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Ben Halpern
Ben Halpern Subscriber

Posted on • Edited on

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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mikengarrett profile image
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 profile image
jorgecedi

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

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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 profile image
phillpafford

this is one of my must have apps as well

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binaryidiot profile image
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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clumpytree profile image
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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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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ghost profile image
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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nathanflurry profile image
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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tribex profile image
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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amundsenjunior profile image
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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