Tools I Actually Use

There's a genre of blog post that lists tools the author uses, and it's usually aspirational — the tools they wish they used more, or the ones that photograph well. This is a list of what I actually open every day.

Terminal

Ghostty. It's fast, it renders correctly, and it gets out of the way. Before that I used iTerm2 for years. The switch took a weekend of mild adjustment and now I don't think about it, which is what you want from a terminal.

Zsh with a minimal prompt. I've tried the big frameworks (Oh My Zsh, Starship) and they're too much. A two-line prompt config and some aliases covers ninety percent of it.

Editor

Neovim. I have a reasonably small config that I've refined over a few years. I don't use it for everything — sometimes VS Code is the right tool, especially when pairing or doing heavy TypeScript work. But for writing and for quick edits, Neovim is faster than anything else I've tried.

Notes

Plain text files in a directory called notes/. No app. No sync service. I use grep to search them. The longevity of plaintext is the point — the format will be readable in thirty years.

What I Don't Use

Task managers, habit trackers, focus timers, second-brain apps. I've tried most of them. The overhead of maintaining the system usually exceeds the value it produces. A small paper notebook and a daily list is more than enough.