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Ask HN: What are you favorite tiny tools?

by seanlinehan on 10/14/18, 6:53 PM with 45 comments

• by yesenadam on 10/15/18, 12:02 AM

  bash, AWK, sips. A couple of bash commands I use daily:

  cdf - change directory to the folder open in (Mac) Finder

    cdf () {
      currFolderPath=$( /usr/bin/osascript <<EOT
        tell application "Finder"
          try
            set currFolder to (folder of the front window as alias)
          on error
            set currFolder to (path to desktop folder as alias)
          end try
          POSIX path of currFolder
        end tell
      EOT )
      echo "cd to \"$currFolderPath\""
      cd "$currFolderPath"
    }
  
    #dlm - "dlm filename" downloads filename.mp4 from URL in clipboard until its finished, resuming if interrupted
    fname=$(pbpaste)
    echo "Download $fname as $1.mp4 : "
    until curl -C - -kLo $1.mp4 "$fname"
    do
      sleep 5
    done

• by schappim on 10/15/18, 12:57 AM

  I'm surprised no one has mentioned Alfred App https://www.alfredapp.com/

  I cannot give it enough upvotes!

• by LVB on 10/15/18, 4:17 AM

  The ‘z’ directory switching bash script is usually the first thing I miss when away from my own environment: https://github.com/rupa/z

• by ivanmaeder on 10/15/18, 7:48 AM

  Colour picker: https://sipapp.io/

  Download videos from YouTube and other sources: https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/ (was the only way I could get a video from the BBC site recently)

  Chrome extension for taking a screenshot of a full web page: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/full-page-screen-c...

  Shameless plugs:

  Script for renaming multiple files at the same time: https://github.com/ivanmaeder/vimv

  Button in macOS Finder for creating a file in the current folder: https://github.com/ivanmaeder/finder-touch

  That last one written in AppleScript which is craaazy.

• by enjayz on 10/15/18, 1:23 AM

  Avid fan of https://htmlcolorcodes.com/

  However, since a while ago if you search "HTML color picker" google brings up a built-in color picker as the first result.

• by maio on 10/16/18, 5:58 AM

  Caffeine - http://lightheadsw.com/caffeine/

  Caffeine is a tiny program that puts an icon in the right side of your menu bar. Click it to prevent your Mac from automatically going to sleep, dimming the screen or starting screen savers. Click it again to go back. Right-click (or ⌘-click) the icon to show the menu.

• by xelxebar on 10/15/18, 4:23 AM

  Not precisely a tool, but YouTube channels actually have RSS feeds associated with them:

      https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=<channel-id>
  

  From your subscriptions page, you can even download an OPML with feeds for each channel. Most RSS will let you import this just fine.

  As I love the cli, my preferred reader is newsboat[0].

  [0]: https://newsboat.org/

• by mbrock on 10/14/18, 7:27 PM

  A little alias that rewrites

      clone foo/bar
  

  into

      git clone --recursive https://github.com/foo/bar
  

  is one of my favorites.

• by tnolet on 10/15/18, 4:50 AM

  Httpie - basically a nicer cUrl. Adding json and headers is super simple. https://httpie.org

  Puppeteer Recorder - tooting my own horn, but is a Chrome extension that records Puppeteer scripts. https://github.com/checkly/puppeteer-recorder

• by superasn on 10/14/18, 10:11 PM

  Video speed controller chrome extension. It lets you speed up videos on any site. I usually watch videos at 4x to 6x speed now (in addition to saving time I feel that I don't get distracted / daydream as much).

  Sadly it's like an addiction and now I even watch Netflix at 1.5X speed too (which makes it impossible to watch with family)

• by beckler on 10/15/18, 12:50 PM

  ngrok: https://ngrok.com/ expose local servers to the public internet (super helpful for building webhooks)

  grpcurl: https://github.com/fullstorydev/grpcurl awesome tools for testing gRPC services

  objective-see: https://objective-see.com/products.html tons of awesome security tools for mac, for free!

  f.lux: https://justgetflux.com/ great tool to adjust the color of your screen depending on the time of day

• by mohitmun on 10/15/18, 6:00 AM

  I extensively use [pngpaste](https://github.com/jcsalterego/pngpaste)

  Now I can copy any images from browsers/screenshot into any location in terminal I want

• by dasmoth on 10/14/18, 7:40 PM

  "paste" -- an unexpectedly useful data-wrangling tool. I used a hand-rolled version for years before discovering it was available "as standard".

• by jaclaz on 10/15/18, 11:02 AM

  Generic resource (mac/OsX):

  https://tinyapps.org/osx.html

  Cannot judge for Mac, but the selection of Windows little tools has traditionally been very good, the only Mac one I ever used (and it proved to work well) was WakeOnLan:

  http://www.readpixel.com/wakeonlan/

• by msadowski on 10/15/18, 5:27 AM

  For me it's tmuxp (https://github.com/tmux-python/tmuxp/blob/master/README.rst). It allows to create scripts for tmux sessions. It easily shaves off about 1 to 2 minutes of my time everyday.

• by amorphous on 10/17/18, 12:17 PM

  Scapple - by far my favourite brainstorming / mind mapping / thought collecting tool. I use it every day. Features are just perfect, simple and useful.

  I combine this with monosnap screenshot tool so I can drag images into notes.

  (It's from the maker of Scrivener)

• by trevordixon on 10/15/18, 1:48 PM

  I run https://serveo.net. Lets you expose local services through a proxy server (a la ngrok), but uses SSH as the transport, so there's nothing to install.

• by txmjs on 10/15/18, 11:49 AM

  BitBar (https://github.com/matryer/bitbar)

  Allows you to create custom MacOS menubar items from the text output of any script.

• by mikebos on 10/14/18, 7:39 PM

  Drafts 5 combined with workflow and Pythonista on IOS. For everything ranging from diary, personal crm, search adress/telephone number/e-mail in a given text, meeting notes and well almost anything. Very usefull combo

• by Artemix on 10/14/18, 8:17 PM

  I use kickstart to manage my templates, including projects (https://github.com/Keats/kickstart/)

• by filosofikode on 10/15/18, 9:08 AM

  - httpie -- command line HTTP client - bat -- A cat(1) clone with wings

• by mstaoru on 10/15/18, 4:11 AM

  smcFanControl - makes my old '14 MBP with replaced-almost-everything tolerably warm.

  menuBUS - for easy switching between built-in audio, Bluetooth, digital output + equalizing each of them in their own ways.

  Spectacle - for window management and easy fullscreen, half-screen and whatever-part-of-screen shortcuts.

  Karabiner - for complicated hotkey rebinding and controlling those Logitech presenter sticks where clever designer put a tiny "Close presentation and exit" key right next to "Next slide".

  LICEcap - for capturing screen to GIF files for easy sharing.

• by designnomad on 10/14/18, 8:10 PM

  Vanilla -- ‘hide Mac menu bar icons’ (https://matthewpalmer.net/vanilla/)

  Clocker -- ‘Menubar World Clock’

• by albertgoeswoof on 10/15/18, 1:45 PM

  https://tab.bz to share lists of links to other people as one link, or just across devices that aren’t synced

• by rusinov on 10/15/18, 11:10 AM

  For Mac automation I use: Keyboard Maestro, Hazel, Automator, AppleScript. Not a tiny ones, though.

• by jpincheira on 10/14/18, 10:19 PM

  Jumpcut — macOS menubar clipboard manager with keyboard shortcuts

  Spectacle - macOS window resizer / manager

• by wingerlang on 10/15/18, 7:35 AM

  Snappy - Let's you keep screenshot on-screen, annotate and so on.