Developer Tools

I don’t know who needs to hear this but:
I love my developer tools.

Core

• Package Manager: Homebrew
• Terminal: Ghostty
• Code Editor: Neovim

History

• Used stock macOS Terminal.app with tmux for 10+ years.
• I tried iTerm2, Kitty, Alacritty, WesTerm but none really fit well for me.
• Constant colour issues forced me to switch from tmux to Zellij.
• I moved to using Warp for a few years, but it still had issues.
• I finally landed on Ghostty which has been great. Yes, it still has minor issues but the community is active and open.

Workflow

I use Zsh Autocomplete with fzf-tab to replace Zsh’s default completion selection menu with fzf which works really nicely.

I mostly use terminal splits and tabs for dividing up projects and tasks, and on the occasion I’ll use Neovim’s built-in terminal across multiple splits or floating windows. Otherwise, the other part of Ghostty I use a lot is its floating terminal that can be triggered from anywhere via a hotkey (as long as Ghostty is open somewhere).

💡 You can find my Neovim config here and my dotfiles here.

Supplementary

• Code Statistics: Tokei
• DNS Client: Dog
• Directory Lister: Tree
• Directory Navigator: Broot
• Directory Switcher: Zoxide
• Disk Usage: Duf
• Feed Reader: Tuifeed
• File Content Display: Bat
• File Finder: Fd
• File Lister: Exa
• File Removal: Rip
• File Space Usage: Dust
• Network Reachability: Gping
• Network Utilisation: Bandwhich
• Process Status: Procs
• Process/System Monitor: Htop †
• Shell: Zsh
• Shell Autocomplete: FZF-tab
• Shell Prompt: Starship

† I had switched to Bottom but htop is so much more flexible and configurable, and although the graphs in btm are nice, I don’t need them.

Browser

Controversial, but I had moved away from Firefox with a whole suite of security/privacy minded tools to Apple’s Safari browser.

I was using Safari’s “Tab Group” feature, which I really liked along with the following extensions…

• AdBlock One
• Dark Reader for Safari
• SimplyJSON for Safari
• Super Agent for Safari (Cookie Consent Automation)

…but ultimately the Tab Groups feature ended up being super buggy and duplicating bookmarks and groups etc and I couldn’t get the issue resolved, so I ended up back with Google Chrome.

💡 In the future I’ll likely switch over to using Ladybird.