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Jess Lee
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What is your top tool that most devs would be surprised you use regularly?

DEV is in the process of launching a podcast and we'd love for you to be involved! We're recording the episodes in advance, and this week we'd like to know:

What is your top tool that most devs would be surprised you use regularly?

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Thank you!

Top comments (93)

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nas5w profile image
Nick Scialli (he/him)

The URL bar to convert rich text to plain text

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cescquintero profile image
Francisco Quintero 🇨🇴

Bro. This trick is so simple and yet useful but now only use it whenever CMD + SHIFT + paste doesn't remove formatting.

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nas5w profile image
Nick Scialli (he/him)

Yeah, it’s an old habit that will die hard.

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skyandsand profile image
Chris C

Firefox also has the search bar which is one reason why I prefer it.

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mhmd_azeez profile image
Muhammad Azeez

Many times I use Windows Run for that

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seanmclem profile image
Seanmclem

Vs code has never let me down for this purpose.

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xowap profile image
Rémy 🤖

I love when people paste AWS keys in there

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bizzy237 profile image
Yury

I use notepad/gedit for that. Also for writing anything longer than two sentences because the chance of expiring session is bigger than a chance of a system shut down

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lampe profile image
Micha

I'm doing that too xD

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v6 profile image
🦄N B🛡

No, I suspect most of us would not be surprised.

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jonesrussell profile image
Russell Jones

Ctrl-T, Ctrl-V, Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-W :)

One hand and you don't even have to take your finger off Ctrl.

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madza profile image
Madza

Lol, I use Notepad for that xdd

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simonhaisz profile image
simonhaisz

Pen and paper.

  1. I never lose my work, even if the power goes out.
  2. It's 100% safe from ransom-ware
  3. GDPR compliance can be achieved with fire
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dance2die profile image
Sung M. Kim • Edited

Heard a counter arg, where 🔥 could destroy'em.

But it'd rarely ever happen.

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alexlion profile image
Alex Lion

Servers are more likely to be destroyed compared to the paper:

  • Fire
  • Water
  • Power outage
  • Hardware issue

But it'd rarely ever happen. ;)

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odddev profile image
Kai

cough cough getrocketbook.com/

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dance2die profile image
Sung M. Kim

Been a moleskine user for decades. What's different about getpocket?

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odddev profile image
Kai

Rocket Book is endlessly reusable. It transforms the "real life" notes into digital ones and then you can wipe it clean again.

youtube.com/watch?v=U9Kas8l38Kc

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manishfoodtechs profile image
manish srivastava • Edited

I use my homemade search engine... haha... what I mean, an HTML input box that creates a string for google to search from multiple sites that I love.

Saves lots of time. Try this one: manish.imfast.io . { by default articles from dev.to also get listed}

Put anything related to DevOps like ubuntu, cloud, Nginx.... etc... and see the magic.
I am using this since 2009 when I was doing my management degree. This type of homemade search engine then helped me and my friends to find a job in the recession.

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mdhesari profile image
Mohammad Fazel

Love it!!

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manishfoodtechs profile image
manish srivastava

thanks dear . also refer dev.to/manishfoodtechs/metasearch-...

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

I use photoshop even though the designers in my life tell me I need the new hotness

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andrewbrown profile image
Andrew Brown 🇨🇦

There's something newer than photoshop?

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rad_hombre profile image
Matthew Orndoff • Edited

Everyone is using Figma for wireframing and general design. It slaps on collaboration.

Illustrator/Photoshop are probably still better for more granular stuff.

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nicolus profile image
Nicolus

For photo editing ? No.
For wireframing, designing responsive mockups and stuff like that yes. There's Adobe XD or Figma for example.

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sunitk profile image
Sunit Katkar

I'm not a designer but for quick flowchart or figures I use Windows PaintBrush.

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ryansmith profile image
Ryan Smith

Tab Wrangler browser extension (Chrome, Firefox).

I have ~6 or fewer browser tabs open at a given time.

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brunooliveira profile image
Bruno Oliveira

By far.... A huge margin..... SourceTree to manage git at work, where repos are large, multiple projects, etc.... Everyone I see uses IDEs like intellij but I can't live without the UI of SourceTree

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jeikabu profile image
jeikabu

I used SourceTree for quite awhile. Give Fork a gander, I've never looked back.

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mjcoder profile image
Mohammad Javed

I remember using SourceTree and remember nothing but the crashes.

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austinstanding profile image
Austin Standing

mermaidjs within codepen for on-the-fly diagrams.

The input is "markdown-ish" and the output is svg. I know you can change look and feel with CSS, but I haven't bothered to yet.

mermaid-js.github.io/mermaid/#/

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v6 profile image
🦄N B🛡 • Edited

That is unexpected, clever, and useful to me.

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manishfoodtechs profile image
manish srivastava

Nice Austin, really a very useful utility

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austinstanding profile image
Austin Standing

Here is a Sequence Diagram based on a true story to demonstrate how chaos can be captured quickly. Names have been changed but not forgotten 😂

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tardisgallifrey profile image
Dave

Nano. Discovered it when I started using Ubuntu. Won't give it up. Ever.

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jeikabu profile image
jeikabu

Pico/nano is training wheels for vim. Sorry, just need to throw that in. 😎

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projectescape profile image
Aniket

Crying intensifies

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bertilmuth profile image
Bertil Muth

The GitHub Desktop GUI. Yeah, yeah, you’re a lot faster on the command line. Still, I find it convenient. It provides a nice overview of the changes I‘ve made, and is just good enough for most cases.

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philipperoubert profile image
Philippe Roubert • Edited

Something I highly recommend is code linting, it's essentially a code scanner that analyses your code for bugs and other issues such as stylistic conventions.

Python Linter Image Example

For example, Python has PyLint (there are other linters available too), it's really useful. They should be available on a majority of editors and IDEs I believe. A cool thing about PyLint is that it follows the PEP8 guidelines where it kindly reminds me that my variables should be snake case instead of camel case or that I need to add a docstring to my new function. Definitely worth a look!

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codingmindfully profile image
Daragh Byrne

I work on a project where the build fails if you break the linting rules. It's awesome.

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tkdmzq profile image
TKDMzq

is there a quick fix auto applied when possible. I once had set up something like that and after adding --fix or something like that I never had to worry about cases for that project.

Aslo faling on warning in rust was a good eay to learn proper language style

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codingmindfully profile image
Daragh Byrne

yep auto fix, which works up to a point. I'd rather have it manual that completely trust the linter to fix everything though, oldschool like that :)