Defaults in 2025
I saw Chris McLeod's post fly by and got the itch. Here's mine!
- Operating system: macOS.
- Also tried this year: Linux (Fedora) and ChromeOS.
- Notes: Obsidian.
- Also tried: Logseq at work. Great ideas. The execution just wasn't quite there for me, and the longevity and flexibility of Obsidian's mostly-basic Markdown won out.
- Journal: Obsidian.
- Also tried: Apple's Journal.app, Day One. See above re: Markdown.
- Text editor:
VSCodeNeovim. I also use Obsidian and a splash of iA Writer.- Also tried: Helix. Fun experiment, cool editor, led me back to Neovim. Also danced with my old fling, Sublime Text.
- Terminal emulator:
iTerm2Wezterm.- Also tried: Ghostty, Kitty, Alacritty, Terminal.app. Hot takes:
- Terminal.app doesn't support true color, so Neovim looks godawful in it.
- The Alacritty dev is somewhat hostile toward macOS and its users.
- The Kitty dev behaves like a dickhead.
- Wezterm has speed, a seemingly likable developer, basic built-in multiplexing, and Lua config like Neovim.
- Ghostty also seems cool; I'll keep an eye on it.
- Also tried: Ghostty, Kitty, Alacritty, Terminal.app. Hot takes:
- Color theme: Gruvbox dark, baby. 🕺
- Still hunting for my go-to light theme. Digging PaperColor but sometimes want higher contrast. Gruvbox light is fine but sometimes just a little too groovy, y'know?
- RSS:
Reeder ClassicMiniflux (host and client) and NetNewsWire (client).- Also tried: Inoreader.
- Launcher: Alfred. I love Alfred. Yes, I've tried Raycast.
- Clipboard history: Alfred.
- Snippets / text expansion: Alfred for system-wide snippets, LuaSnip in Neovim.
- Cheatsheets: Navi.
- Browser: Safari at home, Chrome at work (mandatory).
- Bookmarks: Chrome at work (see above). At home, I'm dabbling heavily:
- I've been using Buku wired up to Alfred, which has mostly been great, but I don't like syncing its sqlite database over git because the changes are inscrutable. God forbid I get a merge conflict. Just this week I wrote my own alternative that stores everything in JSON. We'll see.
- I also tried Raindrop.io and haven't decided where that's landing.
- Passwords:
1PasswordApple Passwords. - Blogging: Bear Blog.
- Email:
iCloudFastmail for my custom domain, Gmail for everything else.- I found iCloud's configuration confusing, especially when dealing with several Apple devices. Fastmail feels less squishy.
- Tasks: Things 3, dabbling in Taskwarrior.
- Also tried: Todoist for cross-platform support. Returned to Things after going back to the Mac.
- Music: Spotify.
- I'd like to move elsewhere, but we have the family plan and wife will hate it if I mess with it.
- Personal finance: YNAB.
- Also tried: Several others. I can't remember them all. I came back to YNAB. It satisfies my inner control freak the best.
- Shopping lists: Apple Reminders for easy sharing with my wife.
- News: I've been noping out of news for a while, but I'm feeling very clueless, so I signed back up for the New York Times daily email.
- Photos: Google Photos.
- Calendar: Google Calendar and some Apple Calendar.
- Chat: Apple Messages (most of my friends are normies, not nerds), Signal (with my one nerd buddy), Google Chat at work.
- Social media: Nope. I'm not on a soapbox. I just strongly dislike it.
- Coffee: Kalita Wave pourover drippers (the metal ones so I don't break them) for the wife and me, plus a standard-issue drip machine for when we're serving a number of guests.
For lots more of these, see Hemispheric Views.
Click here for my January 2025 edition.