Name your top 3 favorite software products that you use

This post is part of the Mayfield + DEV Discussion series. Please feel free to go back and answer previous questions as well.

Comments

[Max F. Findel]

1. I'm a heavy user of the whole Proton suite. I'm always on VPN on my laptop and mobile, I love the private email and the new calendar :)
2. After some bad experiences with several computers over 10 years of coding (completely dying the day before a release, for example), I run all my code on Gitpod
3. I love using Bear for note taking and organizing my thoughts.

[Nick Taylor]

It’s hard to choose just three, but here goes.

• VS Code Insiders Edition
• Raycast
• Rocket

I wrote about other productivity tools I use for anyone interested.

Productivity Tools I Use

Nick Taylor (he/him) ・ Mar 29 ・ 2 min read

#tooling #productivity

You can also check out my uses page for everything I use as top 3 was tough.

[Keff]

Figma
VSCode
DEV ;)

[Ben Halpern]

This gets a quick like!

[Ben Sinclair]

This sounds like a simple question, but what my favourite is isn't the same as what I think's the best for whatever reason, or what's affected my life most. I mean, I use web browsers every day and should probably put the whole category in here as my favourite, right? Silent Hill 2 is a "software product" that I used a lot back in the day, and I still don't think there's much that can top this one in its category.

I'll stop overthinking.

Vim is my #1. There are some rough edges with plugins, but the core Vim experience is as close to perfect as I can imagine.

tmux fits snuggly with Vim, and while it's not perfect, and the interface can be a little funny sometimes, it still massively improves my terminal experience and I use it every day.

ripgrep is the fastest and simplest of the grep-replacements that came out a few years ago (starting with things like Ack and Ag).

Honourable mention: fzf. A lot of my workflow is around using ripgrep inside Vim inside tmux, and fzf is the sprinkle on top of the cake that makes it all much more fun to eat. There are other fuzzy-finders around these days, but to be honest I haven't investigated much since fzf works exactly as I want it to already.

Yes, everything I've mentioned has been terminal-based! And it's nice to have favourites that aren't just favourites at work, of course :)

[Waylon Walker]

💯 this. Yes vim has some rough edges, but it's designed so that you can gently smooth them out to exactly your own muscle memory In your vimrc.

[Moon Presence]

1. As the main code editor, I like to use VSCode. It has everything I need, and if there is something missing, you can try to create it. ❤️
2. To create notes, articles and just materials, I use Obsidian. Beautiful design, convenient functionality, and many other useful features. 😃
3. I like to use Figma to create designs, layouts, icons and more. This is one of my favorite tools for working with design ✨

[Pandademic]

Oooh , difficult choice , but:

• Raycast
• Emacs
• f.lux

[Jatin Sharma]

There are many, Can't mention all, some of them would be -

• VS Code
• Sublime text 4
• Bitwarden (password manager)
• Microsoft todo
• Figma (design)
• Ditto (clipboard manager)
• Share X (Screenshot Manager)

[Joe Mainwaring]

1Password - I’ve been a customer for 10 years and it’s been an absolute game changer. I recommend this anytime I see friends get their socials hacked.
JetBrains Webstorm - my IDE of choice. It’s a bit hefty compared to VSCode but it excels better at tracing-related workflows with complex projects.
Docker - I lived the SysAdmin life before containers, being able to package packages into their own little runtime environment has been transformative for scaling up an application stack.

[Thomas Bnt ☕]

Same as @jesssimpson34 for the first point,

1. I use Proton suite like ProtonMail, ProtonDrive and ProtonCalendar. For personnal and work uses. Very good to keep your private/intimate life safe.
2. For everything that is writing, like projects, ideas, things to-do, I centralized everything on Notion. It's organized, easy to use and very powerful!
3. And the last, I use Gravit Designer for all the design aspect, banners, logos.

[leob]

1) VSCode
2) VSCode
3) VSCode

Okay I cheated a bit here, but you get the idea ... :)

[Phil Ashby]

I'll cheat a bit and categorise:
most used:

• Falkon - a privacy-focused webkit based browser, I switched from Firefox after the shenannigans with Mozilla and 'managed advertising'
• Thunderbird - until I find an alternative mail client I can stand to use!
• KeePassXC - utterly awesome :)

most enjoyed:

• Flightgear - probably one of the largest, oldest OSS projects, and a really nice flight sim!
• Python - I guess my mind works like Guido's, as I find both the language and std lib intuitive, and I get good flow.
• Git - yes really.. I spent far too many years with bad SCM tools, it's nice to have one that isn't!

I'd have listed many online services, but we're sticking to local software right?

[David Taitingfong]

I feel like I might want to revise this list later, but here's the first 3 things that pop into my mind:

1. Libby, "the library reading app". It allows you to rent books AND audiobooks - it's awesome!
2. Gramps, open-source genealogy software. I've been creating my family tree using this & it has SO MANY features. Maybe too much? But it gets the job done.
3. Notion, "a project management and note-taking software". It's pretty simple IMO; and there's a desktop app which I always prefer.

Gramps is the only one I don't use everyday, but when I do use it I get lost in the flow - again, there's SO many features...it makes me want to add every bit of detail that I can.

[Venkatesh KL]

Windows Phone OS 10 - I don't use it anymore but it has everything we get now as Android version upgrades back then. Example: flip to mute, take the phone to ear to lift the call, privacy dashboard(different name though) & excellent RAM management
Linux: it's pretty interesting to see something that powers so many servers & is fully open source
Microsoft edge (V8 version) : it's much sleek, faster & easy on processor & RAM. Not a Microsoft fanboy but I like the deft touches they give to make software more accessible

[Elliot Derhay]

These are in no particular order, and it was actually a bit hard for me to come up with this list. Lol

1. PhpStorm
2. Trello
3. GitHub
4. Heroku
5. Bitwarden
6. Authy
7. Obsidian
8. Spotify
9. AWS S3
10. Twitter

[Simon Egersand 🎈]

Love this question. Some software applications you just take for granted.

My top 3:

• Git. Amazing software. The impact it had is massive and I use it every day at work.
• Notion. To gather my thoughts and ideas in a user friendly way.
• Vim key bindings. I mainly use other apps to write code but always with the key bindings. They make me so much faster.

So interesting to read what other people wrote 😊