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Ben Halpern
Ben Halpern

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What's your favorite tool or library that few others have heard of?

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jvanbruegge profile image
Jan van Brügge

Markdown Doctest

It runs code examples in your README/all other markdown files, so you never forget to update your documentation

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Mike 🤘

Instead of harping on a popular framework, I want to highlight some niche web-based tools I find myself going back to far too often. It's usually for things I don’t do often enough or when I get stuck on a particularly niche aspect of something.

Crontab time formatter: crontab.guru/
CSS entity conversion calculator: evotech.net/articles/testjsentitie...
Regex tool: regexr.com/
Testing website readiness: varvy.com/ (previously feedthebot.com)
The “what the hell does this command do?” for command line: explainshell.com/
htaccess tester: htaccess.madewithlove.be/
Free online lossless image compressor: kraken.io/
Parse your css (for fun?): cssstats.com/
Collect a user’s browser info: yourbrowser.is/

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michael profile image
Michael Lee 🍕

Crontab.guru is a really good one.

Whoa, Varvy looks pretty sweet!

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ross profile image
Ross Creighton

Vimium (vimium.github.io/) - chrome extension for navigating the web w/o a mouse.

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jorgecedi

I prefer cVim, I found it faster for link annotation rendering :) but both are awesome utils for mouseless interaction.

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ajf

Yubnub.org - the command line for the web/browser, best to be installed as default search engine in the browser, allows commands to directly search/go to specific pages, e.g. "wp search-term" to search Wikipedia, "gm place" to look up a place in Google maps...

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Charles Francoise

FlyCut: A clipboard manager for macOS. Keep your copy buffer history. Never lose that URL or code snippet you copied a few seconds ago and haven't pasted. Copy all you need from one file before moving to the next, no need to back-and-forth. This is literally the first thing I install on a new computer.

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phillpafford

this is one of my must have apps as well

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Kris Siegel

I have a few that I find handy.

tohtml.com/
Take code samples and generate highlighted HTML for blog entries and documentation

hapijs.com/
Hapi.js is a great alternative to express.js for creating web servers in node. Using this with joi.js and Swagger means you can write your endpoints once, supply the code for validation and swagger reads all of this in and generates documentation. Never have stale comments again!

purecss.io/
Pure CSS is a super, super small CSS library that helps you do a lot of what Bootstrap does just more bare bones. It's run my Yahoo and hasn't been frequently updated but they're working on turning it over to the community. Great little library that's 3.8kb when gzipped.

msngrjs.com/
A JavaScript messaging library that includes handy utilities for type validation (#ShamelessPlug, this is my library)

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michael profile image
Michael Lee 🍕

I've been using Hapi.js for all my recent projects. Been liking it since. Haven't looked into Swagger, but sounds pretty sweet!

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mxcoder profile image
ricardoe

github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher

and/or

github.com/monochromegane/the_plat...

Both allow me to navigate my code bases very efficiently.

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lizzae13 profile image
lizzae pittae

Why are you hacking all of my accounts mxcoder

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mxcoder profile image
ricardoe

Sorry, I have no idea what you're talking about, if you're serious please describe the situation, what accounts, on what services? If you can't provide that, I'll have to report you as harassment.

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lizzae13 profile image
lizzae pittae

Mxcoder.my@gmail is brute forcing my accounts. They are in Plano tx and using an iPhone. Not you?

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lizzae13 profile image
lizzae pittae

Accounts are Reddit, Spotify, Instagram, and others

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mxcoder profile image
ricardoe • Edited

Sorry, not me, I go by mxcoder only in github, I think, I don't have that email address. I'm sorry I cannot help you, I think you could try by reporting the address here: support.google.com/mail/contact/abuse

If there's anything else you think I can help you with, feel free to ask.

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lizzae13 profile image
lizzae pittae

Ah well guess I'm happy it's not you and also sad to hit a dead end. Forgive my transgressions as I try to save my various online identities!

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mxcoder profile image
ricardoe

I know the feeling, I'm sorry I could not help more.

Hope you get them!

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

What an odd little interaction. Hope you get this sorted out lizzae, if you need the community's technical help understanding and getting to the bottom of this, feel free to make a post with the help tag and ask

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Nathan Flurry

Deepstream is a great open source alternative to services like Firebase with far more extensibility and ease of use.

Paws for Trello integrates Trello with macOS and gives a native-feeling experience (even though it's still an Electron application).

devRant is a great place to go when looking for programmer jokes or feeling the need to rant about something.

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Joshua Bemenderfer

I tried Deepstream in a production app.

Nothing but regret all over the place. I don't think it's production-ready yet.

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Scott E. Russell

Chocolatey (chocolatey.org/) is a Windows package manager. Great for provisioning and maintaining development environments, both virtual and physical, at my job. apt or yum for Windows, sorta.

Along with that, anything else that brings some familiar *nix-iness to Windows is my friend. Babun (babun.github.io/) is a pretty shell wrapper - runs on top of cygwin, but does everything for you, including pact, its own package manager for installing the cygwin bits you want with one command ($ pact install tmux).

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shiling profile image
Shi Ling

ImageMagick (imagemagick.org)

It's a CLI tool for most of your image processing needs. I use it in my apps a few times, and for the random times I need to resize or convert jpg to PNG, so that I can do stuff like upload a passport-sized photo in a really specific size and format for government e-sevices......

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Antony Courtney

Tabli - A Free, Powerful Tab Manager Extension for Google Chrome: gettabli.com

This is a Shameless Plug (I wrote Tabli). But I wrote it because, as a developer, I really needed it, and now it's a tool I can't live without. And, much to my chagrin, few others have heard of it. :)

Tabli's best feature is the ability to save collections of tabs as a "Saved Window" and easily restore that saved state. This is invaluable when using the web as a source of reference material; the "quick tour" video on the web site shows how this works for (for example) CSS reference docs.

Tabli's other killer feature is the Tabli popout window. This provides a quick at-a-glance real-time updating view of all the windows and tabs you currently have open in Chrome, essential on the giant 4K+ monitors many of us use nowadays.

Finally, Tabli has extensive keyboard shortcuts so you can accomplish most navigation tasks without your fingers ever leaving the keyboard.

Hope you find Tabli useful as a developer tool -- feedback always welcome!

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Ghost

This is a tool that should be in any developer's toolkit: HTTPie. It makes working with REST APIs from the CLI dead simple. Seeing people use curl to debug REST APIs is just painful.

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Bruno Heridet

Kakoune: A modal editor with multiple selections and orthogonal design.

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maxdevjs

I see you do create a lot of plugins for it :)

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Paul J. Lucas

I've been using my own text reformatter wrap(1) github.com/paul-j-lucas/wrap to reformat comments in source code (for 40+ languages) while using vim. It even reformats Markdown within comments. I started hacking on it more than 20 years ago to scratch a personal itch.

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Tyler Warnock

jframe (jframe.io)

I'm partial to this one because I'm on the team, but it's a really simple way to use all kinds of web components (content blocks, carousels, etc). It's great to be working on a tool that makes the job of working on the tool even easier!

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