What apps, software, or tools do you use and why?

#discuss #tools

What are some of your favorite/useful/recommended application, software or tools used to program or stay productive or are just plain awesome.

Latest comments (43)

jules manson • Dec 16 '18 • Edited

I am just a hobbyist so I Vanilla the dogshit out of everything -- PHP, MySQL, JavaScript (OO and functional), CSS, HTML, Fortran, Visual Basic, etc. I use no libraries or frameworks not even templates. But I do use some time saving tools like AutoPrefixer and Normalize and I always do the basic stuff like minimize, lint, gzip, etc. The way I see it all those libraries are primarily for professionals who need to be efficient and at cutting edge technology. Besides over-bloated libraries and frameworks take the fun out of challenging yourself to find a solution. Often a small well coded solution is all you need not a overweight cholesterol filled library that does everything including ordering Starbucks online. Think jQuery when all you really need is light DOM manipulation and AJAX in an age where CSS3 and JavaScript has matured to a very efficient coding language whose most important features are now supported by all mainstream browsers. Of course my apps are always based on best practices and I always compare what I create with similar open source tools or standard practices.

For developer apps I am also minimalist. When I create client-side mini-apps or tools or UI's I do a test run on CodePen (for example) and larger apps on GitHub or on my own personal PC with Brackets, my editor and mini IDE of preference. If I am doing server-side programming I use DreamWeaver and WAMP. For client-side debugging I find the browser consoles to be more than I need. I don't do Node or Webpack.

Christian Dueppe • Sep 2 '17

Thought I add tools not yet mentioned or mentioned not so often.
Shifting to Visual Studio Code for my small projects. I like that it is intuitive and powerful.
Whenever there is a repetitive editing task, I switch back to emacs and its ability to record keyboard macros, because it is so much faster than writing a text processor with sed, awk asf.
I like umlet for sketching software designs.
I use snagit for screen captures.
Sometimes I use autohotkey for tasks that I can not automate any other way.
Powershell is a crazy language, but its access to the complete windows environment is worth some pain.
git bash when I get homesick for the good ol Unix days

James J • Sep 1 '17

General

Slack: Work/team based communication
Discord: General chat with other colleagues and friends
Skype (I know..): Communications with 'legacy' clients

Development

IntelliJ: Java work, IntelliJ works so much better than Eclipse/NetBeans (I believe so anyway)
WebStorm: any web based work (NodeJS, React, HTML, etc).
Notepad++: General file editing on Windows
Sublime: General file editing on Mac

Other

mRemoteNG: Server management
FileZilla: (S)FTP
ShareX: Screenshot & Screen-recording (GIF & MP4) management

And probably some other stuff that I use without even realising...

Sam Kleiner • Sep 1 '17 • Edited

A lot of good tools in here, but a lot of the same. Two apps I don't see here but use every day:

Patterns - When I need to work out some tricky regex.

Code Runner 2 - When I need to work out a tricky function. Nice because you can run just that function and hard code some test values without the rest of the app you are working on.