Dev Tools

These each have their own posts:

Positron & RStudio – my IDEs
Terminal & Shell – Ghostty, zsh, and CLI tools
Neovim – a work in progress

I’m an R guy, but an aspiring user of Python and Julia.

I prefer Quarto wherever possible; Latex as a backup. Maybe someday Typst will enter the picture.

Communication & Calendar

Outlook for email and calendar.
Slack for team messaging
Zoom for video calls

A natural question is why not Apple’s default Mail and Calendar apps since using Outlook anywhere (but especially on a Mac) is heresy: the Mail app doesn’t use Command+Enter to send a message and re-mapping the keyboard shortcut in Settings is unreliable, and the Calendar app lacks Zoom integration.

Desktop Environment

Arc as my browser of choice
- Side tabs!
AeroSpace for tiling window management
- Everything in it’s place with keyboard shortcuts to navigate
Vimium browser extension for keyboard-only navigation

I aggressively edit keyboard shortcuts on my mac. I find most of the defaults unnecessary, which I disable. I heavily utilize speech-to-text and screenshots. I enable Vim motions wherever possible.

Writing & Notes

Obsidian for notes
- I’m not a full SecondBrain-Zettelkasten user, but I love the premise of markdown-based inter-linked notes, and of having complete local control of the content
Typora for markdown in a minimal editor
- This is unnecessary given my use of Positron, Neovim, and Obsidian, but it’s pretty and minimal
Zotero for tracking academic literature.
- While not perfect, it’s substantially better than a system based on sub-directories and verbose file names

Utilities

Todoist to track things that need to get done. There’s a version for every device and as backup it’s accessable from a browser
LastPass is my password manager. If you don’t have one yet, you won’t believe how much simpler and more secure authentication can be
Dropbox for storing everything that’s not on github

Don’t let their position at the bottom of this post deminish their utility. I use these hourly.