Tool Hall of Fame (Irregular Updates)

Chinese

To do a good job, you must first sharpen your tools. This article ranks the tools I use in daily life by a mix of practicality and novelty.
The scope here includes online services, executable programs, plugins, and other user-facing tools. It does not include libraries accessed through APIs or programming languages themselves.

Maccy

A free and open-source clipboard manager for macOS. It is easy to use, stores up to 999 clipboard records, and is extremely fast. As a full-time ctrl+c ctrl+v engineer, I absolutely cannot live without it.

GitLens

A free VS Code plugin that enhances Git with a graphical interface to improve programming efficiency. Its most useful feature is showing who wrote each line of code, when they wrote it, and in which commit.

ffmpeg

A free and open-source powerhouse, the Swiss Army knife of video processing. One command is enough for transcoding, compression, or simple editing of video and audio streams. It was created by the legendary programmer Fabrice Bellard.
To borrow the official site’s wording:

Converting video and audio has never been so easy.

Because video transcoding can fully saturate CPU performance, it can also moonlight as a stress-testing tool.

Github Copilot

A paid VS Code code-generation plugin based on language models, free for students. In essence, it helps you borrow logic-similar code from GitHub by machine. Its accuracy is still limited, but it often points in the right direction, and every correct completion saves real time. Tongyi Lingma is a free alternative in China.

Immersive Translate

The Immersive Translate plugin identifies the main content area of a webpage and presents bilingual translation with minimal intrusion into the original page. It also provides an interface for calling LLMs, so with a third-party API you can get quality close to human translation at very low cost.

Logseq

A free and open-source bi-directional note-taking tool for building a second brain. Compared with commercial software, its files are stored locally in Markdown format, which gives you more control.

Warp

A modern terminal with intelligent command completion.

Stats

A free and open-source system dashboard for macOS that monitors hardware and performance metrics in real time.

PageSpeed Insight

Google’s web performance analysis tool. It does not just benchmark pages; it also gives concrete optimization advice.

Squoosh

Google’s open-source image compression and format conversion tool. It provides both a web version, which uses local compute without network upload, and a CLI version.

All images on HeThink were compressed with this tool, and the effect is substantial.

Crontab.guru

An online visualizer for crontab expressions.

Chrome + CurlConverter

In Chrome, you can right-click a network request and save it as a curl command, for example:

curl 'https://www.baidu.com/' \
  -H 'Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/avif,image/webp,image/apng,*/*;q=0.8,application/signed-exchange;v=b3;q=0.9' \
  -H 'Accept-Language: zh-CN,zh;q=0.9' \
  -H 'Cache-Control: no-cache'

Then this tool can convert it into crawler code in many languages.
For example, Python:

import requests

headers = {
    'Accept': 'text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/avif,image/webp,image/apng,*/*;q=0.8,application/signed-exchange;v=b3;q=0.9',
    'Accept-Language': 'zh-CN,zh;q=0.9',
    'Cache-Control': 'no-cache',
}

response = requests.get('https://www.baidu.com/', headers=headers)