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.