My Tools
Last updated April 8, 2022
People often ask me what I use to produce the things I make, whether it’s code, videos, books, or music. This page is a list of my tools, organized by what I use them for.
I use macOS for my desktop operating system because of its fantastic accessibility features. I use iOS for mobile. I use Windows 10 through a bootable partition and in a virtual machine for testing apps.
Software Development
- iTerm 2 for my terminal emulator. I use the Bash shell.
- Homebrew for installing programming languages, command line tools, and other apps on macOS through the command-line interface.
- Vim for my text editor with my Vim configuration.
- Tmux to manage my terminal workspaces.
- Firefox for building and testing web apps. The developer tools are amazing.
- Browsersync for testing sites on mobile and slow connections.
- VirtualBox for virtualization.
- Colima for working with containers.
- Vagrant and Ansible for setting up virtual machines and cloud servers quickly.
- Hugo for static site creation.
- Ruby, Elixir, JavaScript, Sass, and Node.js for building web apps.
- Direnv to manage environment files in my shell.
- fzf for quick CLI navigation.
- bat for reading files with color, paging, and Git integration.
- Starship for managing my prompt.
- Go for making command line apps.
- Siege for testing web site performance.
- HTTPie for sending API requests.
- jq for transforming JSON.
- Blink to connect to SSH sessions from my phone and iPad.
- Screens to connect to remote desktop or VNC servers from my phone or iPad.
- Bash for my shell, with GNU versions of
sed
andawk
as needed for wide compatibility.
Image Creation / Editing
- Affinity Photo for photo manipulation
- Affinity Designer for line art (vector graphics).
- Pixelmator for album art.
- OmniGraffle for diagrams.
- ImageMagick for inspecting and converting images
- Monosnap for image capture and annotation.
- LICEcap for creating animated GIF screencasts.
Project management
- OmniFocus for tracking all tasks and due dates
- Vim-wiki for personal notes.
- Trello for managing book projects.
- Pivotal Tracker for managing software projects.
Creating Learning Materials
- Drafts for starting my ideas. Newsletter, quick ideas, anything that flies into my head starts here. I also use this to compose Twitter threads. This works seamlessly across devices.
- Vim for writing anything.
- Screenflow for creating videos and screencasts.
- Marked2 for producing PDFs and ebooks.
- Typora for producing tutorials.
- Clarify for producing highly visual tutorials with screenshots (Discontinued, but still downloadable.)
- pandoc for producing PDFs and epubs using automation.
- OmniOutliner for creating outlines.
- Deckset for creating presentations.
- Hype for creating animations.
- Epocam to use my iPhone as another camera.
- Mindnode for mapping ideas. I use this on iOS mostly.
Managing Files and Documents
- Dropbox for sharing files and syncing my shell configs across computers.
- Evernote for keeping documents long-term.
- Pocket for things I want to read later.
- Arq for backing up my Mac
- B2 for long term offsite file storage
Finance
- Numbers for tracking business expenses.
- Freshbooks for tracking freelance work and sending invoices.
- YNAB for my budget.
- Google Sheets as needed.
Music creation
- Ableton Live 10 as the center of my music creation workflow.
- Reason 11 (used as plugin).
- NI Massive, a virtual synth.
- NI Kontakt, a sampler.
- DiscoveryPro, a virtual synth that can model a Nord Lead 2 or 2X.
- D16 Phoscyon, a virtual synth that emulates a TB-303.
- Arturia V collection 7, a collection of virtual instruments including emulations of the Prophet 5, Jupiter 8, and Yamaha DX-7.
- Korg Gadget, used as plugins within Ableton.
Communication
- Discord for various communities.
- Slack for work and for communities that require it.
- IRCCloud for IRC communications.
- Signal for secure communication with family and close friends
- Zoom for meetings.
- Google Hangouts when necessary.
Productivity
- Alfred and the Powerpack.
- Soulver for quick complex math.
- Witch for task switching.
- RescueTime for tracking where time goes.
- jrnl for tracking what I’ve done today.
- Choosy for opening web links in any browser I like, not just the default.
- CleanMyMac for uninstalling and removing files and services
- Amethyst for managing my windows. Similar to xmonad.
- 1Password for managing passwords.
- Authy for 2FA codes.
- Streamdeck to launch apps and control other automations.