alt.hn

4/1/2026 at 3:16:12 PM

Ask HN: What dev tools do you rely on that nobody talks about?

by crcsmnky

4/1/2026 at 8:59:01 PM

https://github.com/atuinsh/atuin for fuzzy shell history (ctrl+r)

https://github.com/sharkdp/bat (nice coloured cat replacement)

https://github.com/abiosoft/colima (so I don't need docker desktop)

https://github.com/duckdb/duckdb (performant database that lets you directly query JSON, parquet, csv files with SQL queries and convert one to the other.

https://github.com/eradman/entr (rerun commands automatically when provided files change) (useful for rerunning test commands automatically once you save the file you're editing.

https://github.com/martinvonz/jj and https://github.com/idursun/jjui (Jujutsu VCS, been using it for three months and I really enjoy it)

https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazydocker (managing containers, images, volumes easily)

https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit (best tui for git and outside niche git commands, the fastest way to use git.)

https://github.com/jdx/mise (fast asdf, direnv, and task runner replacement) (install pretty much version of tool, language, env vars in a per directory level. (Or global if you want))

https://github.com/ajeetdsouza/zoxide (intelligent cd to move between directories incredibly quickly)

by Zizizizz

4/1/2026 at 11:52:08 PM

It's amazing, how rarely people talk about fish (https://fishshell.com/)

I love it so much that I pity people that use Bash, Zsh.

by asxndu

4/2/2026 at 7:27:54 AM

Ragas for anyone building RAG pipelines. It evaluates your retrieval quality before you've written a single line of product code. Faithfulness, answer relevance, context recall are all measurable and automatable. Most teams I've seen find out their retrieval is broken in production. Ragas tells you in Week 0. Completely changes how you scope the build.

by sunilkumarai

4/1/2026 at 6:06:42 PM

I love deepwiki for understanding deep code architectures: https://deepwiki.com/

by s3micolon0

4/2/2026 at 10:21:19 AM

Notepad++

:)

by KellyCriterion

4/1/2026 at 3:49:54 PM

I've been using ack for a very long time, maybe 15 years.

It's like grep but faster and easier to use. I still use it all the time, even in the era of Claude.

https://beyondgrep.com/

by strict9

4/1/2026 at 4:09:51 PM

and then ag (silver surfer) and then rg (ripgrep).

by fragmede

4/1/2026 at 9:24:54 PM

multitouch+stylus screen, plus the windows ink demo app https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/garage/profiles/sketch-pal/

its low latency, can do multiple layers, and its easy to pick out a standard set of colours to draw with.

It lets me make good rhetorical diagrams, and I've also used it for drawing quick mockups to get genai to make webpages

also, Quip as a design document/review tool. Its fantastic having a design review where you get comment threads going along different parts of the requirements and design, that you can then focus on in discussion time. it also lowers the barrier to giving feedback, so newer devs can ask questions without feeling like theyre taking up valuable meeting time

by 8note

4/1/2026 at 8:40:53 PM

This resonates. I actually ended up building a tool last year (CapSize) because I needed to churn out screenshots at a specific frame size for my day job and couldn't find anything that would just "lock" to 800x600 without a fight.

I'm not a dev by trade, so I did use AI as a power-tool to wrestle with the C++ and Electron parts. It turned into a bit of a rabbit hole—I ended up obsessed with keeping it entirely local/offline (no cloud APIs or telemetry) just to see if I could do things like local OCR in RAM. I ended up building two more tools to help me with making the one tool so it kind of spiraled into a small suite, but the main goal was just a no-frills utility that didn't require a login or a subscription just to crop an image.

by Peacetoes

4/1/2026 at 8:31:40 PM

code-server, instead of VSCode. I can build my own podman image on top of it with whatever dev tools I need for whatever languages I'm working with, and if I have to install something weird or something breaks I can just restart the container. Especially on my work machine that isn't Linux, I have this running in a VM and can just use in my browser and don't have to jump through hoops to get the dev environment I want. On my personal instance I also use it for automating building stuff from source. Before I had this, I just had build tools on pretty much every single machine I was building for and it was a hot mess.

https://github.com/coder/code-server

by 4oo4

4/2/2026 at 7:58:51 AM

so... devcontainers but in a different way?

Why not just devcontainers? I know its a PITA to setup on podman.

by Antitoxic6185

4/2/2026 at 5:31:13 AM

`gdu`, which is like `du` with a TUI.

by mbrezu

4/1/2026 at 7:55:32 PM

jq piped with curl for API debugging. Sounds obvious but I still see people open Postman for things that take 10 seconds in the terminal. `curl -s url | jq '.data[] | {id, status}'` and you're done.

Also `entr` for file watching — `ls *.js | entr -r node build.js`. Replaced like three different watch tools for me.

by artakulov

4/1/2026 at 8:50:01 PM

You may like https://httpie.io/ if you've not memorised all the curl flags already. The CLI tools way of making requests with headers and post bodies is really nice in my opinion

`http PUT pie.dev/put X-API-Token:123 name=John`

by Zizizizz

4/2/2026 at 2:32:03 AM

I use restclient inside emacs. You edit a .http file to add the endpoints and you can quickly execute them.

by skydhash

4/1/2026 at 3:58:52 PM

A VS Code/Visual Studio extension for creating mind maps with nodes linked to code called Code Mind Map.

by kentich

4/1/2026 at 11:29:15 PM

cat some-file | pbcopy

Copies it to your clipboard on osx. I use this a lot.

by linesofcode

4/1/2026 at 11:56:07 PM

on linux:

alias pbcopy='xclip -selection clipboard'

alias pbpaste='xclip -selection clipboard -o'

by vlod

4/1/2026 at 4:17:03 PM

Tilix + shell scripts to create a Tilix session, open windows inside Tilix and run commands, so that I can immediately create a session to debug say Linux kernel development -- 3 windows, one for gdb, one for compiling and running, and one for minicom.

I'm sure Tmux can do it, but I really hate the Ctrl+B thing. Alt + Arrow keys are way more intuitive.

by markus_zhang

4/1/2026 at 3:36:56 PM

gitk and git gui

by rep_movsd

4/2/2026 at 8:10:02 AM

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by microbuilderco

4/2/2026 at 1:02:33 AM

[dead]

by stockyarddev

4/2/2026 at 3:02:41 AM

[dead]

by weiyong1024

4/1/2026 at 7:10:47 PM

[dead]

by HawkApps

4/2/2026 at 8:10:15 AM

[dead]

by microbuilderco

4/1/2026 at 8:48:34 PM

[dead]

by gbibas