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Uses

This is everything that I use to help me with my digital life. Most apps are available cross-platform.

Computer setup


  • Pre-touchbar Macbook Pro (See how it’s setup here)
  • Logitech MX Master mouse and MX Vertical mouse
  • Microsoft Sculpt Ergonomic keyboard with Cmd(⌘) and Ctrl(^) keys swapped
  • Sony WH-XB900N Headphones

Audio setup


Productivity


Rocket for easy emojis 🚀💃💅. It’s effectively a key logger though, so I disable it when typing sensitive info like passwords or passport numbers.

Vanilla – hide icons from the Mac menu bar for free.

Kap for quick screen recording (macOS only). It’s super handy to show something to your colleagues. It exports to Webm, it’s free, open-source, and looks good. What a time to be alive.

Security


Get a password manager and never reuse passwords. It’s the best and easiest way to improve your online security.

My choice is 1Password. I heard great things about Bitwarden.

ProtonVPN to secure my Internet connection and prevent IP and DNS tracking.

Signal replaces WhatsApp and Messenger for talking to people around the world. Friends don’t let friends chat unencrypted.

Facebook Container Firefox extension 🦊. It (tries to) stop Facebook from tracking you across the web.

uBlock Origin Free, open-source extension that blocks ads and analytics trackers.

Notes, drafts, reading and writing


Notion for a lot of things. Notion is a CMS for this site, it tracks my goals and subscriptions, and much more.

Obisidian as a “second brain.” The slower Notion gets, the more I migrate stuff to Obsidian. You can see how I configure it here.

Simplenote for random notes, daily to-do lists, book notes, or when the Notion app is too slow. Sleek, intuitive interface. Super-fast cross-platform sync. Amazing native apps for Android, iOS and macOS.

Yomu EBook Reader to read ebook. It’s much faster and easier to use than Apple Books and it lets me copy text.

UI


Dark Reader Browser extension that gives every webpage a “dark mode.”

QLVideo Allows macOS to show thumbnails for file formats like Webm and MKV. Install it with brew cask install qlvideo.

Raycast For window management, clipboard management, text snippets, and more. Sol is a great open-source alternative.

Color Picker I use this trick to turn the hidden macOS color picker into its own app.

🧑‍💻 Heads-up


It gets geeky from this point on. You may want to read my articles instead.

If not, keep scrolling fellow techie.

Shell


Using the 🐠Fish shell🐠 with:

📦 Fisher as the package manager.

🤓 fnm for managing and switching between node versions. (Run fnm install --lts to install the LTS version.)

🎨 Tomorrow night bright as the colour scheme.

💤 zoxide for fuzzy navigation to recent directories.

Terminal


Believe it or not, I’m happy with the default macOS terminal. The Fish shell does everything.

iTerm2 is what people seem to like on macOS. It is now on version 3 though ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Code Editor


I code with VSCode like everyone else.

Look and feel

  • My font is Victor Mono. It’s free, has fancy cursive italics and programming ligatures.
  • I use Seti as the icon theme.

Extensions

These extensions are my bare minimum. Whenever I start writing code on a new computer, I install them. Roughly in order of importance.

  • Prettier formats my code for me.
  • Formatting Toggle lets me disable formatters. How is this not built-in?
  • Atom Keymap keeps my favourite shortcuts from the Atom era.
  • File Utils Adds some file operations which should be part of the editor by default, like duplicating files.
  • JavaScript Snippets helps me write code quicker.
  • Bracket Pair Colorizer helps me make sense of nested code.
  • HTML end tag labels shows you information about closing elements. It’s a must, honestly.
  • Markdown All in One makes writing Markdown much easier.
  • Name: Sensitive Replace. I can’t believe this isn’t on by default.
  • Live Server Preview so I don’t miss the p5.js editor.
  • Insert Date String makes it easy to insert dates for blog posts and other stuff.
  • Word Count. Official extension to show the word count of Markdown documents.
  • select-quotes Alt + Q to select anything within quotes.
  • Import cost shows how big my dependencies are.
  • Change Case. Note to self: You don’t need an extension. VSCode can change the text case to lowercase, uppercase, title case and snake case natively.
    1. Open the command palette
    2. Type “Transform” to see the list or “lower”, “upper”, “title” or “snake” 🐍.