My Setup
Everything below is what I am using in my day-to-day, as of June 28, 2023.
For more details on this concept, I recommend looking over awesome-uses by Wes Bos.
Just a disclaimer that some of these links are referrals or affiliate links.
Devices
Editor + Terminal
- Visual Studio Code as my main driver when I’m editing for a while (i.e., project-based work). For the configuration, you can take a look at my cloudSettings gist that I keep updated via the Settings Sync extension.
- Neovim for when I want to quickly edit when I’m bouncing around in the terminal. For the configuration, you can take a look at my dotfiles for neovim.
- iTerm2 for my terminal.
- Zsh for my shell. For the configurations, you can look at my .zshrc and .zaliases files.
- Tomorrow as my colour scheme where I can get it to work.
- FiraCode for my font choice (has nice ligatures).
Desk/Workspace
Personal Gear
- Timbuk2 Spire Backpack expands and contracts to accommodate its contents. There is a protective laptop holder that fits the 15" MacBook Pro. I rarely worry about weather conditions with this backpack.
- Victorinox Swiss Army Cadet Knife is a trusty companion that I keep attached to my keychain, it has proved its usefulness time and time again.
- Doxie Go quick and easy way to digitize paper.
Applications
Productivity
- RescueTime is a nice service that allows me to better understand my mobile and laptop usage. Overall I like to see where my time is going so that I have a better grasp of where I can make improvements.
- Notion has been a great all-purpose tool that I’ve adopted. I use it through my day to record/perform many functions.
- Evernote is used to hold all my scanned documents so that I can search through them using. I share this with my wife, so she is also able to pull up documents as needed.
- TablePlus is a GUI-based multi-purpose database management tool (i.e., MySQL, SQLite, PostgreSQL, etc…). I use to use a specific GUI application for the different databases, but this bundles them all into one clean GUI.
- SourceTree is my preferred GUI tool for working with
git repositories. I personally do a lot of my work in the terminal, although I do like it for managing staging hunks of a file. - Dash is a powerful programming documentation lookup tool. It has great integrations with Alfred as well.
Utilities
- Alfred is my replacement for Spotlight. It is customizable and powerful. I have the Powerpack which allows me to use workflows.
- iStats Menu provides me with finer-grain detail over my system with respect to CPU/Memory/Network/SSD/Battery.
- Bartender cleans up my menu bar on macOS so that I only have frequently used/looked applications up.
- BetterSnapTool gives me the customizable keystrokes for moving my windows around on my desktop.
- Monosnap is a great application for quickly sharing images, videos and GIFs. It also has expressive annotation tools built in.
- 1Password has been an application that my wife and I have been using for a while. It excels at password management and secret concerns.
Communication
- Airmail and Spark are both used for my email to seperate work and personal. I like these as they both offer a unified inbox and customizable swipe actions.
- Tweetbot is a native application for Twitter and keeps me up on recent tweets, the UI is also pretty good.
- Slack is the defacto communication tool for work.
- Discord is a great application that I use for persisted chatroom conversations with my family. I also use it for voice conversations when gaming.
- Facebook Messenger is the communication tool that I use with family and friends.