Uses

Inspired by Wes Bos, this page details the things I use to stay productive. Let’s dive in.

Last updated: Feburary 20, 2025

Editor & Terminal

  • My editor is Neovim.
  • I made a theme called Electron Highlighter and have spent an absurd amount of time on it. I have made this theme for a bunch of different apps, and use it pretty much everywhere that I can use a theme.
  • My font in my editor and terminal is JetBrains Mono.
  • I use Ghostty for my terminal.
  • I use fish as my shell. It’s not POSIX compliant, but I rarely need that and can always pop into zsh to run a script if necessary. Fish is fast, has really killer autocomplete suggestions, and the scripting feels a lot less archaic than zsh or bash.
  • I use a terminal prompt called Starship. It is built in Rust so it’s very fast (important for a prompt!), it has support for a ton of different shells, and customizing is done via a TOML file so it’s dead simple to make it look exactly how you want. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

I have a lot of terminal aliases and scripts to help me be more productive. Here are a few of my favorites:

  • afk starts my screensaver
  • weather gets the current weather in your area - try it out! Run curl wttr.in in your own terminal.
  • please = sudo. Stole this idea from Paul Irish, but I can’t seem to find it in his dotfiles anymore.
  • rm = trash. I installed trash-cli, so setting rm equal to trash means instead of losing something forever when I run rm, it dumps it into my trash so I can still recover it if I need to. I’ve been burned too many times.
  • gpub = git push -u origin $(git_current_branch). When you start a new branch in git, it’s super annoying to have to set the upstream origin the first time you’re pushing that branch. This alias makes it easy to publish a new branch.

Desktop Apps

I used to prefer having desktop apps for everything, but these days I try not to use too many apps, and generally prefer to use web apps for most things (because portability). Things like Notion and email that I could use an app for I just use the web app. Most of my time is spent in a browser, terminal, or Slack (I tried Slack in the browser and just couldn’t make it stick. Might give it another go sometime). Here’s the rest:

  • For my browser, I’m using Arc from The Browser Company.
  • I use 1Password for password management across all my devices, and at this point I think it’s safe to say that I couldn’t live without it. I use the Family Plan because it gives me shared folders so my wife and I can both use it for shared logins and also keep our own logins separate.
  • I use Raycast for launching apps, emoji picker, dark/light mode toggle, lorem ipsum generator, snippet manager, clipboard history, window management, and a confetti cannon (seriously). It took a lot for me to leave Alfred but Raycast is really incredible and they keep adding awesome features. brew install --cask raycast
  • Kap is the best app I’ve found for doing screen captures (for videos only - the builtin macOS screenshot utility is perfectly fine for screenshots). You can easily export them to MP4 or GIF. Super useful for showing UI changes in GitHub PRs. brew install --cask kap

Desk Setup

  • My desk is an IKEA countertop that I cut down to 84” mounted to Fully Jarvis adjustable desk frame. Unfortunately, Fully was purchased by another company and no longer sells the frame-only model.
  • I have a 32” 4K curved monitor mounted to the desk with Fully Jarvis dual adjustable monitor arms.
  • To the left of my monitor, my laptop (currently a 16” MacBook Pro) sits on a laptop stand attachment to the dual monitor arms.
  • I use a ZSA Moonlander keyboard and can’t imagine going back to a normal keyboard anymore. I have it tented quite aggressively using the ZSA Platform for ergonomics.
  • I use HyperX Cloud Alpha gaming headphones. I’m fully remote and have these on nearly all day, so comfort is super important, and they are ridiculously comfortable.
  • I use a USB microphone that I bought on Amazon. Couldn’t tell you which one. It’s nothing special, but it works significantly better than my laptop or webcam microphone.
  • I use a Logitech C920x webcam. Any standalone webcam will be a significant upgrade over the builtin webcam on your laptop. If you have suggestions here, I am all ears.
  • I use a Logitech MX Master 3 bluetooth mouse. I like that Logitech has software for mapping the different keys to Mac-specific actions that I typically use trackpad gestures for (like switching between desktops or Mission Control).
  • I have two Logitech Litra Glow lights mounted behind my monitor. My office is in the unfinished part of my basement, and the lighting is horrible for video calls. These help a lot.
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