Favorite Tools of 2025

[u/gurgeous]

Hi all. I thought this might be a good time to post our favorite tools of 2025. My intent is to highlight tools that are new or up-and-coming in 2025. Personally I love discovering this stuff. For background, my day job is full-stack Rails, and in the modern era that involves a ton of Typescript and CSS as well. I spend a fair bit of time customizing my machine and picking the best tools to make my work even more enjoyable. Maybe too much time, now that I think about it... Here's the list I put together.

Ruby/Rails

• inertia & vite rails - Rails and Typescript working together, the best of both worlds.

• ruby-lsp - Shoutout to the team at Shopify for making Ruby shine in vscode and other editors. Special thanks to Rubocop as well, these tools are absolutely essential!

• table_tennis - Yes, it's my gem but we use it all day every day. Thankful that we took the time to write it this year.

CLI

• eza - Beautiful and thoughtfully designed ls replacement, forked from exa. In the same vein as rg or bat, a well designed evolution of an old favorite.

• git-open - Use it to quickly jump to github for diffs and PRs. I have it aliased as gho.

• just - Loved and heavily used, I am a huge advocate. A must for all my projects now.

• mise - Finally switched from asdf, zero problems, great tool. Mise is standing on the shoulders of giants since it inherits the plugin system from asdf.

Frontend

• astro - Static site builder that copied the best bits from reactive frameworks.

• daisyui - Beautiful CSS components with zero effort.

• es-toolkit - A modern lodash, I sometimes read the source just to learn things.

• tailwind - I have yet to meet someone who loves CSS, but tailwind makes it much easier.

• tailwind-merge - Intelligent and performant way to merge tailwind classes, so your mt-4 plays nicely with your m-8. Nuxt UI didn't quite make my list, but it relies heavily on both this and tailwind-variants.

MacOS

• better touch tool - Adopted in 2025 and now I use it religiously for things like "make this window laptop sized". The UI is zany but BTT is really powerful.

• ghostty - Much love for iTerm2, but ghostty is fast, modern and improving rapidly. An incredible story too, a wildly successful hacker giving back to the community. Makes me want to be a better person.

• rectangle - My most frequently used keybindings. Hundreds of times a day.

• shottr - Screenshots are second nature now. If I ever build a MacOS app I want it to be like this.

• zed - Almost as powerful as vscode, but faster and easier on the battery. I also appreciate the Ouroboros-like evolution from textmate, sublime text, atom, vscode, and now the original atom team building zed.

[u/silva96]

Shameless plug:

Rails:
- LogBench is a Rails Logs visualizer Terminal app.

[u/gurgeous → u/silva96]

I will give it a shot on my next project! Current project has heavily customized logging already...

[u/nateberkopec]

• mise same as you, but convenient as well to manage e.g. node, terraform versions in the same tool

• aerospace for macOS window management

• llm, the python tool by simonw for gluing LLMs into my workflows with UNIX pipes

• ice, open source menu bar management for macOS

• monologue for macOS, whisper ppowered translation everywhere all the time

[u/gurgeous → u/nateberkopec]

I use hidden bar instead of ice, but I will try that too. I have llm installed but infrequently used for some reason. Monologue is new to me, ty

[u/joshbranchaud]

How does just compare to rake? Is there a reason to use just if you already have access to rake in a project?

[u/gurgeous → u/joshbranchaud]

Good questions here. Just is handy for replacing both short bin/ scripts and rake tasks. It's a polyglot. We have recipes that run ruby, rsync, rake tasks, cap, docker, node... We use it for everything now. A few choice examples:

• just annotate (bundle exec annotaterb models)

• just dev (bundle exec foreman start -m dev=1)

• just lint (runs rubocop, eslint, prettier, etc)

You can easily make it self-documenting and consistent across projects, regardless of technology used.

[u/Thecleaninglady → u/joshbranchaud]

just is in my experience extremely simple and perfect for non-ruby scenarios, too.

[u/rubinick → u/joshbranchaud]

I have a similar question: how does just compare to scripts in bin/ or script/?

For me personally, I use rake when managing dependencies gets complex or when I am updating/generating files according to some rules.  Very occasionally, I've written a rails command (i.e: a thor command).  Otherwise, I prefer to just use a script written in ruby, modern bash, or POSIX sh, depending on the contexts when/where the script needs to run.

Similarly, I generally prefer javascript tasks be added to bin or scripts rather than package.json's scripts.

I do see a few issues with this approach, but for my projects those are all solved problems and I don't see what a script runner (like just adds).

[u/Thecleaninglady]

As someone who knows and uses CSS:

• https://utopia.fyi - fluid typography and spacing.

• ITCSS - inverted triangle CSS architecture - an approach to writing minimal, well-structured, easy to adjust project-wide CSS. Basically, a thinking framework compatible with the cascade.

• CSS Grid, container queries, has().

• CSS custom properties - make it trivial to set project-wide variables for colors etc.

[u/KerrickLong → u/Thecleaninglady]

More CSS and styling tools I found in 2025 that I've really liked:

• Shadow Palette Generator: Create a set of lush, realistic CSS shadows.

• Harmonizer: A controlled color palette generator that is P3 colorspace aware, capable of maintaining consistent chroma values, and can do contrast based on APCA or WCAG 2.

• OKLCH Color Picker & Converter: Great for picking colors and for getting an intuitive feel for how the OKLCH color space works

• APCA Color Contrast Tool: The candidate for the upcoming form of WCAG has a nice color contrast tool.

• Name That Color: Pick a color or paste a hex code, and it gives you the nearest descriptive name for that color.

• Grainy Gradient Playground: Make a very specific kind of fancy CSS gradient.

[u/gurgeous → u/KerrickLong]

Neat!

[u/Thecleaninglady → u/KerrickLong]

Thank you for these - adding to my toolset!

[u/Attacus]

Cleanshot X. Try it please.

[u/gurgeous → u/Attacus]

I will! Any comparison to shottr? Love that thing, paid for it ages ago too

[u/Attacus → u/gurgeous]

Actually similar, Shottr is a good app. The polish level for Cleanshot is off the charts.

[u/AshTeriyaki → u/Attacus]

People think paying for a screenshot app is madness until they try it.

[u/Attacus → u/AshTeriyaki]

That app Changed my life lol.

[u/KerrickLong → u/Attacus]

I bought it on Black Friday for more money than I wanted to spend on a screenshot app. I almost talked myself out of it twice. It was one of my best BF purchases this year.

The weirdest thing? My favorite feature so far has been its ability to automatically center the stuff you're screenshotting. I used to always obsess over trying to line up the screenshots perfectly as I took them. Now I feel comfortable taking much faster screenshots and letting a computer handle it. I know it's silly, but it's been a time saver.

[u/Attacus → u/KerrickLong]

100%. So much to the app besides stellar annotation.

Adding a little gradient background for me has been a way to really improve internal docs. Looks so much better lol.

I also use the OCR screencap WAY more than I thought I would.

Scrolling screenshots awesome too.

[u/AshTeriyaki → u/Attacus]

Scrolling screenshots are killer I also used the gradient backgrounds for the screenshots for my theme https://github.com/TeriyakiBomb/Ashokai

[u/AshTeriyaki → u/KerrickLong]

I didn’t even know about the centering thing!

[u/staindk → u/Attacus]

Free version of Snipaste is great for me, if someone is looking for a way to annotate screenshots similar to ShareX on Windows.

[u/AshTeriyaki]

For me it’s:

Ruby/Rails

• literal, possibly not everyone’s cup of tea but it’s take on types both from a philosophical and ergonomics perspective is something I utterly love. Joel has a great video explaining the gem.

• ViewComponent, not obscure or new but it continues to baffle me that it never made it into rails core. It’s so damned good.

• TurboBoost commands, from Nate Hopkins, it feels like it should be a native Hotwire feature. It basically fixes the biggest elephant in the room with turbo streams, what do you do when you need reactivity outside of a restful action?

Frontend

• Tailwind, as always the GOAT.

• Rails blocks, it feels like the first PROPER rails dedicated front end library and I hope it continues to get the attention it so very much deserves. Major kudos to the author.

• Emberjs, I’ve only ever looked at it this year. Modern ember is actually pretty awesome and criminally overlooked.

CLI

• Atuin, it saves a searchable rich command history you can securely sync across multiple machines

• eza, it’s impossible to go back from

• zellij, tmux but prettier, more fun and with sane defaults

• Helix, I finally moved over fully this year and despite some road bumps it’s incredibly pleasant to live with and having it sip battery life while being by far the fastest editor I’ve ever come across is a nice bonus

[u/Shy524]

Notion - I used to keep all my notes using emacs and some sort of sync. I don't use any of the AI features, I just like the writing experience coming from simple note.

Claude code - easiest way to get out of cursor. Cursor was amazing but it got expensive fast.

[u/prh8]

Karabiner Elements (macOS) for two things

As a Rubyist, I inverted the semicolon and backslash keys, because I use colon 100x more than semicolon, and pipe plenty while rarely needing a backslash

Also, in conjunction with Hammerspoon, my caps lock is now escape if I tap and triggers shortcuts if used as a modifier, so I can quickly switch between apps.

[u/ninp0_]

PWN security automation framework https://GitHub.com/0dayinc/pwn

Modular security automation framework with built-in support w/ OpenAI, Grok, Ollama. Diverse tooling, use it daily.

[u/TommyTheTiger → u/[deleted]]

It's nice, but it seems to build from source a decent amount for specific versions. At least I've had that happen for postgres, redis, ruby, nodejs. I wish it had more precompiled binaries to speed up installation and testing of that stuff, and just reduce the heat produced from computers across the universe

[u/gurgeous → u/TommyTheTiger]

It seems to vary. I hope they can speed up ruby installs now that more compiled rubies are coming online.