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Tools & Productivity
The most popular blog posts about tools & productivity on Hacker News. 6,505 posts.
Gap Buffers Are Not Optimized for Multiple Cursors
Gap buffers are a common data structure for representing a text buffer in a text editor. Emacs famously uses gap buffers — long-standing proof that gap buffers are a perfectly sufficient way to represent a text buffer.
My Obsidian note-taking workflow
A Vim-Inspired Approach to Efficient Note Management with Obsidian and Markdown
Honest In-App Purchases
It is no secret that the vast majority of revenues being made today in the App Store are via consumable based “Free”-to-Play games. These have sat atop the Top Grossing charts for a long time now. Last month at WWDC Apple announced that it had paid out $5 billion in the last year to developers, with clearly much of…
Localllm lets you develop gen AI apps on local CPUs
Want to use open-source LLM models from Hugging Face on your local development environment? With localllm and Cloud Workstations, you can.
Mutt on Windows Without WSL
I have this weird hobby of trying to get good unix tools to run natively on Windows. I find this is the most efficient use of my laptop's resources, and therefore the nicest experience. WSL is nice, but it takes up a lot of RAM on my system. I prefer to use MSYS2 . Getting unix tools to work correctly under MSYS2 is a…
Markdown's Big Brother: Say Hello to AsciiDoc
Learn how AsciiDoc combines simplicity with advanced features. Create documentation that stands out, saves time, and ensures clarity.
A Year Away from Mac OS
This is the fifth post in my series on finding an alternative to Mac OS X. A bit over a year ago I wrote about my search for an alternative to Mac OS and switch to Linux. In this post I reflect on how that year went and detail some further adventures into Mac OS alternatives.
Generating true random numbers from bananas
It was a dreary afternoon in Milan last year when, procrastinating on studying, I was struck by a flash of genius. “What would happen if I made a banana-powered random number generator?“. I immediately went to tell my roommate, who was also an electronic engineer.He looked me in the face and burst out laughing. At ……
Building a Desktop Application for Datasette
This week I started experimenting with a desktop application version of Datasette—with the goal of providing people who aren’t comfortable with the command-line the ability to get Datasette up and …
One sentence per line, please
I give some advice each year in my annual Sphinx tutorial at PyCon . A grateful student asked where I myself had learned the tip. I have done some archæology and finally have an answer. Let me share what I teach them about “semantic linefeeds,” then I will reveal its source — which turns out to have been written when…
An early look at VLC 4.0
Early review of VLC 4.0 Nightly build, focusing on the new and redesigned interface, including tons of problems like bad ergonomics, low font contrast, decreased workflow efficiency, reduced responsiveness, no quick access to local filesystems, video playback in a separate window, and more
Mastering Git submodules
Hair-pulling. Helpless rage. Clusterfucks. They leave much to be desired, yet sometimes are the right tool for the job. Let’s tame them!
Announcing my free book on Vim
Made in Notion, the connected workspace where AI agents and teams organize docs, projects and knowledge together.