Uses

Things I use and/or recommend.

Current status: accurate but incomplete. Last updated in 2024. Maintained since 2024.

Related: In 2021, I was interviewed by ZSA, and I talked about my setup there too. Read the interview here (local archive).

List of things I know I need to add:

RSS

See the webfeeds page for what I use and why.

Email client

Mail.app is, in some ways unfortunately, the best email application I’ve used.

It’s got real local storage, can send plain text emails when required, doesn’t require a server apart from the IMAP server, is battery efficient and performant on mobile.

Email service

Fastmail is excellent. (Sign up with my referral link; you get a discount, I get cash.)

Unfortunately, it’s hosted in Australia, which is maybe the most anti-privacy country in the western world. On the other hand, it’s email, which is maybe the least private communication system in the world.

Sharing audio between multiple computers

See deskmx: never unplug your headphones again for a solution I designed during COVID and still use today.

Synergy

I use Synergy all day every day.

Unfortunately, it has a horrible intermittent bug that causes disconnects on macOS. For some periods, it’ll happen multiple times an hour, although most of the time I go for weeks without noticing it. I am very interested in Synergy 3, Barrier, and Input Leap, but all of them are still very alpha.

(TODO: write more about my Synergy experiences)

Installable web applications

There unfortunately isn’t a good name for this: “site specific browser” was too technical to ever catch on. What I mean is the ability to install a website as an app on your computer.

I’m currently using Safari on macOS for this. It ticks the important boxes: the website has its own app icon and appears in your cmd-tab list, and it separates cookies for different sites.

That second point is a reason to avoid Chrome’s implementation. Actually, Chrome’s is nice for SSO, and so I use it for Gmail at work, but for many of the apps I use it’s convenient to keep browsing fully separated.

Sites I use this for:

I have also used and still recommend WebCatalog, which works well cross platform.

Terminal

On macOS, Terminal.app is the best combination of fast, featureful, and Mac-like.

iTerm2 is just too slow. Real syslog OGs know this: you can’t tail -f all.log on the syslog instance that receives data from 10k Linux boxes in iTerm. It will not just not be able to keep up, but it’ll be slow to quit. “You shouldn’t do that”, perhaps, but you don’t always realize in advance how fast a log file is being written to, and the fact that it impacts the rest of your system while you try to quit it is an annoying footgun. Better to work with a system that can handle more data than a human can.

The last time I tried kitty and Alacritty they opened separate icons in alt tab for each terminal window. No thanks. (Maybe they’ve improved since then.)

Terminal customization