Things I use

For some reason, I do get asked quite often about the stuff I use in my day-to-day life. Well, now I have a page to link them to.

No links are affiliate; I am not endorsed by any of the mentioned companies.

Computer

I only have one machine, which I use for everything: the MacBook Pro M1 Pro, a 14″ model from 2021. I used to have a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad 2016 model, and I’m having a blast with my current one ever since I got it. It’s probably the best laptop you can get, and it’s worth the money I’ve paid for it.

Hardware

I’m fine with the Magic Keyboard and the trackpad, but when I’m at home, I use external peripherals.

My keyboard is the Keychron K8 with white backlight and Brown mechanical switches. It’s my first ever mechanical keyboard, and I can really recommend the brand to anyone who wants to try out mechanical keyboards for not too much money.

My mouse is the Logitech MX Master 3. I still use the mouse quite a lot, mostly for web browsing, image and video editing, or occasional gaming. For these tasks, it does its job very good. You don’t have to charge it too often, and the Bluetooth connection is surprisingly stable.

The monitor I use is a Samsung Smart Monitor M7. I generally dislike smart devices, but this monitor is my best buy so far. It replaces a TV for me, since I can use it to watch streaming, YouTube, and even some TV channels. It’s 4K, and the picture is fascinating. It supports USB-C image transfer, so I only have to use one cable. And the USB ports get forwarded to my laptop, too. The monitor is attached to a monitor arm, which allows positioning it in any way I like.

Everything mentioned above lives on the cheapest IKEA tabletop attached to a pair of RODULF table legs from IKEA. With a push of a button, it becomes a standing desk. I really need to do that more often…

Software

I try to only use private and/or open-source software, but it’s not always possible. I try to compromise between usability, openness, and evilness of the software I use.

I use Librewolf as my browser. Any Firefox flavour works, but LibreWolf has good defaults, no telemetry, and no Pocket. Chromium browsers lack some features I absolutely need (and are also evil).

I use Thunderbird for my emails. I wasn’t that big of a fan of it for its bulkiness and outdated design, but it gets better. It’s still the best thing one can use on macOS.

My primary code editor is Sublime Text. It’s incredibly fast, and has a very good plugin system. I kinda miss the built-in terminal emulator, and Terminus ain’t really my cup of tea. I also use JetBrains IDEs for very big projects. In the past, I have been a heavy user of VSCodium, a less evil fork of Visual Studio Code, but I never loved it. It’s heavy and it’s slow.

I use lazygit as my Git interface. It’s a TUI, and it’s the best piece of software ever made. I love it and praise it and I install it on every single computer I touch.

My terminal is iTerm2. I’ve tried kitty, WezTerm, and many others, but I like the feature set of iTerm the most. As my shell, I use Zsh with zsh4humans, but heavily changed. I think about redoing it all myself.

Phone

My daily driver is a sexy red Asus Zenfone 10. It replaced my OnePlus 7T that I started to hate after its horrible OS updates.

I also try to run open-source software on my phone as much as possible, and I think I have more apps from F-Droid, than from the Play Store. Not that easy to achieve while living in Germany, if you ask me!

On it, I use Mull as my web browser. It’s basically Firefox without proprietary blobs and with settings from Tor and arkenfox. I don’t see much difference from Firefox or Fennec, so I guess it’s a good thing.

The email client I use is K-9 Mail. I am thrilled about it being acquired by Thunderbird and I can’t wait for the two apps to get a better integration with each other.

Services

It’s very difficult to balance between good services that cost money and evil services that cost privacy, especially because I earn less money than I spend. Nevertheless, I still choose to pay for some stuff I use.

I pay for my email, and you should too. My emails live at Mailbox.org. It’s Germany-based, not too expensive and offers everyhting I need for my workflow. It’s also where I host my calendars and contacts.

I also pay for Bitwarden. I could have easily self-hosted it, but I do not want the struggle. Also, I want to support the developers of an awesome product.

My task manager of choice is TickTick, and I use a free version. I do not think it’s very private, but it has the feature set I need, and a very generous free tier. The information I keep in my task list is not too private anyways. I have tried Tasks.org in the past, but I couldn’t find a good macOS client for it.

I host my code on GitHub, with some stuff mirrored to Codeberg. It’s a mess as of now, as I was migrating from GitHub to Codeberg and am now migrating back. I love the idea of a smaller and less evil Git forge, but GitHub has some stuff I can’t give up yet, like Actions. Working with GitHub has been more fun for me as of now, and I hope it will change for the better with the development of Forgejo.