What are the most underrated tools you use regularly?

Pen & Paper. For all the time that I spend daily in front of computers, when I must reason deeper and clearly about a problem, nothing beats sketching drawings and doing some quick calculations by hand. Typing in a keyboard, physical or virtual, doesn't give me the same feeling of "flow" to my thought process. Also distraction-free.

I started a german Podcast "Terminal Treff" - about cli tools I love, have loved or would like to love: https://podcasts.philipp-weissmann.de/@terminaltreff/episode...

Beeminder: Personal accountability through commitment contracts. Helps me stay on track with my goals, often serves as a little extra "push" to do something useful even if I'm really low on willpower that day.

Anki: Maybe not underrated, but seems like it only really took off in language-learning circles. I create a card for anything new that I'd like to retain, and have been doing so for almost 10y now. Really multiplies the long-term value of sitting down and learning, since I can be relatively certain that I'll keep the knowledge with me for a long time. Particularly useful for papers.

Does Zettelkasten count? I started using a more formal approach to note-taking and idea review and it's been fantastic in helping me generate ideas, hypotheses, topics to write essays on, and so on.

It requires a bit of rigour but it's helped my intellectual productivity immensely.

Qubes OS, a security-oriented desktop OS with fewer vulnerabilities than in Xen thanks to a clever design and reliance on hardware-assisted virtualization: https://www.qubes-os.org/security/xsa/#statistics

- pen

- paper (especially in the form of A5 paper notebooks used as lab diaries)

- reading

- listening

- writing

- drawing

- plain text files (together with text editors and UNIX tools)

- full text search

Probably the coreutils, like grep and cat. They hold the world up.

z - Jump around:

https://github.com/rupa/z

lefthook for githooks.

justfile to avoid typing long commands.

sleek to format sql.

and many more.

Readwise Reader