Uses

Analog

• Notebooks — Field Notes and Moleskines, all kinds of them. (For Field Notes, I particularly love the National Parks series — the cover art is fantastic, and the grid lines are faint.)
• Pens — Lately I’ve been trying 0.35mm sencoo black gel ink pens, and I like the width but feel like the pen isn’t as smooth as I’d like. Before this, I used 0.5mm Pilot Precise V5 black pens for many years.

Laptop

• Operating system — macOS. I’ve generally stopped upgrading to new major versions, though, because upgrading inevitably makes my computer run slower. I used to run Linux, and before that, Windows 3.1, and before that, MS-DOS.
• Launcher — Spotlight. I used to use Alfred but realized that Spotlight basically does everything I need. Boring, I know. (I’ve tried Raycast, wasn’t my thing.)
• Editor — Neovim. I’ve been using Vim for almost thirty years now and don’t see myself moving off it anytime soon. (I used Emacs before that, but I had RSI in my wrists from it. I’ve also tried VS Code and Kakoune and Helix and Spacemacs and a handful of other editors, but Vim/Neovim works really well for me.) I use a whole bunch of plugins. Someday I need to pare it down.
• Shell — zsh, with a fairly minimal configuration (most of which goes toward my prompt). And tmux. (Though I’m thinking about trying Zellij.)
• Browser — Firefox. It’s admittedly not perfect, but it works well enough for me. I like that I can configure the browser chrome with CSS. I don’t use many extensions.
• Terminal — Kitty. I’ve also used Terminal.app, iTerm 2, and Alacritty. My terminal font for the last several years has been Go Mono.
• Window management — Hammerspoon. I use this to toggle my terminal (like Visor) and resize/place it the way I like.
• RSS reader — Feedly in the browser, though I’m probably going to build my own someday soon.
• Email — Gmail in the browser. I don’t love it, except for the keyboard shortcuts.
• Art — Figma (in the browser), Inkscape, Affinity Photo, occasionally Blender.
• Music typesetting — MuseScore. I hardly ever do this, though.

Phone

• Operating system — iOS. It’s okayish, but I feel like the past few years have been a slow slide into mediocrity and flaky bugginess.
• Browser — Safari. No real complaints, except I [cough] keep bumping into the 500 open tabs limit.
• Ebook reader — Scroll, my homegrown EPUB reader. I also occasionally read books on Libby or (with scanned PDFs) in Documents.
• RSS reader — Feedly.
• Reddit reader — Narwhal 2.
• Email — Mail (built-in).
• Calendar — Google Calendar.
• Calculator — PCalc or Soulver.

Homemade personal productivity apps

I use almost all of these every day.

• To do list — Liszt (though it no longer looks like that screenshot).
• Reading tracker — Bookshelf (ditto, and that’ll be true for the rest as well).
• Goal tracker — Momentum.
• Quick text entry — Gate on my phone and Quill on my laptop. (These let me enter text and then send it to Liszt or Leaf, primarily. Same idea as the iOS app Drafts.)
• Launcher — Saturn.
• Notes — Codex, which replaced Arc.
• Journal/log — Leaf, which replaced Vinci.
• Fiction writing — Storybook.
• Blogging — Cast.