Alfred has been the a lifesaver on macOS and I use it instead of Spotlight. Aside from the usual shenanigans like launching apps, searching etc., I have a bunch of custom integrations for updating my notes, looking up information on the internet and the like. I also use it as my default snippets manager on macOS.

Brave is my primary browser. I like the fact that I can install pretty much any chromium addon. Ideally I’d love to try something other than chromium and occasionally I do use Firefox or its derivatives but I’ve had several instances where an update to Firefox would just lose my session. Brave has been rock solid in that regard.

My primary LLM assistant is Claude. I use the Sonnet 4.5 model and occasionally use the Opus 4.5 models for anything that needs a little more thought. I also use Claude code as my primary coding assistant with all its ecosystem tools/mcp/skills/agents etc.

I use f.lux for adjusting my screen’s color temperature based on time of day to reduce eye strain and improve sleep quality. This is also cross-platform and my configuration is consistent.

I started using Ghostty when it was still in beta after moving from Alacritty and kitty. The fact that it is written in Zig was one of my primary motivators and I’ve enjoyed reading the source and learnt a thing or two about patterns in Zig.

If you need a version control system, there’s nothing better than git today! Having used several like Bitkeeper, mercurial, svn, cvs and the dreaded Perforce, git is probably the most intuitive. In fact, Linus Torvalds wrote git because he was frustrated by BitKeeper.

I can’t remember the number of times I’ve had to re-run a specific task before macOS slept on me on my work laptop. This has been a lifesaver to prevent macOS from sleeping and killing any active sessions.

I did use vim for almost 20 years and in 2023 switched to neovim primarily to migrate my configuration to the lua based system. Vim-mode is central to pretty much anything I do and one of the first things I install for any other IDE if I have to use them is the vim plugin.

Obsidian is the last app in my quest for a good local note-taking system. Having used pretty much every tool out there, the fact that Obsidian is local, stores files in plain .md files is the killer feature. It does support a lot of plugins, but I pretty much use it vanilla with a few core plugins. Pretty much everything I keep track of goes into Obsidian. I don’t obsess much with the Zettlekasten approach to note-taking with backlinks.

I use Ollama with local models from qwen and gemma for local tasks like summarization, basic organization involving data that I don’t want to share with an external LLM. Granted, context is small on these but they do get the job done reasonably well.