Ask HN: What's the oldest software tool you still rely on every day?
What is it, why hasn't anything replaced it, and what would it take to retire it?
JOE [0] for editing directly in terminal (Linux, macOS)
Somebody gave me Slackware Linux [1] floppies in 1994 and schooled young me on worlds beyond MS-DOS and Windows 3.11 For Workgroups; I had accidentally discovered MS-DOS Editor [2] by being frustrated one day and typing edit into the command line (while muttering "HOW DO I EDIT A FILE?", barely understanding what a file was in the first place), so I was shown that JOE was like edit but also way better. The UI and keybindings ended up burned into muscle memory, so I just kept using it, and still do -- and there's basically no point in ever replacing it now or starting to use emacs/vi/etc instead lol
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe%27s_Own_Editor
1995 for me and Slackware but I had the tiniest advantage in having used WordStar in DOS quite a bit beforehand. JOE still remains my preferred editor as a result.
% vim --version VIM - Vi IMproved 5.8 (2001 May 31, compiled Jun 1 2001 23:17:28)
No need to retire it, because it just works..
Circuit Maker 2000, for designing descrete circuits. I've tried to move to LTSpice a number of times, but it's interface is less intuitive. CM200 has a really clean UI for design and simulation. Doesn't run as well on Windows as it used to, but still good enough
Well it's not quite a 'software tool' but where I work we still sometimes have to handle a deck of column binary punched cards.
Notational Velocity's last update was in 2011. Still works like a charm 15 years and 14 macOS releases later.
bash
Because it holds up the universe on its shoulders.
Even Apple's 40 floors of lawyers couldn't retire it.
cmd.exe is older, but ever since I started using fnm to manage node I use Powershell all the time.
Not everyday, but I still have an internal too in Classic Visual Basic 6.
what's project?
vi. Fifty years old now. It's a defacto TUI text editor on any embedded Linux system I work with and I can count on it to always be there. No replacement comes close, or has a smaller footprint in storage.
How do you define old? The oldest initial release or the last update?
Not sure exactly, but probably either Emacs or Bash.
dc