Toolbelt

This is my hardware and software setup, along with my review of the tools I currently use.

Hardware Setup

My main laptop:

• Operating System: Mac Sonoma 14.3
• Processor: Apple M3 Max
• RAM Memory: 64GB
• Headphones: HyperX Cloud 2
• Monitor: LG 24" IPS VGA HDMI Full HD FreeSync 24MK430H-B

Software Setup

• Knowledge Base: Notion
• Code Editor: Visual Studio Code
• Tasks Management: TickTick
• Web Browser: Brave
• Raycast: Raycast

My Software Review

Knowledge Base - Notion

In the past, I’ve optimized for writing and ‘durability’ of my notes, by writing stuff in plain markdown files, which can be read by any text processor.

Nowadays, I care more about retrieving information, since I noticed that regardless of writing a lot, it was no use if I didn’t go back to those notes at all!

This comes at a cost, of course, at some point a new shiny tool will appear, and I’ll have a strong desired to start using it, which will require me to export everything I wrote in Notion, again to some markdown files, and use that, losing all the friendliness I had from Notion.

Notion makes creating pretty documents quite easy, so it’s my new go-to tool for my personal knowledge base (you know, where I write stuff I learn and all that).

Code Editor - Visual Studio Code

No surprises here, but I tried JetBrains’ editors and but they had too many issues with my project’s setup (Yarn PnP getting in the way).

Tasks Management - TickTick

I like TickTick, and I like it even more than other solutions as Todoist, Things, etc.

The problem I need to solve in my TODO app software is: keyboard shortcuts.

Nowadays I have a few apps where I can do lots of powerful stuff straight from the keyboard, and I absolutely love it. Of course it’s not everything, but lots of things, and specially the more common ones (including navigating the app!).

Neither of TickTick, Todoist, Things, have a good keyboard shortcut setup, and their command palette (if they have one at all) is not quite complete.

I totally understand it though, it’s a massive effort to maintain something like that if it wasn’t built and taken into account from the first moment, but I think this would make me go from liking it, to absolutely loving it.

Web Browser - Brave

In my opinion, Brave is the best of the chromium-based browsers, although I don’t enjoy some of the default settings, after a bit of tweaking it suits my needs perfectly.

I only advice a bit of care, as Brave Shields have broken some websites functionalities/visuals and that’s also the very reason I don’t use their ad-block.

I used Firefox and Vivaldi for a big while before getting back to Brave, I found Firefox felt more cluttered and sluggish than most chromium-based browsers, and Vivaldi failed me on some situations I don’t remember.

Raycast

Oh man, Raycast is awesome.

Personally, I use it to:

• Add custom emojis (not all tools support the :smiley-face: format, but most support the emoji character)
• Snippets, to quickly paste common pieces of text, I have one for “prevent tab from closing”, that I paste into the console tab which is some JS code to make the tab ask me before I close it, because I have a tendency to just close everything once in a while.
• Clipboard management: this one is awesome, I was looking for a clipboard tool, but then realized Raycast does an excellent job at it, and it’s keyboard-centric!

Conclusion

These are the tools that are helping me get the job done, I’ve spent a considerable amount of time to get to discover them, so if you have any recommendation for excellent software, for any purpose, then don’t hesitate to tell me!