have some time to invest in learning it (same goes for any powerful tool). I also use evil mode because more thought went into vim keybindings than emacs ones. Honestly, emacs feels kind of like an accident that's evolved over time to become amazing (think JavaScript), and so there are some terrible defaults and so on, but the roughness around the edges can be changed, so I'd recommend using Doom emacs to start, because they've already done the job of creating a good set of defaults.

Software: https://www.autohotkey.com/

Need: macros and key remapping for Windows

Others I've tried: a number, but none recently.  Hardware/firmware remapping in keyboards is superior, but not universally available.  

Once I got used to layers in programmable keyboards (in my case, caps-lock and the windows key used as layer-toggles), so that I almost never needed to reach for nav keys or even the mouse very often, I found that I hated using my laptop in a portable fashion without my programmable KB.  AHK allowed me to remap these keys and key-combos to work the same way whether on my good KB or on my build-in one.

caps-HJKL for arrow keys, caps-F/B for pgup/pgdn, and a few others near there for ins/del/home/end is life-changing for a vi user. 

Meta-recommendation: https://suckless.org/rocks/ for "quality software with a focus on simplicity, clarity, and frugality". Likely to be most useful to command line users.

Raise your monitor. This isn't software, but probably relevant to the same readers. Consider raising your monitor so that its center near-top is 20-27" higher than your keyboard, similar to how your head is 20-27" higher on your body than your elbows. I said "raise" instead of "raise or lower" because apparently 99% of people have their monitor too low.

I recommend buying something like this, which conveniently clamps onto the back of your desk and lets you set up your monitor at a good height. There are nicer desk-clamp moniter stands out there, but they don't seem to go up to 24"+, and you may need that much height if your keyboard is sitting on your desktop rather than a keyboard tray.

↑ comment by ChristianKl · 2021-09-20T07:59:09.223Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

On what basis do you believe 20-27" to be ideal?

It seems to conflict with common ergononic advice as found on websites like https://www.ergotron.com/en-us/ergonomics/ergonomic-equation that suggests the top of the monitor should be on eye level.

In the past I remember having a monitor that high and I think it created bad posture habit involving overstretching the cervical spine and I now have it lower.

Replies from: Liron, lpuerto

↑ comment by Liron · 2021-09-20T13:19:16.917Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I'm going off what it takes for me to sit up straight with my elbows 90 degrees and able to see my whole monitor without turning my head. I have a single high-res 32" monitor with important stuff in all 4 quadrants so I really need my eyes vertically lined up with the middle of the screen or close.

I think even conventional ergonomics advice recommends boosting your monitor's height a little bit and using a keyboard tray. That's probably at least 20" from keyboard to monitor center, even if you choose to line up your eyes with the top of the monitor rather than the center.

In your case, if you were overstretching your spine, I'd guess that lowering the monitor 1" or so would have been helpful, and that would probably still leave your monitor's height higher above the keyboard than most people's.

In the website you linked to, I'm pretty sure the person in their video has not set themselves up right to optimally use the monitor. Imagine he often needed to refer to small text at the bottom of their screen where the MacOS dock is currently visible. Then I think he'd end up slouching.

Replies from: ChristianKl

↑ comment by ChristianKl · 2021-09-20T15:56:19.247Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

I now have my 24" monitor in a way where the eye level aligns with the top of the monitor. I find that I can look at my whole monitor just by using my eyes without adding any tension. On the other hand looking 10 cm over my monitor is an act that does add tension around the atlas. 

Evolutionary, I imagine that it works that way because it's quite important for hunter gathers to look down in front of them (you need to do that a lot when walking barefoot) but less often important to look up above themselves.

The image does show what those people who make a living selling ergonomics equipment consider to be good.

The best way to prevent slouching is to have some physical activity in your life and not try to force your body into looking up by requiring looking over the eye level.

It's not just the website I linked. You find the same sentiment on all the top results for "optimal monitor height" on Google.

Replies from: Liron

↑ comment by Liron · 2021-09-20T16:51:34.352Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Ok I agree that aligning your eyes to the top of the monitor is best as long as you can read the bottom section of the monitor without slouching. I edited my original post to recommend putting the near-top of the monitor at 20-27" above the keyboard instead of the center of the monitor.

I use a 32" monitor, which seems to be the largest possible monitor that doesn't require much head tilting. I use in a small high-resolution mode, as if it's replacing an array of 4 monitors. I need my head to be somewhat below the top of the monitor in order to use the programming editor in the bottom half of the screen.

I still think something is wrong with the first picture I posted. That picture looks like most people's default setup using the default Apple desktop computer stand. IMO the person in the picture above is most likely going to have a hard time with text near the bottom of their screen unless they slouch, use a keyboard tray, or lift their monitor.

Here's a second picture that seems to me like a more realistic portrayal of the position associated with that setup:

I believe that lowering the keyboard and/or raising the monitor would cause the man not to slouch. That would be consistent with my own experience.

↑ comment by lpuerto · 2021-09-20T09:30:27.768Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Yeah… I was reading the post you replied and I thought what kind of monitor OP had since now monitors are gigantic and the advice is to have to top at your eyes level, not the center. To you don't have to rise it, but to low it.

Replies from: ChristianKl

↑ comment by ChristianKl · 2021-09-20T12:07:19.616Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Here on LW a lot of people don't just follow the official advice and it's generally fine to recommend things that differ from the official advice. In those cases I however think it's important to explain why one considers the official advice wrong.

I would be surprised if the advice came out of having a smaller monitor. I used to believe monitors should be higher too. Human biomechanics are complicated. This reminds me of one dance teacher I had you had a professional training in dance and who went to learn from other dance teachers in New York. After she came back she had the idea that the impulse during dancing should always go forward. Four months later all the women in her dance classes were a lot more tense during dancing. 

From an naive point of view having a monitor higher exerts a force on being more upright similar to having the impulse being forward in the dance example which is also making the dancer more upright. I think that argument got me started to increase the hight of my monitor before I understood anything about human biomechanics. Unfortunately, I don't think I can easily explain the gear level of why it's that way in a comment, so I just point to the official advice and the problem having a higher monitor caused for my cervical spine.

Software: Yt-dlp

Need: Downloading videos from youtube

Other programs I've tried: Online webpages made for that purpose, torrents, ytdl.

Why its superior: It's actively mantained and it has integration with SponsorBlock.

An example command might be `yt-dlp -x --audio-format mp3 --audio-quality 0 --yes-playlist --sponsorblock-remove all`

Software: Nix

Need: Package management

Other programs I've tried: Puppet, Ansible, Pip, Poetry, Virtualenv, Vagrant, NPM, Yarn, Gradle, Docker, Apt, Yum, Make, and many more I can't remember the names of.

It would be difficult to convince myself from ten years ago that Nix was even a good idea without trying it. The change is probably as fundamental as going from ./configure && make && make install to a package manager, or from no version control to Git. I'll give it a try

• You can replace the vast majority of the use cases of the other programs above with Nix – it's not just another tool on the pile.
• Do you ever work on more than one programming project? It's trivial to ensure they don't clobber each other, for example when they use different versions of NPM or Python.
• Reverting to a previous version of your entire operating system configuration is trivial.
• You don't need to write any rules to uninstall packages or disable services when you no longer need them, like in Puppet or Ansible - you simply remove the relevant line and rebuild.

Some arguments I can think of against Nix:

• Builds can take a relatively large amount of disk space, but that's already really cheap and getting cheaper.
• The Nix language is maybe about as complex as Puppet, Ansible or Vagrant, but unless you're developing software you won't need to deal with anything as complex as that.
• Some of the tooling is still not very mature. Again, unless you're a developer using some unusual package management solution you should not worry about this.

Software: Typora. Need: Markdown editing. Other programs I've tried: Boostnote, StackEdit, VSCode, Marktext

Most markdown editors have plain text on one side and rendered text on the other. Typora has a single Wysiwyg panel. You can edit it as if it were plain markdown, for example you can bold something by putting stars around it. But you can also edit it as if it were wysiwyg, by doing ctrl I, or through a menu. More importantly, it doesn't take up a lot of screen space and it's much more aesthetically pleasing to not have a bunch of plain text. The only other single panel MD editor I'm aware of is marktext, which was significantly less polished last time I tried it about a year ago.

Typora also supports custom themes, tree style notes based on directories, various exports, a gui for making tables, and a bunch of other features. I consider it to be a second generation editor and will never go back to the first generation dual panel editors.

Software: IDA

Need: Binary reverse-engineering

Other programs I've tried: ghidra, OllyDbg, Hopper

IDA is fast and well-featured. I've had multiple times where my process of having questions about a binary to figuring out the answer took minutes.

Hopper has a nicer UI, but works on fewer executables and does not analyze the binary as well.

IDA gets criticized for "having an interface designed by programmers," but ghidra is much worse in that regard. "A giant Java program written by the government" describes it well. ghidra supposedly has a collaboration mode, but I gave up trying to get it to work after much effort.

OllyDbg is not really comparable, being primarily a binary debugger. But IDA's built-in debugger is quite underrated. And their support is very good. I was among the first to use it for Android-hacking on Android 5.0, and found their Android debugger would not run with the new OS restrictions; they gave me a new version that would within a few days.

If you already know an example of the tool you are looking for, but it is not available for your operating system (or some other reason it doesn't fit your needs perfectly), then "NiceTool [best] alternative [YourOperatingSystem]" is often a good search. Alternativeto is also pretty great for that purpose. Lots of users list up- and downsides of tools which often makes it pretty easy to figure out if a tool would fit you or not. I've not yet tried another one, but alternativeto itself lists PrivacyTools and Product Hunt as popular alternatives.

If you are just searching for tips for software tools you didn't even know you wanted them, I'd highly recommend you look at the potpourri of this amazing course on tools for CS-Students/Programmers. I can't recommend this course highly enough. I've been going back to it again and again for helpful links on commandline tools or what to do if you messed something up with git.

Software: Omnigraffle

Need: Making figures and diagrams (e.g.: for scientific papers)

Other software I've tried: Sketch, Illustrator, tikz

Omnigraffle has beautiful defaults, and makes it very fast to create shapes and diagrams that connect. It can make crossing edges look pretty and clear instead of a mess. Illustrator gives you a lot more flexibility (e.g.: strokes whose width gradually changes, arbitrary connection points for arrows), but you can be way faster at making figures with Omnigraffle.

Use Illustrator for making art and posters. Use Sketch (or Figma) for mocking up UIs. Use Omnigraffle for making figures.

Selfcontrol for abstaining from visiting websites without expending your precious willpower. If you're a mac user.

Sorry for not following the rules but, I think discovering a whole category of software (like terminal multiplexers) is often higher value than discovering the best in that category.

EDIT: I've actually put in the effort to find the best software for this use instead of the first one I could find. Here are my findings:

- Cold Turkey, StayFocusd, Freedom all worked based on browser plugins, which took me 2 minutes to circumvent, so I found these (and others like it) quite useless.
- Focus is decent. It has schedules and it actually blocks on an OS level

The problem with blocking on the OS level, though, is that you cannot block sections of websites. Say you don't want access to Facebook except for a certain group that announces events you want to go to, or something. This fine-grained control isn't possible with an OS level block because it bases it on the IP address

I ended up choosing for FocusMe, which also blocks on the browser level but seems developed enough that it will still be hard to get around, even if you try to install or re-install a browser. It is the most customisable tool that I have found by a long stretch. I'm quite convinced this is the best one.

Meta finding: do actually compare pieces of software before using something. If only I had done this before my past 2 years could have been like 5% more productive...

EDIT 2: while FocusMe is promising, the execution is just dreadful. I ended up being forced to factory-reset my mac. I have left a review here

Software: jq (https://stedolan.github.io/jq/)

Need: Process JSON on the command line  

Alternatives: grep/sed/awk, trentm/json, JMESPath

A lot if not most web APIs return JSON. data is nowadays provided in JSON format. Rapid prototyping and ad-hoc scripting often necessitate dealing with such data on the command line. Doing so with classical tools like awk/sed/grep is very cumbersome because the data is hierarchical and not line-based. Many people will prefer to process JSON in Node JS, Python or other scripting languages and that is totally fine. Nonetheless, there are many use-cases where you may want to process JSON in the CLI or in small shell scripts. My preferred tool in these cases is jq. It has a powerful yet compact stream language to filter, aggregate, restructure, or, in general, arbitrarily process JSON and JSON streams (multiple newline-separated JSON objects). There are a few alternatives out there (here is a list) but jq seems to be the champion esp. for CLI. One other tool I have worked with a bit is JMESPath because it is integrated into the AWS CLI. JMESPath has the advantage of being standardized and being available as a library in multiple script languages. It is much less powerful than jq though and specifically less usable as a CLI tool. One reason is that jq has a raw mode and which combined with combinators can, for example, generate CSV directly.

Software: fish shell
Need: interactive shell
Other programs I've tried: bash, sh, rc

fish is pretty good as an interactive shell. It has a quite intuitive search and excellent tab completion (e.g. including tab completion previews). The language is much simpler than bash, but less prone to weird substitution errors. fish is configurable, but I suspect that its package environment is not as extensive as for zsh. fish recently had a breaking language change which screwed up a couple of scripts I had written. I wish someone would write an rlwrap equivalent with the user interface and feel of fish.

Software: rc
Need: scripting shell
Other programs I've tried: bash, sh, fish

rc does a couple of things very right. It's a new spin on the classic unix shell, its main advantage being the cleaned up syntax, e.g. for handling variable substitution around strings (it doesn't do any substitution inside of strings), its handling of lists and basic control structures. It is best used conjunction with Plan 9/9front (e.g. the return value of a command being a string), but even on POSIX systems it fits my use cases nicely.

Advantages over bash/sh: Simpler syntax, variable substitution cleaner, nicer control structures. Disadvantages to bash/sh: Fewer packages/extensions/libraries (?), not available by default on any system

Disadvantages to fish: Interactive usage is less fluid, can't be extended much further

Software: Pluckeye

Need: Blocking certain websites during certain times

Other programs I've tried: StayFocusd, ColdTurkey, AppBlock

In a fight against procrastination, I've tried many programs to block distracting websites during working hours, but many of them don't have enough flexibility, are too simple to by-pass, or don't work on Linux. With Pluckeye you have basically any option you can think of, such that you can customize the blocking entirely to your own needs.

Software: Vim

Need: Text editing

Other programs I've tried:GNU Emacs, Visual Studio Code, Atom, Sublime Text.

Vim allows powerful and ergonomic text editing and a lightweight and ergonomic environment that is able to be extended to infinity.

• Software: miro.com
• Need: Remote collaboration, agile project management, individual ideation
• Other programs I tried: Mural, Figma (online collaboration). Trello, Asana (Project Management)
• Why it's better: Best UX and performance, ease of sharing with people outside your team, huge library of templates,...

Additional notes: I am a product manager and I had to transition a 30+ team in a highly creative industry (videogames) from working in the office to working from home. miro.com saved our life :)

Software: Newsfeed Eradicator + Leechblock NG

Need: Resilient self-control/anti-akrasia for web browsing.

Other programs I've tried: Stayfocusd, Forest

The problem with Stayfocusd and any website blocker is that, invariably, you have to navigate to a given tweet or youtube video or facebook profile, for legitimate reasons, and it means you have to go and deactivate the plugin. This is bad because 1. it trains you to do this action and 2. It incentivises you to avoid making deactivating the plugin too tricky.

Newsfeed Eradicator kills only the problem parts of social media apps. I can still check individual subreddits. I can still visit a Facebook page. I can still watch a YouTube video. I just don't get served recommendations, I don't get exposed to a scrolling feed. This has transformed how I use e.g. YouTube, where I now cultivate my library of channels I subscribe to and get new content via the subscriptions page, rather than passively browsing algorithmic recommendations.

I pair this with Leechblock NG to block websites I don't want to visit at all. The number of options is STAGGERING compared with Stayfocusd. I can create different categories of blocker, I can program different behaviours, Time-delays instead of blocking if you want. You're not just stuck with 'x minutes per day', you can have 'x minutes per hour, replenishing every hour.' if you want. The list goes on. 

PythonDebuggerPlusPlus

Alternative: pdb, ipdb

Just pip install once into a venv and you'll get autocomplete in a pdb session and if you turn on sticky mode (which can be globally done via a config file) you'll get a proper display of the source code you're stepping thru.

Software: yabai + skhd

Need: window management for mac

Other programs I've tried: Spectacle, BetterSnapTool

If you're from a linux background and looking for an i3-like experience to manage your windows on macos, this (combination of) software is the best solution I've found. The other programs I've tried for this on mac are desktop apps, but yabai and skhd are configured in plaintext and are much more powerful and customizable.

Note: The yabai readme mentions a need to disable system integrity protection, but I have never done this and I can still resize/move windows just fine.

Software: The free version of PDF Viewer Pro by PSPDFKit (https://apps.apple.com/de/app/pdf-viewer-pro-by-pspdfkit/id1120099014#?platform=ipad) for iPad

Need: A program for iPad for reading PDFs and writing/making notes in them using apple pencil. I use it to attentively read math textbooks and solve exercises in them, read psychotherapy self-help books and fill in worksheets in them, read difficult academic articles and write notes for myself.

Non-needs (i.e., if you need these, maybe you should disregard my recommendation, because I don't use these): signing documents and sending them to people, rapidly giving feedback to people in the form of annotating their pdfs, collaborative anything, reading fiction without annotating or taking notes or anything, using a dictionary to look up unknown words.

Other programs I've tried: Xodo, Liquid Text, MarginNote3, Flexcil, Flexcil 2.

Pros:

• I can easily add blank pages or pictures, remove pages.
• Very good tools for writing or drawing inside a document.
• It quietly saves my notes in the pdf file. I use MobiusSync, so the changes get synced to my computer, and there are no problems with seeing the notes in other PDF viewers.

Cons:

• Doesn't open djvu files. (but neither do any other of the compared programs)
• A sketchy privacy policy written in legalese, so I can't even understand what data it uploads and whether it uploads my documents.

Xodo provides all the same functional, but there are some bugs that make it worse than PDF Viewer Pro by PSPDFKit:

• Sometimes I try to add a blank page after, let's say, page 200, but instead it gets added after page 201 or page 199.
• Erasing handwritten scribbles is buggy.
• Tools for writing or drawing inside a document are much less pleasant to use.
• Sometimes drawing becomes shifted relative to where I am touching the screen with apple pencil.

Software: Roam Research

Need: Knowledge management and evaluation system

Alternative programmes I have tried: Obsidian, Athens Research (beta), Dynalist

A previous comment has listed Obsidian as the best software for knowledge management, however, I think it is necessary to provide an alternative view as to why I think Roam Research dominates this field of need:

1. Roam Research has weightings assigned to the strength of relationships between nodes, meaning that this software can become an instrument for Bayesian inference.
2. The atomic element of the software is the block, meaning that you can have bi-directional linking at block level rather than at the level of the page/header. This reduces the number of decisions that have to be made while navigating the software and increases productivity.
3. Roam Research is a database, and thus does a better job at handling backlinks to individual blocks. This is quite important when seeking a system that attempts to recreate cognitive thought.
4. The user interface is clear and simple, meaning that it reduces the time spent reading, interpreting, and assessing the contents of your page and increases productivity. As mentioned before, Roam Research intends to replicate cognitive thought, and creating a software that prioritises productivity is essential to achieving this.

I'd also suggest to people looking into this field of need to have a look at Athens Research. It is currently in beta, and as of current time I believe Roam Research is superior, but within the next year it might have advantages that outweighs that of both Roam Research and Obsidian.

I’m not sure if book scanning software is better now, but used to really like scantalior for books I’d scan from the library and share. https://scantailor.org/

I don’t know I can say that I remember much about the competitors. So… sorry if that’s cheating.

Software: z, lf

Need: Navigating in Linux

Other programs I've tried: Nautilus, ls/cd, convenience scripts and aliases on top of ls/cd, nnn

lf offers a better interface than nnn, and z is just significantly more convenient than anything else, though I'm still using aliases for the most visited files and locations.

Software: streamlit.io

Need: making small webapps to display or visualize results

Other programs I've tried: R shiny, ipywidgets

I find streamlit extremely simple to use, it interoperates well with other libraries (eg pandas or matplotlib), the webapps render well and are easy to share, either temporarily through ngrok, or with https://share.streamlit.io/.

Would be more useful if included OS and free/paid/subscription with the program name.

Software: OpenCPN

Need: Chart plotting software for navigation at sea; integration with AIS, radar and other NMEA connections; displaying GRIB files.

Other programs I've tried: Garmin, Simrad, B&G etc proprietary solutions (only sold with GPS plotter hardware); Navionics, Isailor, Nimble Navigator, ZyGRIB (only does GRIB files).

I do a fair bit of ocean sailing on small sailboats (between 1 and 3.5 circumnavigations so far, depending on how you count). Unlike on land with Google Maps or Maps.me, at sea most modern navigation solutions center around an expensive GPS-plotter unit, that comes with proprietary software. While some are better than others, they are all A: universally and ridiculously overpriced, and B: quickly outdated with no upgradeability. The one thing they have going for them is that the hardware is generally ruggedized for the marine environment. I have tried many different units on different boats, but never found one that I like. This situation means that many boats have an old (10 or 20 years) plotter unit around that they don't generally use and that might not work anymore, and instead use an app like Navionics or Isailor on a tablet (Navionics in dangerously bad imho, Isailor is marginally better). While this can be convenient for casual use, it is not a fully fledged system, and I consider that practice unsafe (un-ruggedized hardware, tablet might randomly hang or refuse to work (for example without internet access), automatic background updates can suddenly break things, tablet can easily be lost overboard, loosing or destroying your charging cable now becomes a life-threatening danger, etc, etc. The problem is mainly that many people don't realize the degree of trust they are actually putting on the system).

OpenCPN is an opensource alternative that in my opinion handily beats all alternatives that I have tried in pretty much every way. It displays both raster and vector charts of many formats, handles both routing, tracks and waypoints and can send commands to the autopilot, and it displays AIS signals in the most intuitive, informative yet unobtrusive way I have yet seen implemented. It can even be ECDIS-compliant (legal for use on big ships), if paired with compliant hardware and set up right. It is very stable, and has extensive documentation and a helpful community. It runs easily on a RaspberryPI or similar low power devices (very important on some sailboats with limited power available, or as a backup unit). While the software is free, charts and hardware needs to be supplied by the user. High quality charts are provided for free by the governments of some countries (US and New Zealand for example), can be found for free online (pirated), or purchased. Hardware can be anything that runs Windows, Linux, OSX, BSD or Solaris (or Android, see below). I make sure that my primary unit is rugged and protected (like a Panasonic Toughbook for example), and run a backup copy on every single computing device onboard.

Issues with OpenCPN include horrible touch-support (there is an android version, but it sucks, useful as an emergency backup only), some unintuitive and quirky solutions (akin to many other opensource programs), lack of polish of the user interface compared to some proprietary solutions (again, akin to many other opensource programs), along with the need for more technical skills, especially for setting it up. There are some bugs and some missing features, but fewer than any other modern system that I've used. 

I regularly set out to sea, literally and directly trusting OpenCPN with the life of me and my crew. 

I realize that this is pretty niche and probably not relevant to most readers here, but it's the one area where I feel like I might have something to add :) Hope it's helpful for someone! If you are interested, I'm happy to chat more about OpenCPN, navigation or sailing in general.

Ag: the silver searcher, (grep replacement)

Alternatives: grep, ack

Ack has a better interface than grep and ag is like ack but faster.

Software: SensorLog

Need: IOS app for continuously recording iPhone sensor data at all times.

Other programs I've tried: Toolbox - Smart Meter Tools, Sensors Toolbox - Multitool, phyphox, Physics Toolbox Sensor Suite, Gauges

I've tried many apps that let you see sensor data from your iPhone, but, SensorLog is the first that lets you log gigabytes of data in the background continuously for multiple days. Ironically, it's also one of the smallest apps I've used, at just 2.2 MB. My only issue with it is that the average audio dB logs seem to be bugged for long-term recordings.

Meta-Comment: There is a whole site dedicated to this problem: https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/

I helped make it grow, but am no longer active there.

In case you don't know the StackExchange System: Its a Q and A format. You ask e.G. "Need a cartographing tool that supports non-spherical objects" and specify what you want it to do, how much it may cost, etc. and people who happen to know will answer it. It is acceptable and welcomed to provide BOTH question AND answer.

It is also a nice place to find questions you know the answer to and supply them.

Software: Godot Engine

Need: Game engine for amateur devs (especially for 2D and pixel art games)

Other programs I've tried: Unity, Game Maker Studio, Pygame, Love 2D

If you're looking for a game engine that's easy to get into and quick to produce results with, Godot is your best choice. It's free, completely open source, has a nice variety of functionality already provided and a lot of useful object types while still providing the flexibility of coding in your own scripts. It's lighter and more intuitive than Unity, not to mention, better suited to 2D development as it uses pixels as units and has various utilities to make pixel art games work best. But it can do 3D too! It's cheaper than Game Maker, and has more of a UI than straight up frameworks like Pygame. It also supports shaders (both GLSL and with its own internal visual language), it exports natively to Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and HTML, and a lot of other really cool functionality, all for the great price of $0.

Curated. The Best Textbooks on Every Subject [LW · GW]is one of the most viewed posts of all time. With 107 comments and counting, this post is a worthy addition to the genre. We should have done this a long time ago!

Software: Trello

Need: To-do list

Other programs I've tried: Toodledo, Wunderlist [discontinued], Microsoft Outlook

I have a GTD-ish to-do list. The way it looks in Trello is that there's a "Work to-do list" Trello board, on which there are "lists" labeled "Today", "This week", "Waiting for..." "Done", "Next few weeks", "Not this month", "Probably never", etc., and on each "list" there are "cards" with individual items that I want to do. Trello allows each individual card to carry lots of useful information inside it, like links, attached google docs, text, checklists, deadlines. It's very easy to browse and edit the cards and move them around, and has change-tracking for that. It's cloud-hosted and has good smartphone apps. Their main market is for team collaboration I think, but it works great for one person. (I do use it to share a grocery list with my spouse.) It's also free (including for private boards), good responsive searching (with an "archive" feature), no downtime, no bugs. The other to-do lists I've tried were missing some of these features and/or worse user experience.

Software: https://onivim.io/

Need: modal code editor that works well for a VIM user

Others I’ve tried:

VsCode with VIM plugin – as any other electron-based app, it tends to hang every once in a while, and the plugins are the first ones to be suspended, so you end up not being able to navigate around the code until it unfreezes.

Emacs with evil-mode – actually my second favourite VIM mode in a code editor. I’d recommend using spacemacs, if you want a good emacs config with evil-mode. Does not work great on large enough monorepos though.

Software: Stremio+Plugins

Need: Watching movies online

Honorable mentions: vidsrc.me+adblockers, various torrent sites, Netflix, Amazon Prime, online websites.

Why its superior: It allows for watching movies from any platform, its integration with plugins (particularly the Juan Carlos 2, Torrent.io and ThePirateBay ones) is superb, and its tagging system is convenient. 

Software: Zenhub https://www.zenhub.com/

Need: Agile project management for multiple projects.

Other programs I've tried: jira, Monday, clickup, trello, etc

I use scrum to manage my general productivity (not just professional work) and other programs have tended to be painful when managing multiple projects, or have been fiddly in ways I didn't need. A downside to zenhub is it's only free for public projects, so someone inclined could read through your tasks. Zenhub's main selling point is github integration, but I largely ignore that and just use it for standard issue management.

Software: ffmpeg

Need: Converting arbitrary video/audio file formats into another

Other programs I've tried: Various free conversion websites

Not tried: Any Adobe products

Advantage: ffmpeg doesn't have ads, or spam, or annoying pop-ups

Software: pandoc

Need: Converting arbitrary document file formats into another

Other programs I've tried: In-built conversion for office-like products

Advantage: pandoc supports a lot of formats, and generally deals with them really well—loss of information through conversion is pretty rare

Software: archivenow

Need: Archiving websites to the internet archive.

Other programs I've tried: The archive.org website, spn, various scripts, various extensions.

archivenow is trusty enough for my use case, and it feels like it fails less often than other alternatives. It was also easy enough to wrap into a bash script and process markdown files. Spn is newer and has parallelism, but I'm not as familiar with it and subjectively it feels like it fails a bit more.

See also: Gwern's setup.

Software: Readwise

Need: Knowledge Reinforcement

Other Programs I'v tried: Anki , Evernote, Pocket

The ease of  copying and loading key references/highlights from various sources into a system which reminds of the key phrases every morning in a required pattern has been very useful. This is actually a project which i've started working and later gave up when i found Readwsie doing all of what i wanted and much more. It's ability to sync,tag,store and remind highlights from various sources (especially kindle, web browser) on a daily basis helped in a lot of knowledge reinforcement 

Software: Tasker, to automate everything Android. Alternatives: Automate, IFTTT, Llama

More details on this post [LW(p) · GW(p)], including a comment of mine detailing things that my setup does. I'll have some posts coming up as well, regarding Tasker and checklisting to drive.

But the point is, it's extremely powerful and flexible. There are also a bunch of plugins (some free, some paid), that expand it even more. With Termux, for example, you can even write regular Python programs to do complicated stuff as well. Pretty much anything I needed to do, I was able to do, and I keep discovering new things. You can even make pretty GUIs to go along with that!

This is the first Android app that I ever bought (and remained the only one for half a decade).

One disadvantage is that the intents system is hard to figure out in case you want to use it (I don't use it), and another is that some of the external plugins don't really scale well in terms of having variables set in Tasker. But it's still a very strong rec from me.

Software: Fluent Search

Need: Navigating Windows with a keyboard / a Windows Search that doesn't suck.

Fluent Search does a lot of things, but at its core it aims to make you reach for your mouse less. 

The most obvious competitor is the Windows Start Menu or other launcher-type apps like Listary, but I haven't used the Windows alternatives too much. I'll say that it's much more powerful than KRunner or ULauncher on Linux though.

Features:

• Search for lots of things on a quickly summoned search window:
  • Apps
  • Open windows / processes (will change focus / virtual Desktop to the Window selected)
  • Chromium Bookmarks (open in Browser)
  • Chromium Tabs (will change focus to browser and click tab)
  • common ui-elements in focused application
  • the web with a search engine of your choice
  • clipboard
• Use the search bar for related tasks like
  • Calculate
  • Execute commands in a terminal like cmd,powershell,bash
• With a shortcut, spawn identifiers for clickable object on screen - enter the identifier to click
  • (In order not to use the mouse)

The developer is highly active, and I'm impressed by his speed and skill. This app has made me like interacting with Windows. That was a first. I don't launch apps / search the web in any other way anymore.

Software: Chrome/Chromium (Might work on other Chromium based browsers, but I don't use them, so YMMV)

Need: turn web apps into desktop apps.

Alternatives: I usually use Firefox (Desktop) or the DuckDuckGo browser (Phone) for daily browsing, but this is the feature that makes me use Chrome on a daily basis too. I've used this on Windows, Linux and Android so far.

See here for how to do this. Sometimes the best software for a need turns out to be a web app (Google calendar/Gmail for me). But I find it nicer to have them separate from my browser, if I use them frequently. Sometimes the desktop version of an app is buggier than the desktop version (Looking at you Todoist). Another advantage of this is that you can use browser extensions with it. For Todoist I'd recommend the extension to get Gmail/Vim shortcuts. I would not recommend this if you don't have a stable internet connection (unless your app doesn't actually need internet, like the speed cubing app csTimer).

PromptToolkitIpython [Python shell]

Alternatives: python, ipython, jupyter

Jupyter notebooks are great for certain workflows where you're doing exploratory analysis but also want repeatability, but they're also clunkier and heavier than a shell session. ptpython has really good autocomplete and UI widgets. Ipython is an acceptable substitute.

Software: Axios

Need: Making requests in javascript

Other libraries I've tried: fetch, isomorphic-fetch, request, maybe some others.

Why it's superior: It automatically parses outputs nicely (as opposed to be having to be fed to e.g., JSON.parse()), errors are ok. Overall much less of a hassle (though using "data" instead of "body" takes some getting used to). It of course has support for promises

Notion.so for project management. Also a general replacement for google docs.

Tried: Trello, Jira/Confluence, linear.app (close second)

A simple and intuitive document editor with markdown-ish shortcuts that is powerful enough to handle task  assignment & tracking, meeting notes, and wikis.

Linear is also really good. Compared to Notion is has a command palette and search is better. However, it is not as good at anything beyond task tracking, wheras Notion is good for general purpose.

Software: Focus To-Do

Need: pomodoros and time tracking

Other programs I've tried: Harvest, Toggl

I really like Focus To-Do because it tracks how many pomodoros you spend on each task. You can create multiple projects or categories and then create tasks for each category. It has both a web app and a mobile app.

It also allows me to see how many pomodoros I do every day and see trends over time.

Software: Salesforce

Need: Customer relationship management (CRM)

Other programs I've tried: Hubspot, Sharpspring, Zoho

If you need a CRM for your business I would be hard-pressed to recommend anything other than Salesforce. It's the clear winner in terms of user interface design, flexibility, graphing, and integration. Competitors can be less expensive, and it's true that with all the bells and whistles Salesforce can cost something like $300/month per user, but on the low end the price is competitive and it comes with a host of features that you'd have to pay for on Hubspot and aren't available at all on Zoho.

I've long been fascinated by 'personal information managers'. I've started with DOS 'InfoSelect'. It had very fast search and flexible note taking with some calculation capability. In Windows, I've toured through a few shareware note takers, but currently concentrate on Evernote for more more serious use, but I need a document manager and annotater. Evernote will annotate PDFs, I want something with a different flavour. I'm dabbling with Zoot from Zoot Software. and InfoQube, a Canadian package; quite sophisticated and echoing the old EccoPro. Zoot is my current top of the list to trail sucking in my 20,000 or so papers, references and articles. So far so good, but I'm really looking forward to what its automation can do for sorting and tagging my collection.