Awesome Tiny Tools

A tiny tool is software that is scoped to a particular need. It tackles a narrow set of high-value tasks and leverages that constraint to execute them well. Because it is scoped, it is not a mass-market application; rather, it meets the needs of a particular community. It is often home-grown—a free, locally-controlled, and lightweight utility. It is also customizable, accommodating individual needs that diverge from its base design.

Inspiration

Scrappy: make little apps for you and your friends
Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps
An app can be a home-cooked meal

Tools

GenAI

Tools for running generative AI models on your computer.

• LMStudio: A desktop application for easily running LLMs locally.
• Ollama: A server and command line tool for local LLMs.
• OpenWebUI: An offline GenAI interface that pairs well with Ollama.
• ComfyUI: An open source application for image and video generation.

Document processing

Tools for analyzing and searching documents.

• Semantra: A command line tool for semantic search.
• Tesseract: An open-source Optical Character Recognition (OCR) engine that extracts text from images and PDF files.
• Tabula: A tool for getting data tables out of PDF files.
• AntConc: A free, standalone desktop tool for text analysis that reveals patterns, keywords, and recurring themes in documents.
• ripgrep: An extremely fast command-line search tool that finds patterns in your files.

Web apps

Tools for publishing documents, data, and code to the web.

• Datasette: A tool for exploring, analyzing, and publishing data, turning datasets into interactive websites.
• Streamlit: An open-source Python library that turns data scripts into shareable, interactive web apps in just a few lines of code.
• Gradio: An open-source Python library designed to build web interfaces for machine learning models.
• Sphinx: A powerful documentation generator that translates a set of plain text source files into HTML.

Code and automation

Tools for managing and automating workflows.

• Make: A classic and simple automation tool that runs sequences of shell commands to build projects and manage workflows.
• pre-commit: A framework for managing and maintaining multi-language pre-commit hooks, automating code quality checks before you commit.
• uv: An extremely fast Python package installer and resolver.

Data analysis

Tools for working with datasets.

• DuckDB: An incredibly fast database for analysis that runs inside other programs, with no separate server needed.
• OpenRefine: A powerful, free tool for working with messy data: cleaning it, transforming it, and getting a high-level overview.
• csvkit: A suite of command-line tools for converting, exploring, and processing CSV files.
• jq: A command line tool for processing JSON data.

Knowledge management

Tools for organizing and annotating files and notes.

• Obsidian: A private and flexible note-taking app that works on top of a local folder of plain text files.
• Zotero: A free and open-source tool to help you collect, organize, cite, and share your research sources.
• Logseq: An open-source, privacy-first knowledge base designed for structuring your thoughts, managing tasks, and building a personal wiki.