What follows are my personal dotfiles, MacOS setup recommendations, software, and settings for general software development.
Consider which philosophy you prefer. Would you rather:
- Always find and use the best tool for the job, at the cost of potentially having to learn a lot more tools
- Find and use good multi-purpose tools, at the cost of not necessarily using the best tool for a given job
I tend to fall into the second camp, personally. Thus, the things I use and recommend to others tend to be things that are more broadly applicable and unspecialized, with exceptions which I will note.
So if you see my recommendation for something and wonder "Why not X?", it's possible X is a more specialized tool, which might excel at its specialization but incur the additional overhead of learning and interfacing with it. But if you already know X, by all means stick with it! My other personal philosophy is that the best tool for the job is the one you are already most familiar with. 🙂
- Finish README ;)
- Merge no-oh-my-zsh branch and clean up MacBook Air instance
- Decide if I want a Brewfile
- Standardize asdf installs across machines
- Catalogue VSCode extension + settings recs
- Catalogue MacOS software recs
- Maybe set up and add instructions for using stow
- Unify how you install software packages, for example with Homebrew. It can get very annoying to manage dependencies and versions if some of them are managed by Homebrew, some of them are one-off installed with special installers, some of them are manually cloned and built from the source, etc. If nothing else, try to never end up with multiple installation methods for the same software executables! They'll fight over your PATH variable and make everything more confusing than it needs to be. If your package manager supports any sort of dependency declaration file that you can check in with your personal dotfiles (e.g. Brewfile via homebrew-file or homebrew-bundle), all the better!
Editor: VS Code
Does it have the most fully-featured, rich language integration for a given language? No, of course not. But does it have an LSP and pretty good support for every language? Yes, that it does. It's highly customizable, and its extensions marketplace is frankly unrivaled and unlikely to be for a very long time. Since extensions are written with ubiquitous web technologies like JavaScript and CSS, there's a very low barrier to entry for developers who use VS Code to write and maintain them compared to other editors. Does that make VS Code slower than other editors? Yes, absolutely. But for me personally, when I probably spend just as much time outside of my editor as I spend in it, the efficiency gains I get from specific extensions likely near cancel out the efficiency cost of a slightly less performant editing experience.
Note taking: Notion
WIP.
Web browser: Arc
While I'm not convinced Arc is the be-all-end-all of web browsers, it's certainly doing some things right to make web browsing a more pleasant experience again. It's jam packed with attention to detail and lots of little things: a refreshing and fun UI, smart new tab organizational strategies, built-in ad block, built-in tab sleeping for memory management, tab auto-archiving, a global command bar, per-website "boosts", and even floating video players (including for video calls). It's Chromium-based, so it still works with all your favorite Chromium extensions, but the UI was also built with Swift for nearly native UI performance. It even has some pretty tasteful AI integration, in my opinion, including quick previews when hovering links, tab and download auto-renaming, and instant open from search.
Terminal: Warp
For years I would always "just use iTerm2". It's clear iTerm2 is a mature, tried-and-true, general-purpose replacement for the default MacOS terminal that fills in a couple of its basic missing features like split pane, search term highlighting, and terminal customizability. However, lately I’ve been trying out Warp, which brings more of a native IDE-like experience to the terminal in a way that I quite enjoy. It's not perfect (for example, it's unfortunately closed source and requires login, which I don't love), but there's a lot of active development and innovation going on there that I've never before seen in a terminal. It has things like pinning and bookmarking commands, built-in command autocomplete for a whole host of popular executables (the only downside is, it's not versioned or even aware of if you have that executable in your PATH!), ask AI to help generate a command, and command "intellisense" like in an IDE.
DBMS: TablePlus
TablePlus has been my one-stop shop for database inspection and administration for years now. I've never run into a relational database it couldn't accommodate, and it even works with many NoSQL databases. The generous free tier, which includes all functionality indefinitely just with a 2 tab and 2 window limit, is already enough for any of my side projects, and premium licenses are "buy once, use forever" as opposed to a subscription model. Its query editor has autocomplete, syntax highlighting, formatting, and favorites + history.
API client: Hoppscotch
While I previously used Insomnia for years, their product has gradually lost favor with a lot of developers due to how hard they've been pushing their premium subscriptions and degrading the experience for everyone else, including upsells littering the UI and even a nasty update in the past that wiped everyone's data locally who wasn't using their cloud syncing. That's when I found Hoppscotch, which was newer but somehow even more feature-rich. It's open source, has native support for GraphQL and realtime (websocket, SSE, MQTT) APIs, keeps your request history, supports cookies, allows filtering responses with JSONPath, and can create an entire collection from importing an OpenAPI specification.
LLM chatbot of choice: GodMode
Why use just one when you could use multiple simultaneously and check them against each other? Though it has unfortunately not seen many updates recently, this open source multi-chatbot browser is still the best option I've found for a free, robust, multi-LLM chat client. Due to its use of webviews, it's not reliant on any API, which means both 1) it doesn't break when the API changes, and 2) new functionality is available in the app as soon as its launched on the service, as opposed to having to wait for API support. There's no paywall at all, and it even has a global keyboard shortcut to easily pull it up from anywhere on your machine. My current setup uses Google Gemini (formerly Bard), Claude 3, Perplexity, ChatGPT 3.5, and Inflection Pi (which are all free) in parallel.
Color theme: ayu
Font: Dank Mono
Prompt: Starship
CLI wrapper around git that extends the git CLI with additional commands that make it
easier to work with GitHub. Everything you like about gh, except packaged together with
git as a single tool. I alias git to hub once and then never even have to remember
it's there.
Single runtime and language tool version manager with plugins for almost every language or runtime tool under the sun. Replaces nvm/n/volta for Node, rvm/rbenv for Ruby, rsvm/rustup for Rust, gvm/g for Golang, pyenv for Python, jenv/jabba for Java, and lots more like them.
Community-driven manual/help pages for popular CLI tools that focus on common operations with popular options and usage examples. Instead of having to sift through hundreds of subcommands and flags to remember how to do something basic, which is often the case with the exhaustive help docs that ship with most CLI tools, tldr offers to complement those docs with a simpler set focused on practical usage.
Open source, cross-platform password manager. Supports 2FA codes, sharing via vaults, auto-filling, secure password generation, and more.
Open source, performant, ad and content blocker with manual element blocker.
If you don't use Apple Music and have ever accidentally pressed a media control key when you didn't have other media playing, only to have Apple Music annoyingly throw itself in your face, this is the app for you. It's super lightweight: it just prevents Apple Music from opening if it ever tries to, since Apple doesn’t give you any way of disabling it natively.
The cutest, most nonintrusive system resource monitor you could ever want! A little sprite cat sits in your menu bar and runs faster when your system is hard at work. You can view CPU and memory utilization at a glance by clicking it.
Supercharged, drop-in replacement for MacOS Spotlight (cmd+space) with a huge collection of extensions, a built-in calculator with currency and date/time conversions, a clipboard history manager, a window tiling manager, an emoji picker with hotkey trigger, and more.
A better version of cmd+tab window switching that provides previews as well as treats multiple windows of the same application as distinct items in the switcher panel. Okay, I admit it, the Windows OS really did do this better than MacOS. 😛
Open source window tiling manager with snapping areas.
It's surprising how quickly your menu bar fills up with items you don't really want occupying a permanent position on your desktop. Bartender is one of very few paid apps I recommend, as it gives you full control over this space and makes it wonderfully functional. If you don't find tons of applications in your menu bar annoying, don't bother with this one. But if you're curious, they do have a 4 week trial. Then it's a one-time payment for lifetime access to that major version (which usually translates to around 5 years).
Eyedrop color picker with precision magnifier and easy color format switching.
Some people cast judgement on those who use a GUI for git. Let me start by saying, I agree with the sentiment that it’s good to have an understanding of how git works and basic command usage first, so that you aren't dependent on it to be productive and are suddenly crippled when dropped into an environment without GUIs. However, I think GUIs are the default layer through which users interact with most software for a reason. Git is a notoriously complicated system with a lot of historical baggage, footguns, and overly complicated terminology, so I don't think there is any shame in using a GUI to become more productive in that sort of environment. With GitHub desktop, you can easily undo commits, check when remote has new commits, auto-fetch and pull main when you switch to it, stage files or even individual lines from files, visually browse diffs and commit history, and more.
Chrome extension with a whole slew of tweaks and improvements for GitHub which can be independently enabled or disabled as you please. Whitespace character highlighting in diffs, auto-hiding resolved comments, avatars next to comment reactions, shows first git tag (aka release version tag) associated with a commit, uses the PR title as the default squash commit message, and literally so. much. more.
See a persistent reminder about your next meeting and join it directly from the menu bar.
Simple stopwatch and timer from menu bar. Great for timing activities, or forcing oneself to take breaks.