Ben Halpern

for The DEV Team

Posted on May 19, 2022

Name your top 3 favorite software products that you use

#discuss #productivity

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

Top comments (53)

Max F. Findel • May 19 '22

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 :)
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
I love using Bear for note taking and organizing my thoughts.

Nick Taylor • May 19 '22 • Edited

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

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 • May 20 '22

Figma
VSCode
DEV ;)

Ben Halpern • May 20 '22

This gets a quick like!

Ben Sinclair • May 20 '22 • Edited

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 • May 22 '22

💯 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 • May 20 '22 • Edited

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. ❤️
To create notes, articles and just materials, I use Obsidian. Beautiful design, convenient functionality, and many other useful features. 😃
I like to use Figma to create designs, layouts, icons and more. This is one of my favorite tools for working with design ✨

Pandademic • May 19 '22

Oooh , difficult choice , but:

Jatin Sharma • May 20 '22

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 • May 20 '22 • Edited

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 • May 20 '22

Same as @jesssimpson34 for the first point,

I use Proton suite like ProtonMail, ProtonDrive and ProtonCalendar. For personnal and work uses. Very good to keep your private/intimate life safe.
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!
And the last, I use Gravit Designer for all the design aspect, banners, logos.