Ask HN: What are some excellent pieces of software written by a single person?

• Cap'n Proto

  66 11,215 9.2 C++

  Cap'n Proto serialization/RPC system - core tools and C++ library

  

Capnproto by Kenton Varda <https://capnproto.org>.

There have certainly been other contributors <https://github.com/capnproto/capnproto/blob/master/CONTRIBUT...>, but Kenton does most of the development and maintenance on his own.

There are few things I lament more than having to spin up on a new serialization / file format and it isn't using Capnproto or Protobufs or some similar invention. Capnproto has truly spoiled me in terms of how consistent and feature rich it is for what seems like a "simple" task.

• kitty

  289 22,064 9.9 Python

  Cross-platform, fast, feature-rich, GPU based terminal

TIL that my favorite terminal[1] was written by the author of Calibre.

[1]: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com featured

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

• doomemacs

  152 18,584 9.8 Emacs Lisp

  An Emacs framework for the stubborn martian hacker

  

• libcurl

  301 34,282 9.9 C

  A command line tool and library for transferring data with URL syntax, supporting DICT, FILE, FTP, FTPS, GOPHER, GOPHERS, HTTP, HTTPS, IMAP, IMAPS, LDAP, LDAPS, MQTT, POP3, POP3S, RTMP, RTMPS, RTSP, SCP, SFTP, SMB, SMBS, SMTP, SMTPS, TELNET, TFTP, WS and WSS. libcurl offers a myriad of powerful features

  

Surprised nobody mentioned https://curl.se

and it's author: https://daniel.haxx.se

• issue-tracker

  134 94 0.0

  Issue and feature requests tracker for MultiViewer for F1 (by f1multiviewer)

• harfbuzz

  33 3,606 9.8 C++

  HarfBuzz text shaping engine

  

I'm not sure if it truly fits this category, but HarfBuzz[0], maintained primarily by Behdad Esfahbod, comes to mind.

[0] https://harfbuzz.github.io/

• rnote

  46 6,071 9.5 Rust

  Sketch and take handwritten notes.

Rnote - Sketch and take handwritten notes.

Use it daily to take notes in lessons, never had any issues with it and he fixes stuff really fast compared to other similar sized projects (in my experience).

Before that i used xournal++ but rnote feels more stable/modern but lacks some features that xournal++ has

https://github.com/flxzt/rnote

• SaaSHub

  www.saashub.com featured

  SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives

  

• coreutils

  112 4,036 9.3 C

  upstream mirror (by coreutils)

  

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