Tools I actually use every day

The internet is full of “tools I use” posts that are basically affiliate-link farms. This isn’t that. These are the things I open every single day, verified by my shell history — and this revision exists to stress-test the blog: lists inside blockquotes, tables, fenced code in several languages, task lists, and footnotes that contain both inline code and links.¹

The honest stack (short form)

Editor: VS Code. I’ve tried Neovim three times. Each time I get the config just right, spend a week feeling productive, and then need to do something that requires fifteen keystrokes in Vim and one click in VS Code. I’ll try again next year.

Terminal: Kitty. Fast, GPU-accelerated, good font rendering. I switched from iTerm2 and the difference in latency is noticeable if you’re the kind of person who notices latency (I am, unfortunately).

Shell: zsh with a minimal ~/.zshrc. No Oh My Zsh. I used to have 200 lines of shell config. Now I have 40. Most of the 200 were solving problems created by the other 200.

Notes: Obsidian. Markdown files in a folder. No lock-in. The graph view is a toy I look at once a month. The real value is the speed of [[wikilinks]] and the daily notes feature.

Browser: Firefox. Privacy reasons, mostly. Also because Chrome’s memory usage makes my laptop sound like it’s preparing for takeoff.

Music: Spotify. I hate the algorithm but I’m too deep in the playlist ecosystem to leave. Stockholm syndrome, but for playlists.

Python env: uv for everything now. It’s fast enough that I stopped noticing environment management as a separate step. Before this: conda, then virtualenv, then poetry, then back to virtualenv. Each migration took a year of my life.

Git GUI: Lazygit. Changed my relationship with git. I stage hunks, rebase interactively, and resolve conflicts in the terminal now. Didn’t think I needed a TUI for git until I used one.

Drawing/diagrams: Excalidraw for quick sketches, Figma for anything that needs to look presentable. I draw architecture diagrams in Excalidraw and only move to Figma when someone asks “can you make it look professional?”

Everything else: I use rg instead of grep, fd instead of find, bat instead of cat, eza instead of ls. Not because the originals are bad, but because the modern rewrites have better defaults and I’m lazy.

Blockquote + nested list (reading flow)

Rule: If a tool needs a conference talk to justify itself, I’m suspicious.

Corollary: If a tool needs a second conference talk to explain the first conference talk, I’m out — unless it’s Emacs, in which case I’m out respectfully.

Daily drivers, in order of touching:

1. Terminal
2. Editor
3. Browser
4. Music player (guilty)
5. That one stray PDF reader I refuse to update

Table: “claimed benefit” vs “actual benefit”

Task list (GFM-style — if your pipeline supports it)

If this renders as checkboxes, great. If not, it still reads as bullets — that’s fine.

• Admit I will never be a Neovim influencer
• Finish migrating shell aliases to a single file
• Delete the duplicate ~/bin scripts (there are three pdf* scripts and they all hate each other)
• Write a blog post instead

Code: shell, JS, YAML

Shell — find what you actually typed last week

HISTFILE=~/.zsh_history
# macOS / Linux: adjust path; zsh uses different files sometimes
tail -n 200 "\\( HISTFILE" | awk '{print  \\)2}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head

JavaScript — one-off “which day was I productive?” joke

const days = ["mon", "tue", "wed", "thu", "fri", "sat", "sun"];
const mood = (d) => (d === "sat" || d === "sun" ? "delusional calm" : "caffeinated dread");
console.log(mood("mon"));

YAML — fake ~/.config fragment

terminal:
  font: "JetBrains Mono"
  font_size: 13
  padding: 12
  scrollback_lines: 100000  # hoarding, but make it ergonomic

Definition list (terminology I actually use)

dotfiles

The sacred texts — and the reason your laptop is slightly different from everyone else’s in ways that matter only to you.

rice

Making the desktop look good enough to post on r/unixporn, then never finishing the README.

yak shave

What happens when you open your shell config to change one alias and emerge three hours later with a new prompt theme and no memory of your original goal.

Image + caption (chair, because why not)

Chair.png — exists in assets/images/posts/; caption line is plain italic per site CSS.

Footnote with link + code (the “whole nine yards”)

Sometimes I need to remember the exact install line without Googling again:²

And sometimes I need to remember how to undo my own mess:

# Nuclear option: reset shell experiment (don't run blindly)
# cp ~/.zshrc ~/.zshrc.bak && echo '# reset' > ~/.zshrc

Final word: tools don’t save you — they reduce friction. The friction was never only technical.