Uses

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

Editor & Terminal

• My editor is Vim (specifically Neovim). I used VS Code with a Vim plugin for years, but recently made the jump to ditch VS Code. I'm pretty excited about a new editor currently in development called Zed and have been testing out the pre-alpha builds - it's built by some guys who worked on the Atom team and it's built entirely in Rust so it is extremely performant. They're building some great collaboration features into it as well. I've been testing the Insiders builds for a while now and I'm impressed at how well it's coming along. If it gets proper Vim support I'd consider ditching the terminal.
• My theme is Electron Highlighter - a theme I initially developed for Atom and have spent far too much time on. I've ported it to VS Code, iTerm, Neovim, and Insomnia. I use it basically everywhere I have the ability to use a custom theme.
• My font in my editor and terminal is MonoLisa. It's also the monospace font you see on this website. It's highly readable and looks excellent. If I have to stare at a font all day, it's worth paying for one I enjoy looking at. For my terminal, I used the nerd-font font patcher script to add a bunch of extra icons to it.
• I use iTerm2 for my terminal. It gives me everything I need in a terminal and it's really easy to customize the options.
• Fish is my shell. I used zsh for years (both oh-my-zsh and prezto) and fish is a much more enjoyable experience for me. The intelligent autocomplete has changed my life.
• I use a terminal prompt called Starship. It's built in Rust so it's super fast (slow prompts should be banned), 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

• Firefox is my browser. I prefer basically everything about it to any Chromium browser. brew install --cask firefox
• Kap is the best app I've found for doing screen captures. You can easily export them to MP4 or GIF. Super useful for showing UI changes in GitHub PRs.brew install --cask kap
• Insomnia is an excellent REST client, used for testing API calls that also has top notch GraphQL support. brew install --cask insomnia
• 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. brew install --cask raycast

Desk Setup

• I have one 23" HP monitor that work gave us when we went remote. It's mounted to the wall with a swivel wall mount I got on Amazon. I'm looking to upgrade to a 27" at some point.
• To the left of my monitor, my laptop (currently a 16" M1 Pro MacBook) sits on a Curve stand by TwelveSouth. It frees up desk space and is really minimal.
• I have some AudioTechnica over-ear headphones when I'm in meetings or listening to music. The model I have isn't available anymore, but this model looks to be pretty much the same thing.
• I have a Tonor USB Microphone for meetings. It's pretty affordable and gives better sound quality than the built-in laptop mic, but it's probably not good enough quality for anyone doing podcasting or recording audio tracks. If you want a mic for simple stuff like video calls while your laptop is closed, this is pretty decent.
• I use a Logitech webcam that work provided. Even a cheap webcam has far superior video quality than the built-in camera on the MacBooks.
• I use an Apple Magic Keyboard and Apple Magic Trackpad. I love the gestures on the MacBook touchpad, so I opted for the Magic Trackpad instead of a Magic Mouse, but I do hear excellent things about the mouse.
• I have this light set up behind my monitor and webcam for better lighting on video calls. I built my desk into a shallow closet in my bedroom and the lighting situation is awful. If I don't have this turned on during meetings, my face is totally dark. I'm considering switching to a nicer ring light because it can be pretty bright sometimes, but it's better than nothing.
• The desk itself is one that I custom built. When we moved in 2020, our master bedroom had a walk-in closet and a smaller closet with sliding doors. We didn't need both, and I needed an office, so I ripped out the shelves, painted the interior of the closet, and built a desk that mounts inside the walls. I used 2x4's for the frame and made a slab from a few pieces of pine that I then glued up, stained, and sealed. It's worked out really well.