The Tools I Use - 2026

This is the second installment in a series of posts in which I go over the tools and applications that I use to manage my life and write code. A decent amount has changed over the past year and a half, so I figured this is as good a time as ever to write an update!

I'm not going to provide specific details on anything that I go over; if those details are something you're interested in, check out my dotfiles repository.

Daily Life

In this section, I will go over applications that are not necessarily related to programming, going from most to least important to my daily life.

Things

Things has been a key app in my life since 2021. I would highly recommend this app to literally anyone. It is a simple to-do app at its core, but its quality is what makes it special! Its ease-of-use allows me to sketch plans I have for the next 30 minutes, and its well thought out functionality allows me to draw out the plans I have for five years in the future.

Things has such a smooth, simple interface that using it is a reflex for me at this point. I think of it less as a to-do app and more as a catalogue of everything worth thinking about that has crossed my mind.

One of my project-specific to-do lists

Alfred

Alfred is a better spotlight search for macOS. It is the main way I move around my computer. To access all of its features, it does cost money, but the purchase was definitely worth it for me (and it's not subscription-based).

Alfred in action

Here are a few helpful features, some of which are built-in but most of which are something I programmed in:

Alfred in action using a custom script

My dotfiles have a dedicated Alfred section if you want to see all of my scripts.

Safari

A big change I made this year was switching from ungoogled-chromium to Safari. I do have a whole blog post solely dedicated ungoogled-chromium, yes. This was not due to a fault of ungoogled-chromium, nor a specific feature of Safari. Rather, this change is a consequence of a larger philosophical in how I approach configuration:

I've come to believe in the idea of getting as minimal configuration as possible. It is my opinion that being able to be productive while given the bare-minimum is a skill; moreover, it is a fun challenge. My configuration a year ago featured many of niche apps (like ungoogled-chromium), dozens of Neovim plugins, countless zsh aliases, and tons of small CLI tools. None of these things are bad, but I wanted to challenge myself and strip that all away.

Using Safari, the default web browser on macOS, certainly also follows from the "stick to defaults" mentality. In the Neovim section of this post, you can read further about how I applied this philosophy for stripping my Neovim configuration to the minimum I felt comfortable using.

I use one Safari extension: Wipr. Wipr is the best adblocker that I've come across for Safari! It does cost a few dollars though, but it is definitely worth it and does not have an annoying subscription-based monetization scheme.

Apple Mail

I switched from Thunderbird to Apple Mail for my email client, again in the name of preferring defaults. I don't like Apple Mail all that much, and although good work has been done on my email client project, it is not ready for day-to-day usage yet.

So for now, Apple Mail is good enough.

Apple Calendar

My calendar is managed through Apple's calendar app. Again, not much thought behind this other than that it is the default. It is not the most pleasant app to use, so until I make my own, I'm stuck with it.

Programming

I will now go over the programming tools I use! Not much has changed since last year, but there are a few things worth noting.

Neovim

Neovim is my go-to text editor for programming: it's configurable, fast, and most importantly, fun. My configuration, though, has gone through a lot of changes over the past few years. Continuing that trend, 2026 brough a huge change: I deleted most of my setup. Following the same philosophy as in my switch to Safari, I decided to challenge myself to use as little as possible, while still keeping my favorite keybinds, patterns, and settings, of course.

I have nearly the same functionality as before, but with a lot less. You can read my my Neovim dotfiles for specifics. It's small, so it should be easy to read and adapt for your needs!

Writing code in Neovim

Anything that I didn't think was worth using a plugin for, I implemented myself. For exmaple, I wrote my own integration with auto-formatters instead of using one of the many plugins.

zsh

The pre-installed macOS shell, zsh, has been my main shell for a while now. Although I have many gripes with POSIX shells, they always get the job done.

As I said in the last post in this series, I've stayed away from non-POSIX shells like nushell. While I think these projects are great, and I do believe that the POSIX shell standard will be overcome at some point, it is my opinion that the right abstractions, ones that strike a balance between convenience for users while also maintaining simplicty, have not been settled on.

In the next few paragraphs, I will present my argument for why some flagship features in modern shells do not align with what a shell's role is as a tool for programmers.

A common point of contention between old and new shells: do shell languages need to be good scripting languages? zsh certainly doesn't think so1, but many modern shells do. In this case, I stand on the side of zsh, for the reason that there are many very good existing scripting languages that work well with shells, such as Python. Python, with its features, popularity, robustness, and vast standard library, will always be a better programming experience than any shell langauge. Python is also installed natively on many machines.

Another thing I see a lot of new shells doing is providing better graphical interfaces, using colors, interactive terminal text, TUIs, etc. I think shells should have syntax highlighting and decent status bars, but doing too much can quickly lead to violating one of the core principles of the Unix philosophy: text programs should have simple, predictable outputs. nushell has made the intentional choice to grow past this philosophy, as builtins output typed data, not just plain text. While it is interesting to see what is possible with such a system, I think raising the level of abstraction for program input and output is not viable for practical use. Processes spawned by the OS are given unstructured input bytes, and are expected to yield unstructured output bytes. To me, shell's job is to mirror and expose this behavior, not abstract above it.

my zsh prompt

This was all a very long-winded explanation as to why I have stayed with zsh. Despite this, I support experimenting with bringing modern ideas to shells. In fact, I've written my own shell that has a WebAssembly twist! The POSIX shell standard will be replaced; we just need to find the alternative that checks all the boxes.

You can read my .zshrc for specific details about my configuration.

Ghostty

I now use Ghostty for my terminal. Not only that, but it also replaced tmux, which I never though I would do!

Here are the things I like about Ghostty:2

These factors combined make Ghostty my preferred terminal. Although there are many terminals, they all fall short in some way against the criteria above. iTerm, for example, is hard to configure and has less than ideal defaults. Another option is the default macOS terminal, but most modern programs (like Neovim) aren't very compatible with it.

the Ghostty terminal in action

Wrap Up

I hope you enjoyed this post, and got a basic understanding of how I like using my computer! I plan on continuing this series so I can document how my tools and apps change over time.

If you have any feedback, comments, or questions, feel free to submit an issue on this website's GitHub repository.

  1. zsh is a pretty unpleasant scripting language... ↩︎

  2. It's also written in Zig! ↩︎