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

1. Cap'n Proto

   1 69 11,868 9.3 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.

2. SaaSHub

   www.saashub.com featured

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

   

3. kitty

   2 310 25,815 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/

4. doomemacs

   3 154 19,806 9.9 Emacs Lisp

   An Emacs framework for the stubborn martian hacker

   

5. libcurl

   4 325 36,523 10.0 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

6. issue-tracker

   5 134 103 0.0

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

7. harfbuzz

   6 38 4,270 9.7 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/

8. rnote

   7 47 8,567 9.1 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

9. coreutils

   8 120 4,394 9.5 C

   upstream mirror (by coreutils)

   

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