I have been reading a few posts by others about their setups and felt inspired to write my own. I figure if someone else’s post can bring me joy, maybe mine will bring someone else joy.
There’s been a few changes in my life this year, both personal and professional, including but not limited to: getting married and becoming a manager. While the former has had no impact on my computing setup, the latter has encouraged a couple changes. I think now being almost the end of the year and a time when I am on vacation is good time for me to reflect and share what my setup looks like this year. I’ll be talking most about software but will include some of my hardware and peripherals too.
Hardware and peripherals
Computer
The main part is decided for me by work and I just finished switching from a 16” 2021 MacBook Pro 32GB RAM and M1 Pro Processor to a 2023 MacBook Pro 16” 32GB RAM with M3 Max Processor
The 2021 is now my personal laptop and what I am using to write this post on.
Monitor
My main monitor is the Apple Studio Display. In March 2022 I bit the bullet and dropped my hard-earned cash on some pure retina bliss. There was exactly one studio display shipped to my local Apple retailer for launch day and I happen to be the lucky bastard who bought it.
Is it the perfect monitor? - nope. Is it pretty awesome? - hell yeah. What I really love about the studio display is the pixel density, every letter is crisp and clear, images are vibrant and videos are fantastic. I also love not cluttering my desk with external speakers, since the built-in ones of the studio display are pretty good, and when I really want to jam out I put my headphones on anyway. I like not having a dingus that sits atop my monitor for a webcam or having cables dangle around from said dingus. I like that I can plug in my USB-C hub and basically have a KVM.
I do miss the screen real estate afforded by an ultrawide display but whenever I use one I am quickly reminded that I’ll take the trade off of Retina over real estate every day of the week.
Headphones
Over ear - Sony WH1000XM5 - You can’t beat the noise cancellation performance of these cans. The fidelity could be better I’m sure, but they do the job for my non-audiophile ears.
In Ear - AirPods Pro V1 - They work so well most of the time that I rarely need to think about pairing unpairing or anything else. Keep them charged and they just connect and go. I did have some issues and had this set fully replaced under warranty, but since then they’ve been working well.
Mouse
Logitech MX Master 3 - Mine is older and not the S model. But I have been told the S model is better as far as clicking noise goes
Keyboard
I am going to save a long story for possibly a different post. For now, I am using the Keychron K8 Pro with cherry MX brown switches. This is hopefully soon to change, as I have been having some RSI flare-ups and looking to go split keyboard.
I have also used the NuPhy Air75 V1 (Link is for the V2) mostly as a travel keyboard, but also as a swap out when I’m having a particularly bad flare up in my forearms.
Browser(s)
It pretty much comes down to Arc from The browser company. So far I have liked what these folks are trying to do - re-imagine the computing experience - since it seems like a lot of work is browser first. It makes sense to change our thinking about what a browser really is, and how we use it.
Things I have liked about Arc include:
The tab bar and more importantly the distinct pinned area where I can place web tools I use often. The unpinned tab area below is what I consider to be ephemeral space - tomorrow it’s empty and we start over. Since I do a lot of investigations, research and spelunking through logs having a button I can click that just says - bye bye tabs is so convenient as I work throughout the day.
Spaces - A place for personal stuff and one for work stuff, separation of church and state or something. Built in routing settings allow you to specify certain domains always open in certain spaces, ensuring fewer annoyances when opening work GitHub repos or LinkedIn profile links.
Little Arc - Opening a link from Slack is often a short-lived item, I need to reference something from the link (often a UUID) but I don’t need the tab living forever, this is where little arc is magic. It opens a smaller less full featured window for you to browse until you’re done with it. If you need to keep it around you can hit the keyboard shortcut or button in the top right and it will move to your currently specified space - brilliant.
Preview - Sometimes you’re surfing and you open a link just to see something quickly, maybe a link from a blog post or link to a trace from log. You came you saw and you’re done. The preview means just that - close it and your “base” tab is still there. But I wanted that tab to stick around, I hear you say? Ah, well you’re in luck another button press, and it opens in a “real” tab and goes in the sidebar.
ChatGPT Search - Got a question you know google can’t answer - CMD+T start typing and choose the ChatGPT option instead of searching in Google. Easy Peasy.
Things I don’t like:
Bookmarks - They aren’t a thing in Arc, it’s not that they don’t exist - but they’re replaced with pins. I’ve had a routine of backing up and moving around a bookmarks.html file pretty much my entire computing life…. it feels weird to live without them. That said, I don’t necessarily “miss” them in Arc, more that it feels wrong that I don’t have them.
I do use Chrome but only for web dev - I like to keep my dev browser isolated from my “real” browser.
Code Editors, IDEs and Developer Tools
How it started - PyCharm, how it’s going - Neovim. Yeah, it’s been a big year
for me. Let me start by saying my first lines of code were written in Notepad++
and I thought that was the shit. Then I learned I didn’t need to use print()
or console.log() or alert() everywhere if I used an IDE…. game changer.
When I started writing python professionally, I couldn’t believe how powerful PyCharm was and honestly it still is. I think the difference is the other tools have more or less caught up in power, but spank its ass for speed. VSCode is faster, and Neovim is faster again. I do still use PyCharm from time to time for some if it’s excellent refactoring tools, but in most cases I use VSCode as my second editor now. I say now because I started this year primarily using PyCharm as my python IDE and VSCode as my Typescript IDE. Now I’m just using Neovim as much as I can. Somewhere in the middle, I made a stop at all things being done in VSCode and I still use it for interactive debugging (but with vim keybindings). I plan to figure out interactive debugging within Neovim in the new year.
Github Copilot
Regardless of what editor I’m using, Copilot is there. Not to make me look smarter than I am as some have suggested, but type all the tedious boilerplate that comes with writing tests, or general framework code. Not perfect but still faster and saves me some keystrokes - I can use the help with (RSI).
Neovim
I have some colleagues that swear by Neovim, for the longest time I thought they were all just “that person”. Everyone has a story about that one person they worked with that was all in on vim and would love nothing more than to bend your ear for hours about how it’s really GNU/Linux and how they use Arch BTW. But then I looked at the people I work with today who still proclaim Neovim as best editor and thought I’d give it a second look. Then my colleague Dusty joined Float and I had to give it a third look as I read through his book all about LazyVim. We now have a growing community of Neovim users at work and having a community to ask questions to seems like half the battle.
I am still learning but so far very much enjoy the speed of searching, moving and editing text. When I think about modal editing - it really does make a lot of sense. After all, most of my time as a developer now is spent reading and editing, not writing new things.
Cursor
I have to be honest, I am not a great react developer. I can write a component and hooks and get around, but when it comes to having opinions about organizing the project - I leave those choices to the more seasoned frontend folks on my team. That means when I go looking for something, I often can’t easily find it - but Cursor can. It can use a lot of different pieces of your project in its prompts to look for whatever the hell that piece of code is that does that one thing and interacts with that other one…. If I knew the file, I would be faster in any other tool but that’s the beauty, now I don’t need to go bother someone to help me find it, I can ask AI and get an answer. Kinda nice.
I did try writing a little side project tool using only Cursor, if it got things wrong, I had to re-prompt to get the right outcome. I accomplished the task and it worked, but I think I would have been better off writing it by hand.
PyCharm
I already talked about this in the intro. I started writing python professionally with PyCharm. I still feel something for it, like we all do with our firsts I guess. What I use it for now is mostly refactoring big swaths of code - renaming variables, changing signatures for methods that are used in lots of places. I also use it for its universal search, if I know what a thing is roughly called I can find with PyCharm search everywhere, when I really just can’t in VSCode. That said, with fzf and Neovim, I don’t think this is a use case any longer.
Kitty Terminal
To have a good Neovim experience, one needs a good terminal. My colleague Dusty recommended Kitty, and so that’s what I switched to when I started transitioning to Neovim. Prior to that, I was an iterm2 user for as long as I have a used a Mac, as I found it to be the most like terminator from my Linux days.
The few things I know about kitty are that it uses GPU and VRAM to increase performance, it cares about performance and I can perceive the difference when using it. It also has cursor trails, which are fun when you are whipping around in Neovim. Additionally, it is keyboard centric which if you’re trying to go to as much keyboard usage as possible is handy.
DevUtils
It’s a handy toolbox for things one might need to do as a developer: Regex, Unix timestamps, UUID Generator, All kinds of formatting and serializing, converting and hash generation. Basically think of utility function and it probably does it. I got it on Black Friday sale and well worth the $20 or so I paid.
“Productivity” Tools
Todoist
My to-do list app of choice - mostly because I can see it on my phone, my calendar (see below) and it integrates with Obsidian for my daily notes. I can have different projects and set reminders.
When things are ultra simple, I might elect to just do a simple to-do list in markdown in Obsidian but if something isn’t in my face, I won’t remember to do it.
I’m on the free plan as it serves most of my needs just fine. I did pay for it previously, but I just found I wasn’t using enough of paid features to make it worthwhile. Mostly I used the location reminders. Push comes to shove, I can use Apple reminders to accomplish that if I really need it.
Fantastical
Fantastical by flexbits is my calendar tool of choice - it integrates with every service I need it to, it has natural language processing for event inputs and I can customize which calendars are visible easily and have them change at certain times of day or with certain focus modes in Apple land.
It’s expensive AF and every March when my subscription renews I find myself contemplating if I want to renew. The thing it comes down to for me is how fast I can create an event and how familiar I am with it. I could accomplish everything I need in Apple calendar but less efficiently. Now that I spend a lot of my days in meetings, it seems worth it - but I’ll probably still consider things in March.
Raycast
This could be a post unto itself, but let’s just say Raycast does a lot of heavy lifting in my computing day. It reminds me of events, lets me take ephemeral notes, launches apps, handles my window management, runs shell scripts, controls my smart home and gets me where I need to go FASSSSTT. Honestly, if it weren’t for Raycast my computing experience would now feel wrong.
Obsidian
Yet another app I could write an entire blog post about. This is my note taking app of choice if it needs to stay in computer land. I use a hybrid approach to notes and have paper and pen combined with obsidian.
I love that notes are local, markdown and I can open them with anything that can read/write markdown files. I also really enjoy the community and plug-in ecosystem. It can be overwhelming at first but now I have a folder structure that works for me and the right set of plugins to make it sing.
Utilities and Navigation
Shottr
A better screenshot experience. Take a Screenshot, open an editor, mark up the image, copy or save. The option to copy the image to my clipboard means I rarely ever save screenshots, since they just get trashed in a week or two anyway.
A very simple task focused tool that does what I need and lets me annotate screenshots before sending. Super convenient for a product team. I tossed some coin to this Witcher for making a product I use every day, making it free and making me not need to think about it.
Dropover
I have loved macOS from the very first time I used it, but one thing I have found cumbersome is the finder. Having used windows and Ubuntu before ever using a Mac, I didn’t think my expectations were high, but I guess every other OS has a better built in file explorer than macOS. Dragging and dropping feels awkward every time I try it on a Mac. No matter how embedded I am now in the ecosystem it still feels wrong. Enter Dropover.
Dropover is a little utility that creates a small window it calls a shelf when you hold a file object and jiggle the mouse, you can then place any number of files in your shelf as an intermediate place to build up a collection of files before dropping them wherever they should go. Very handy and solves my biggest issue with macOS — using a GUI to move files.
Melissa and I recently used this to split up a bunch of our wedding photos to make different albums and send them off for printing. She enjoyed it Dropover too so it gets spouse approval.
Velja
Ok we all use a bunch of apps that can open links (linear, Spotify, slack etc.) But the default behaviour most of the time is to open in your default browser. This little utility app is your air traffic controller for links. You can make custom rules for any domain or link shape you like and it will gladly invoke that app or alternate browser based on your rule. Honestly, it feels like something any OS should have built in at this point.
Bartender
It seems that every Mac app nowadays has a menu bar icon, for some reason, it may not provide much use, but it’s there. Some apps allow you to disable their menu bar item, some don’t but with bartender it disappears nicely behind a list. You can configure what is displayed, and more importantly what isn’t, very handy. It is a paid app and there are free alternatives, this one is a bit more polished.
Hidden bar is one I have used in the past that is pretty good.
Shortcat
Another app I’m using to try to combat RSI — this little utility places a bunch of symbols on the screen for you to interact with any app. Set your shortcut and stopping using the mouse, it’s that simple.
Conclusion
I hope you enjoyed reading this post and maybe find a tool or a trick to take with you in your computing journey in 2025. If you didn’t, I at least had fun making this post 😝