Part I: So much more than a Riki ulti
I’m a self-described obsessive. I care about efficiency, perhaps a little too much. Perhaps it’s just the Asian in me, but when I have a few spare cycles, I like to think back on almost everything I do and discover where and how I could have improved. One of the areas I tend to obsess over a lot is the tools I use, particularily in relation to my day job.
Let’s start at the very beginning
Text Editor
Everyone needs a solid text editor. While some people swear by Vi, I like the flexibility of Sublime Text. Written in Python and platform-agnostic, Sublime Text delivers the basic requirements in a text editor in spades: Fast, Solid when writing code, Strong Package Control, Extensible UI, and Syntax highlighting.
I still remember how I discovered Sublime Text: it was second term in my first year in university when I was auditing a class that I had an interest in. The professor was doing some code sample on the board. The person in front of me was typing on this black screen with bright letters while I was still using vim, badly. He finished the task minutes in front of me, I asked him what that IDE was, and I’ve been using it ever since. It’s been almost a decade, and since then a few new players have entered the race, most notably Microsoft’s VSCode. I still stick with ST because it's good I’m too lazy to move off of it.
Terminal
I used to be a default Terminal.app and bash adherent, but I now swear by iTerm 2 and zsh. Oh My Zsh had a profound impact in converting me. As to why Zsh over bash? It’s more extensible, includes Floating-point support, and has support for hash data structures.
Text Expander
If there is one tool that I simply can’t recommend enough, it’s Text Expander. As much as I dislike Subscription based services, Text Expander has become an indespensible tool in my workflow.
Alfred launcher
I love Alfred. Perhaps it is because I wanted too much to live out the Batman fantasy, but Alfred is a truly amazing app, a tireless launcher that automates many of the mundane tasks I encounter in my workflow. Since I got my new mac, I’ve called on this tireless aide-de-camp an average of 15 times a day. This is only going to increase, as I recently discovered the clipboard functionality. Goodbye, clippy!
Droplr
I host a lot of my items on Droplr. I love the ability to share links and files quickly and efficently. It’s gotten a lot less useful over the years, becuase the unique file URL slug keeps growing, but when I started with the service, it was only four characters long. Glorious 😇
That’s everything for Part I. In the next part I plan on introducing some of the tools I use outside my workflow, for things like events management, password management, and journaling. Stay tuned for Part II!