What's a tool you use every day that most developers haven't heard of?

One my favorite tools is Visidata (https://www.visidata.org/). It is great for viewing and working with data in the terminal. It is useful if you need to quickly explore data and change some data.

VisiData makes it possible to view a lot of data such as CSV, JSON, databases, etc. All the supported formats are listed in https://www.visidata.org/docs/formats/

There is a wonderful tutorial in https://jsvine.github.io/intro-to-visidata/

I've been using this obscure tool called "documentation" for years now. It's this revolutionary concept where the people who created the software actually write down how it works!

Sometimes it even has examples showing how to use the software correctly.

I know it sounds too good to be true, but trust me once you discover documentation, you'll wonder how you ever lived without it.

I often use the following tools:

  fzf - fuzzy finder e.g. files
  gdu - tui for disk usage
  rga - search file contents
  bat - cat with syntax highlight
  difft - better diff
  lazygit - tui for gut
  lazydocker - TUI for dicker
  restic - backup tool
  rclone - sync tool
  f2 - file renaming tool

You can find them all in github.

Hex -- voice to words: https://github.com/kitlangton/Hex

In general, I think voice to text for productive work (e.g. prompting cursor) isn't getting much attention. Hex is a great tool, that works locally on top of open models, and is quite reliably.

A pseudo terminal. It provides translation between a shell and a terminal interface for third party access. Third party access can include SSH, application streams, user sessions, web browsers, and more.

An IDE that doesn't inject AI slop into my work constantly.