Tools

This Site

This is a static website generated using Nikola. Static sites are great. I wrote a blog post about why the choice of this particular site generator a while back, but frankly any one will do and there are many to chose from. All the pieces I use are free.

My Resume

I maintain two versions of my resume, in HTML and PDF formats. It's written in hand-coded simple HTML. It's formatted the way you would format something back in 1998: just barely css; tables and colspans for layout. I use the utility wkhtmltopdf to render HTML into a PDF. This is just a wrapper around the webkit engine, and seems to work OK, but I'd switch to something more modern and distributed via brew if I could find one.

Formatting is orchestrated by good old fashioned make. I know there are much better ways to do the content and workflow these days.

Editors

vim. Still my go-to tool for writing: text, code (unless it's very complex), simple lists, meeting minutes. Lots to like about it: ubiquity, speed, easy on the fingers.

Visual Studio Code with VI keybindings. This still works well, but with every passing day I worry about it becoming bloated and enshittified.

Google Docs.

The Command Line

Ghostty. Terminal replacement. After a long-time user, I switched from iTerm2 to Ghostty as it seems just a little cleaner and more Mac-like.

Autojump. Watches what you cd to and then you can quickly jump back there. j posts takes me to my "posts" directory. Magic.

Zsh. I finally switched over to Zsh when MacOS switched the default shell to Zsh several years ago (Catalina). I've found Oh My Zsh to be a helpful way to manage themes and plugins. I expected its trick of checking for updates updating every time you open a window to be onerous, but it hasn't troubled me yet.

Mac Things

Homebrew. The missing package manager for the Mac has proven remarkably durable.

CopyClip. I've come to rely on a clipboard manager quite a bit and it's one of the things I miss most when moving to another OS. This one has always done the job for me.

Moom. I've tried a bunch of Mac things for moving windows around and this one is the best. The hotkey I've assigned is easy to type (ctrl-shift-semicolon), pushing once gets me to some nice instant macros (top, right, full screen) but the best thing is pushing twice to bring up this nice little micro-manager where I can place windows manually. Well done and works.

Alt-Tab. My key requirement is I need to quickly switch between windows with alt-tab. I prefer lots of windows to tabs, and alt-tab is hard-wired into my fingers from so many years on Windows. And the Mac has never done this right, differentiating between windows and apps (why?). Prior apps I tried for this were Witch and Hyperswitch, but it's hard to find one that's reliable.

Productivity and Apps

Gmail. Keep trying other things but keep coming back.

Google Calendar and Tasks. I use my calendar as my journal and todos too. There are much fancier systems for keeping and managing task lists but I keep coming back to the basic one.