Uses

Much like a colophon, it’s intriguing—and sometimes even useful—to see what other people use as they work. Hence, the /uses page convention.

Here I’ll selectively highlight some of the things I use. None of these are affiliate links.¹

Hardware

• LogicTech’s MX Mechanical keyboard easily switches between a few different devices, and is compatible with Mac, Linux, and Windows.

Software

Browsing

• Copy as Markdown is a browser extension that lets you quickly, easily make a list of all the tabs you have open and then paste that list somewhere. Copying and pasting like this makes it way easier for me to context switch, since I don’t have to worry about dredging particular pages out of my browser history. I can’t tell you how much this stress this saves me on a daily basis, as well as how much time it saves to be able to search in my files based on filepaths, urls, domains, etc.
• Firefox has been my desktop choice for faster, better, privacy-respecting-er browsing for years.
• Noir is an excellent mobile Safari add-on if you prefer browsing in dark modes.

Coding

• GitKraken provides a useful interface for interacting with Git.
• iTerm2 is a gratis terminal emulator. If you use things like Jekyll or Pandoc on a Mac, this is a great tool for doing so.
• Visual Studio Code is a gratis text editor with many, many themes and extensions. Here’s an example of each of those:
  • Daybreak is a lovely warm dark theme.
  • Dendron is a great extension for organizing & retrieving notes.

Mobile

• Toot! for Mastodon is my favorite Mastodon app by far. You can easily switch between multiple accounts, and there are options for things like displaying a neat “subway map” view of lines connecting replies to posts. The developer also has been on Mastodon for years, and seems to have a good handle on both the best, most whimsical parts of it and why it’s important to be stridently antifascist there.
• Working Copy lets you do Git-related things on your phone. So if you use Jekyll and want to be able to update things away from your computer, it’s an excellent choice!
• Zotero (iOS) is a very nice companion to the desktop app, especially if you happen to have an iPad.

Reading

• Murasaki is an EPUB reader with free and paid versions—and it presents each chapter on a single, scrollable page! In other words, it treats chapters more like web pages than books. This small interface change somehow helps me focus on reading much longer. You can also set it for horizontal scrolling, if that’s the kind of thing you prefer.
• NetNewsWire is a gratis and open source RSS reader for MacOS and iOS.
• Zotero is easily my favorite app for anything related to research, citation, and annotation. With the PDF reader built-in to version 6, it’s also become my favorite PDF reader. It’s also gratis.
  • Night for Zotero 6 is a plugin that brings a much-needed and well-designed dark theme to Zotero.

Utilities

• Bartender is a paid utility that keeps all your menu items nice and orderly.
• Bunch, a free utility, is one of Brett Terpstra’s many amazing tools. It lets you quickly automate things for MacOS. What kind of things? When I had chat shifts multiple times a week, I automated this entire bunch of actions, all just from one single click:
  1. Remember to check the shared Library email account and respond to any messages,
  2. Open one app,
  3. Open another app,
  4. Log into a web-based chat client,
  5. And keep my display from falling asleep for the next couple hours, so I’d still hear the “new chat” alert if I’d gone to grab a glass of water in the next room.
• Lungo is an inexpensive menu bar tool for MacOS that can keep your screen/computer awake. The same developer makes a ton of other tools, many of them free. This one’s definitely worth what little I paid for it, though.
• PopClip is a great paid utility that provides a bunch of small tools for text. Want to quickly sort a list? Want to know word or character count, anywhere? Want to change something from all caps to sentence case? It does all that and more!
• Rectangle is a gratis utility that lets you move your windows in MacOS using just keyboard commands. I never realized how much I’d benefit from something like this until I started using it.
• SoundSource is a paid utility that lets you easily change audio input and output on MacOS, plus add volume controls and effects. Want to send the sound from app to your headphones, the sound from another to your speakers, and also reduce the treble from a browser with jarring notifications? Yep, this will do all that, easily.

Writing

• Jekyll is a gratis, command-line tool for making static websites. Building a static website with Jekyll and GitHub Pages and Running a Collaborative Research Website and Blog with Jekyll and GitHub are a great pair of introductions to how you might use it.
• Obsidian is a gratis app for making interlinked notes in Markdown. I use it for longer-form writing, for keeping track of tasks and projects, and as a digital bullet journal with daily, weekly, etc notes. For more on my set-up, you might check out my notes on Obsidian.
• Pandoc is an amazing, gratis command line (terminal) tool for switching between document formats. You probably don’t need this… but if you do, and you don’t already know about it? Wow, this will make your day! Sustainable Authorship in Plain Text using Pandoc and Markdown provides an excellent introduction to using it.
• Zettlr is a robust, gratis, open source Markdown editor with nice design and a variety of nifty research features.

1. As much as possible, friends don’t throw friends further into the Moloch of surveillance capitalism… at least without sufficient prior warning. Thankfully, I don’t need to monetize the few folks who stumble across this page—but I also know I’ve got privileges not all of my readers share. In other words, I know your mileage might be different. ↩