Kostia Palchyk

Posted on Dec 10, 2019

What dated/non-mainstream tools you think deserve more attention?

#discuss #webdev

In this modern world of a new IDE, framework, programming language every year — what tools you think were neglected and are worth wider adoption?

My personal favorites:

console-based apps: vim, tmux, midnight commander
iOS Finder sucks so much that you can't even remove it from the dock panel.
A screenshot of all 3 together — all supported 🙌, not mainstream
drag-and-drop programming user interfaces
remember Delphi days?
With all these cool front-end frameworks we forgot how to drag-n-drop a button 😕
tile window managers
i3 screenshot example
Again, iOS window manager — 🤕, envy Linux users 🙂

Share yours in the comments!

Top comments (14)

Ben Lovy • Dec 10 '19 • Edited

GNU make is really really good at what it does, though I don't know that it counts as "non-mainstream" - it's everywhere.

Kostia Palchyk • Dec 10 '19

Indeed it is 🙂

I should confess that I often used it by simply copy-pasting and running installation instructions 😊

A good thing to learn more about. Thanks for sharing, Ben!

Eric Newport • Dec 11 '19

Matrix decentralized and federated IM system and its most popular client, Riot: riot.im
Mastodon decentralized and federated social media platform; a good Twitter replacement: mastodon.social
In general we need to be more skeptical of centralized services and lean harder on open, federated protocols. Also the iOS App Store is a monopoly. Apple should be required by law to permit sideloading and rooting of iOS devices.

Juan Carlos • Dec 11 '19

KDE5 has Tile window manager mode builtin.
Console-based apps still very popular.

Kostia Palchyk • Dec 11 '19

| KDE5 has Tile window manager mode builtin.

Alas, Linux is not so popular among users. While I enjoyed it on my previous laptop, I haven't had guts yet to install it on my MacBook 😨. Once I had Arch Linux with xmonad tiling manager. Was really proud to be a user of those two, though understood neither of them 🙂

| Console-based apps still very popular.

Yep, I guess, my whole point (not just about console apps):
We neglect our heritage and invent new, while old tools might have had more thought put to them than meets the eye.

I see us using visual git instruments and creating a mess in the git history. We use shiny new IDEs, while vim and emacs have been polished for literally decades. We seem to be moving towards web-based apps on mobile devices.

Not saying it's bad, it's cool. I just feel that if we didn't reinvent the wheel every now and then — we'd had better tools today. [highest drama point here]

Brian Schroer • Dec 11 '19

nimbletext.com/

Corey Alix • Dec 10 '19

Requirejs

Evan Plaice • Dec 11 '19

It'll likely be rendered obsolete by the adoption of ES modules. Especially, if/when the source maps specification lands.

Kostia Palchyk • Dec 11 '19

Any particular feature that's missing in currently-better-maintained webpack?

Mohammad Mohammadi • Dec 11 '19

GNU Emacs

Rick Buitrago • Dec 11 '19

Not enough love for Apache ant and maven. They are proven terribly useful in JVM ecosystem, but they're by no means limited to that.

Jon Randy 🎖️ • Dec 11 '19

RiotJS

Kostia Palchyk • Dec 11 '19

Nice! Git-starred it 🙂

Also, they have "Zen of Python" by Tim Peters on their front page:

Beautiful is better than ugly.
Explicit is better than implicit.
Simple is better than complex.
Complex is better than complicated.
Flat is better than nested.
[more...]

I've seen it years ago, and then forgot, worth re-reading more often!