Merlin’s weekly podcast with Dan Benjamin. We talk about creativity, independence, and making things you love.
Open Thread: What's your killer app?
Merlin Mann | Aug 21 2006
The other day I was talking with someone about the novel and non-obvious ways that people use Excel in their work and home life. Gotta say, I've personally seen some pretty amazing stuff happen when people take a favorite app, get really good at it, then bend it to their will. (And Excel is perfect for this.) This tracks to Danny's Life Hack concept by which the alpha geeks were achieving lofty heights of productivity partly by mastering 1-3 "killer apps" -- then using them to solve most of their information and functional problems in fairly novel ways. So my question for you: What's your killer app? Is there one place where 80% or more of your activity takes place (by choice)? Vim? Excel? Perl? Firefox? Post-it Notes? What's yours and when did you realize you'd become a badass at using it? 106 Comments
POSTED IN:
 Probably the single app I...Submitted by mkb (not verified) on August 21, 2006 - 2:54pm.
Probably the single app I spend the most time in is GNU Screen, a free terminal-multiplexing (ie, switching) app. GNU Screen runs on most any flavor of Unix. I use it daily on MacOS and Linux, and used it heavily on Solaris at my last gig. I'm always surprised when I see Mac folk touting iTerm's tabs. If you are serious about the command line, why do you want to reach for the mouse to switch sessions? That's just silly. All heavy command line users should be running Screen, though only nutjobs like me run two or more nested Screen instances. Here's an introduction to get you started: http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/3/9/16838/14935 TextMate is a joy to use, but hasn't quite reached killer app status in my life. » POSTED IN:
|
|
| EXPLORE 43Folders | THE GOOD STUFF |
