One of the most most fun things about software is the seemingly endless options of software that are available for you to choose.
I spent admittedly too much time always looking for the next thing or exploring new tech & tools, but some do stay and I’d like to list those. This post is somewhat inspired by a blog post by a developer that I had recently just stumbled upon: Cam Little’s Tools.
I hope for those who are always looking for something new or better to try, that this list might help you do just that 🙂.
Editors
I used to use VSCode and I occasionally do, but there are a few things that I absolutely love about the above editors that VSCode lacks:
- Not being fully keyboard driven.
- Not a true Mac app.
- Not fun.
On the third one, let me explain. VSCode is a great editor. It’s free, it has all the extensions one could ever need. But it’s not fun. Creating your own plugins for it is not fun. The settings on it is not fun. And if I’m going to spend tons of time on an IDE, I want to use one thats fun, but that’s just me.
Neovim is really great, and when you add it together with a cool GUI like Neovide, it is really fun. I’ve been exploring the Nova IDE by Panic, and while it has a lot of bugs & quirks that irk me, I really love it’s macness. It’s fun (when it’s not buggy).
Here are my “dotfiles” for neovim, if you’re interested: link
Browser
- LibreWolf with these important plugins: Tridactyl vim keybindings and Yomichan (JP dictionary look up)
- Qutebrowser
I actually really love Qutebrowser, but it sometimes has problems with some sites & it lacks good plugin support, which I really only want for Yomichan (although there is a userscript Yomichad), so I mostly use LibreWolf.
Learning
- Anki
Productivity
- Things 3 (todo list app)
- Flow (pomodoro timer)
I’ve been trying out “Daily” time tracker app, and I kind of like it so I might stick with it.
Misc
- Dash (offline docs)
- Swinsian (music)
On the music app: I must be one of the only people in the world who really loved iTunes. I loved many of the features (aside from the awful sync experience with the iPod) and I was really yearning for that experience I had with it. Until I recently found out about Swinsian, which is like iTunes. It’s really great.
Notable Mentions
- Sublime Merge: When I’m not flying and speeding away in Neovim, I use the Sublime Merge client.
On the topic of notes: I’ve tried a million notes app ranging from Bear to Obsidian to InkDrop and I realized that notes are not for me. So I mostly just VimWiki as a diary log, and/or an actual notebook to handwrite on. I save snippets on Dash.
That’s it for my first blog post! If you liked this and want to recommend any software to me, please feel free to shoot me an email!