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Jess Lee
Jess Lee

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What is your top tool that most devs would be surprised you use regularly?

DEV is in the process of launching a podcast and we'd love for you to be involved! We're recording the episodes in advance, and this week we'd like to know:

What is your top tool that most devs would be surprised you use regularly?

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  • OR, if you don't want your voice recorded...just leave a comment here and we'll read your response aloud for you 🗣

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Thank you!

Top comments (97)

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nas5w profile image
Nick Scialli (he/him)

The URL bar to convert rich text to plain text

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cescquintero profile image
Francisco Quintero 🇨🇴

Bro. This trick is so simple and yet useful but now only use it whenever CMD + SHIFT + paste doesn't remove formatting.

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nas5w profile image
Nick Scialli (he/him)

Yeah, it’s an old habit that will die hard.

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skyandsand profile image
Chris C

Firefox also has the search bar which is one reason why I prefer it.

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mhmd_azeez profile image
Muhammad Azeez

Many times I use Windows Run for that

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seanmclem profile image
Seanmclem

Vs code has never let me down for this purpose.

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xowap profile image
Rémy 🤖

I love when people paste AWS keys in there

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madza profile image
Madza

Lol, I use Notepad for that xdd

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bizzy237 profile image
Yury

I use notepad/gedit for that. Also for writing anything longer than two sentences because the chance of expiring session is bigger than a chance of a system shut down

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lampe profile image
Micha

I'm doing that too xD

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jonesrussell profile image
Russell Jones

Ctrl-T, Ctrl-V, Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-W :)

One hand and you don't even have to take your finger off Ctrl.

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v6 profile image
🦄N B🛡

No, I suspect most of us would not be surprised.

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simonhaisz profile image
simonhaisz

Pen and paper.

  1. I never lose my work, even if the power goes out.
  2. It's 100% safe from ransom-ware
  3. GDPR compliance can be achieved with fire
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dance2die profile image
Sung M. Kim • Edited

Heard a counter arg, where 🔥 could destroy'em.

But it'd rarely ever happen.

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alexlion profile image
Alex Lion

Servers are more likely to be destroyed compared to the paper:

  • Fire
  • Water
  • Power outage
  • Hardware issue

But it'd rarely ever happen. ;)

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odddev profile image
Kai

cough cough getrocketbook.com/

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dance2die profile image
Sung M. Kim

Been a moleskine user for decades. What's different about getpocket?

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odddev profile image
Kai

Rocket Book is endlessly reusable. It transforms the "real life" notes into digital ones and then you can wipe it clean again.

youtube.com/watch?v=U9Kas8l38Kc

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manishfoodtechs profile image
manish srivastava • Edited

I use my homemade search engine... haha... what I mean, an HTML input box that creates a string for google to search from multiple sites that I love.

Saves lots of time. Try this one: manish.imfast.io . { by default articles from dev.to also get listed}

Put anything related to DevOps like ubuntu, cloud, Nginx.... etc... and see the magic.
I am using this since 2009 when I was doing my management degree. This type of homemade search engine then helped me and my friends to find a job in the recession.

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mdhesari profile image
Mohammad Fazel

Love it!!

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manishfoodtechs profile image
manish srivastava

thanks dear . also refer dev.to/manishfoodtechs/metasearch-...

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern

I use photoshop even though the designers in my life tell me I need the new hotness

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andrewbrown profile image
Andrew Brown 🇨🇦

There's something newer than photoshop?

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rad_hombre profile image
Matthew Orndoff • Edited

Everyone is using Figma for wireframing and general design. It slaps on collaboration.

Illustrator/Photoshop are probably still better for more granular stuff.

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nicolus profile image
Nicolas Bailly

For photo editing ? No.
For wireframing, designing responsive mockups and stuff like that yes. There's Adobe XD or Figma for example.

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sunitk profile image
Sunit Katkar

I'm not a designer but for quick flowchart or figures I use Windows PaintBrush.

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brunooliveira profile image
Bruno Oliveira

By far.... A huge margin..... SourceTree to manage git at work, where repos are large, multiple projects, etc.... Everyone I see uses IDEs like intellij but I can't live without the UI of SourceTree

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jeikabu profile image
jeikabu

I used SourceTree for quite awhile. Give Fork a gander, I've never looked back.

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mjcoder profile image
Mohammad Javed

I remember using SourceTree and remember nothing but the crashes.

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ryansmith profile image
Ryan Smith

Tab Wrangler browser extension (Chrome, Firefox).

I have ~6 or fewer browser tabs open at a given time.

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austinstanding profile image
Austin Standing

mermaidjs within codepen for on-the-fly diagrams.

The input is "markdown-ish" and the output is svg. I know you can change look and feel with CSS, but I haven't bothered to yet.

mermaid-js.github.io/mermaid/#/

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v6 profile image
🦄N B🛡 • Edited

That is unexpected, clever, and useful to me.

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manishfoodtechs profile image
manish srivastava

Nice Austin, really a very useful utility

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austinstanding profile image
Austin Standing

Here is a Sequence Diagram based on a true story to demonstrate how chaos can be captured quickly. Names have been changed but not forgotten 😂

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tardisgallifrey profile image
Dave

Nano. Discovered it when I started using Ubuntu. Won't give it up. Ever.

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jeikabu profile image
jeikabu

Pico/nano is training wheels for vim. Sorry, just need to throw that in. 😎

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projectescape profile image
Aniket

Crying intensifies

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bertilmuth profile image
Bertil Muth

The GitHub Desktop GUI. Yeah, yeah, you’re a lot faster on the command line. Still, I find it convenient. It provides a nice overview of the changes I‘ve made, and is just good enough for most cases.

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philipperoubert profile image
Philippe Roubert • Edited

Something I highly recommend is code linting, it's essentially a code scanner that analyses your code for bugs and other issues such as stylistic conventions.

Python Linter Image Example

For example, Python has PyLint (there are other linters available too), it's really useful. They should be available on a majority of editors and IDEs I believe. A cool thing about PyLint is that it follows the PEP8 guidelines where it kindly reminds me that my variables should be snake case instead of camel case or that I need to add a docstring to my new function. Definitely worth a look!

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codingmindfully profile image
Daragh Byrne

I work on a project where the build fails if you break the linting rules. It's awesome.

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tkdmzq profile image
TKDMzq

is there a quick fix auto applied when possible. I once had set up something like that and after adding --fix or something like that I never had to worry about cases for that project.

Aslo faling on warning in rust was a good eay to learn proper language style

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codingmindfully profile image
Daragh Byrne

yep auto fix, which works up to a point. I'd rather have it manual that completely trust the linter to fix everything though, oldschool like that :)

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charlesdlandau profile image
Charles Landau

Lucidchart. I had a colleague recommend it to me and have never looked back since. I find it far easier to explain solutions with a prop or diagram. Other good solutions (e.g. drawio) exist but I have settled on this one and I'm happy with it.

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mjcoder profile image
Mohammad Javed

+1 for Lucid Chart.

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vonheikemen profile image
Heiker

They'd be surprised if they knew I don't use a language server, just good ol' universal-ctags.

Instead of a regular snippet plugin for vim I use abbreviations. What are those? read this to find out.

Recently I started using this task runner for project specific commands. Kinda like make, but cross-platform and uses YAML.

And also, I rarely use the mouse thanks to an innecesary complicated combination of tools that includes but it's not limited to qtile, rofi, neovim and vimium-ff.

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ghost profile image
Ghost

just a few days ago I replaced Rofi, thing I would neve thought possible, is pretty awesome; the thing is that after years trying terminal emulator after term emulator, I've never found something better than XFCE4-terminal (yes I've used st, and yes I've patched it but with more tan 8 terminals open in fact eats more RAM than most and that without any goodies), I just found that XFCE4-terminal has dropdown included as an extra mode that does not affect the rest of the instances, even with it's own settings (you can even make it appear in the middle of the screen), so, new shortcut to my i3 (no, I don't use Arch) and got rid of my trusty Rofi, sorry Rofi, and now whenever I need a quick command or run something I just get the dropdown and voilá (I know there are many dropdowns but having more than 1 terminal emulator feels wrong, although I also have cool-retro-term, but is too visually awesome, it doesn't count as terminal, count as eye candy :) )

That's it, I just wanted to share my new discovery, maybe nothing new, but I really like it.

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moopet profile image
Ben Sinclair • Edited

I have had iabbr :poo: 💩 in my .vimrc for a million years. Very useful, these abbreviations :)

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iggredible profile image
Igor Irianto

As a vim user, ctags is indispensable. Wish people would use it more.

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ghost profile image
Ghost
  • pdfsplit and pdfunite to quickly, well, is self explanatory
  • html slide presentation, got rid of PPT and alike
  • restructuredText or MArkdown instead of wordprocessors
  • Git as "backup" to all my system and user settings, to migrate to a new Linux install is just cloning a few personal repos and making some soft links
  • a RaspberryPi as "git server"
  • a BeagleBone Black with Pi-hole to filter a lot of "unwanted content", nothing FB in my LAN
  • an old Android phone, like, old Android 4 old and that after I rooted it with Cyanogen, it came with Android 2, circa 2012
  • Gentoo in an old laptop with a broken screen and with an external keyboard as a main machine
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mareksamec profile image
mareksamec • Edited

On Windows:
Cygwin or Babun for a git that "just works". This way you can have even two git accounts signed in on your computer (one for work and one personal). I use native windows git for work and git in Babun for personal stuff.

On Linux:
PDF X Change editor running via Wine because linux just does not have any PDF editor/viewer that works the way I want.

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sunitk profile image
Sunit Katkar

Oh yes, Cygwin rocks.

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mjcoder profile image
Mohammad Javed

Project is discontinued for Babun, but it looks awesome.

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tmonika profile image
Monika Tiruchanur

'Meld' tool to compare two folders. By this I mean when a repo is used as a dependency in another repo, and I made changes in the folder present in node_modules, how do I make sure to not loose any of these changes and push them to the actual repo? Using this meld. I got to know this from one of my colleague some years back and I still use it.