I've been asked about my terminal setup, my font and theme choices for my editor and general advice on software, so I thought I'd share my entire setup below.

This is an ever changing work in progress.

Updated: 23 Jan 2020

Editor & terminal

My code editor and terminal are the bread and butter of my day work.

Desktop apps

These are the apps that I rely on to make my work, or rather working with my laptop, a little easier day to day.

  • Bartender 3 - for hiding menu bar items and keeping the visible items tidy (I have very few menu icons on display)
  • Alfred - I also use the clipboard history that's built in, perhaps more than the core Alfred features
  • 1password - I finally ponyed up for a subscription and it's definitely worth it
  • iStat Menus - using: clock, weather, battery and CPU widgets
  • Fantastical 2 - for fast/user friendly calendar event entry
  • TablePlus - for sqlite, postgres, redis and more database browsing
  • Robo 3T - (because MongoDB support isn't great in TablePlus)
  • Karabiner Elements - really powerful, things like cap-lock is re-binded to ` and shift+caps is ~
  • Goku - to supplement Karabiner Elements, I use Goku to make modifying the configuration a lot easier.
  • Moom - I've tried a few of these and Moom has the most functionality - including resizing to specific dimensions (useful for when I'm screencasting)
  • Monitor Control - control external monitor volume using my keyboard
  • Dash - code documentation, useful with the ctrl+h shortcut in VS Code
  • Backblaze - whole drive backups
  • Screenflow - for recording training videos, though I don't tend to upgrade often
  • NordVPN (IKE) - I bought a 3 year VPN license some time ago and although it hogs the CPU when my wifi is down, it's reasonable decent (and works on my phone) - I'm using the IKE variant that's available in the MacOS store (compared to the normal download) as it connects

URLs that are always open

Email aside, here's some of the web sites that I have open on a near permanent basis:

Websites I gladly pay for

…because these sites make my life a little bit easier.

  • feedbin.com - my news
  • updown.io - I monitor a number of production projects with this extremely elegant service
  • Glitch - I moved a small number of projects I had hosted on Vercel (AKA Zeit) and enabled the boosted app mode
  • 1password - it's a business account that my partner and I are connected users and being able to share password vaults is a huge win

Browser extensions

For personal browsing I use Firefox. For some JavaScript specific development I use Chrome Canary.

  • 1password
  • Disable javascript - useful for quick hit testing (though in Chrome I can open devtools and disable from there)
  • DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials - visualises the state of trackers on a site - though I've recently found that it does causes problems on a very small handful of browsers
  • Enhancer for YouTube - a new addition to my extensions, generally cleans up YouTube from shouty to more reasonable
  • Facebook container - I use Facebook exclusively for my ZX Spectrum community stuff, and this helps to keep facebook out of my business otherwise
  • m-wiki - defaults to the mobile version of wikipedia (though the Chrome version is slightly better as this one will push to my history)
  • Make Medium Readable Again - I don't really enjoy Medium so this makes it a little more tolerable
  • OctoLinker - makes links out of included files in github source code pages, such as import X from 'foo' - the foo part becomes a link to it's source
  • Pinboard WebExtension - I've tried a number of these and I prefer this one because it opens separately and doesn't loose the content when I click away
  • React Developer Tools - definitely finding the "profile" section useful these days
  • Refined Github - lots and lots of minor tweaks that makes github that little bit nicer
  • Simplify Gmail - I've no idea what what regular Gmail looks like these days - I'm a big fan of this
  • Toggl Track - used for tracking client work
  • uBlock Origin - I frequently uses this to block out large overlays that websites add or crap that's designed to be distracting

Mobile apps

I moved across to Android a long time ago after getting super frustrated with iOS, some of these apps I know are Android specific.

  • Dark Sky - hyper weather (actually fairly accurate based on experience)
  • FitNotes - absolutely essential gym (logging) app and the very best of all that I've tried
  • Todo Agenda widget - my calendars at a glance on the main screen
  • Terminus (only on mobile) - this is one of the better terminals on mobile, but I do not enjoy on desktop
  • ADV Screen Recorder - screencasting from the mobile phone - useful for bug reports too
  • iA Writer and JotterPad - for writing blog posts on the go
  • Office Lens - great for for taking photos of white boards and papers
  • Nova Launcher - for my launcher app, and I've tried a lot!
  • Snapdrop - PWA that lets me drop files between devices on the same network

Physical space: My Desk

After years of working off a kitchen table, the house we're in now has an office and I now have a desk that I can make my own.

TODO