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 and awk as needed for wide compatibility.

Image Creation / Editing

Project management

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

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.