Hey, what’s up, Datablog readers? I have a couple of things cooking and felt a little “let’s blog something” itch in the meantime. So here’s the next installment of my Notes About Stuff, focused on some of my go-to MacOS applications.
One of my longtime absolute favorite applications is Alfred, an application launcher and incredible all-around multitool. I’ve been using it for over a decade and at this point it’s just wired into how I work with a Mac. I do everything with it: from finding and opening files, running applications, searching the web, and running more detailed custom workflows.
I started using the fish shell a bunch of years ago, and, like Alfred, it’s an indispensable way for me to work now. The thing that sets fish apart in such a huge way is the way its terminal history works: Entering a partial string and tapping up starts a history search through entire commands, not just from the start of a command. So if you remember a partial filename but not exactly what you did with it, you can start with that and scroll up through your history until you get to the command that operated on that file. I use this constantly. Fish also has really nice operations for writing and saving functions that I took to more naturally than writing complex functions in bash. All that plus a great plugin ecosystem for prompts and things like git integration. It’s super.
The more I use git, the more I reach for Fork. As much as I like to use magit or neogit, having a really clear GUI for git goes a long way to knowing just what’s going on in a repo, and I love having Fork for that.
Drafts is where I start a lot of small writing. I have workflows built in Drafts to post to my blog and to upload photos to my media endpoint. Drafts syncs across iOS and MacOS, so it’s easy to start on one and pick up on the other.(With recent improvements, the built-in Notes app is also really good, and does some things like cross-note linking, wiki-style! But it doesn’t have the programmatic scriptable interface that Drafts has for working with APIs and other automations.)
I use Sofa for lists of things that I want to watch, read, listen to and play. It’s a customizable, friendly and fun app.
Last but not least, another tool I use constantly is Ryan Hanson’s Rectangle Pro. Rectangle gives a spectacular amount of window control to keyboard and keyboard+mouse combinations, allowing me to save and restore window layouts and quickly adjust size and position of individual windows. Rectangle isn’t quite a true tiling window manager, which I’ve also used — such as Amethyst — but it does everything I want in a window manager and does it so, so well. (Ryan’s other apps like Charmstone and Space Capsule are great, too!)