Cool Tools I Use Daily

There are a hand full of tools that I've been introduced to in the last year that have completly shifted the wasy I develop things. These are tools that I have personally found really cool and think other's need to know of them!

Arc

I know it catches a ton of heat... especially after TBC decided to sunset the application for Dia. Realistically, I only need so much from my browser to do and honestly, Arc speeds up my workflow. There's only so much more I honestly need from Arc, so I can't complain. Feel free to make your judgment call.

Pros: - Good-looking browser with sidebar - functional hot keys that will make you never need a cursor again(for the most part) Cons: - Resource Hog - Officially Sunset by TBC

Ghostty

Mitchell Hashimoto, the founder of HashiCorp, created Ghostty. I've been a huge fan of Terraform since getting into the cloud space, and when I heard about Ghostty, I thought I'd give it a shot.

I knew that the original terminal application on Mac catches a ton of flak, but I never personally had any issues with it. I got reassured when I started developing my own Homelab, where I would need to run commands such as btop, and the rendering on the original Mac terminal was terrible, whereas on Ghostty, everything rendered perfectly. Along with that, the performance of Ghostty compared to other terminals is also higher.

Finally, everything on Ghostty is controlled through a single config file, making it really easy to customize how you would like to use it.

A breakdown of Ghostty was posted by Theo Browne, which is what initially prompted me to try it out. I'd suggest giving it a watch!

Pros:

• High performance
• Easy Customization

Cons:

• Mac and Linux only

Raycast

This is the original Spotlight search for Mac done right. This application became so popular that Apple decided to update their proprietary Spotlight search to make it more like Raycast.

Now that I've been using Raycast, there is no going back, everything is so much easier to access in my Mac, and I actually use the spotlight search extremly functionally. Honestly speaking, how much do people use it before this app anyway, because I rarely did.

I keep my Documents directory extremly organized, and sometimes I have to go through various layers to find a particular file. With Raycast, I can do a quick global search to find the given file by searching for it. Spotlight search doesn't do this. Which was surprising.

Moreover, there are community plugins available to quickly integrate into other apps. For example, Obsidian, instead of opening up Obsidian and navigating to a particular note, I can open Spotlight search with cmd + spacebar type Obsidian, and type the note/contents of the note I'm searching for, and I can navigate it through a small viewfinder. Quickly escape and resume what I was doing.

Also, Macs up until a couple of months ago didn't have window snapping for quick window resizing. Before this feature, Raycast had already implemented it, so you can just type how you want it, and it will let you resize and relocate the window.

There is so much here that I could go on forever. Here's a quick breakdown:

• SVGL plugin: when developing, I can get SVGs copied to my clipboard
• Emojis can open with ctrl + cmd + spacebar because using the current emoji key takes like 3 seconds for some reason
• The calculator is so much stronger
• Chat GPT integration Honestly, this app probably has even more than I've used it, but these are my favourite things to do with it. Try it, and deactivate the Apple Spotlight search. I'll be surprised if you don't like it.

Pros:

• Everything mentioned above tbh

Cons:

• None 🫢

Obsidian

I've been using an iPad Pro since 2018 for notes, and for the longest time, I've always thought Apple Pencil + iPad Pro is the way to go for school, but once I transitioned to Computer Science, I've used my iPad less and less, especially for notes.

Once I realized that I'm better off actually typing out code as opposed to handwriting it on my iPad, I tried out Notion and honestly, initially, I absolutely loved it. Especially the shortcuts for Markdown with the "/" key were an amazing experience. The fact that drew me away was that additional features, such as collaboration, would be restricted and result in an additional cost, as well as the fact that the data lives on Notion's servers.

I've also become a stickler for self-hosting and owning my data wherever possible. This is another reason why I began looking for alternatives, which is when my mentor introduced me to Obsidian.

Obisidan felt like a lightweight version of Notion with a feel of VSCode, which drew me to it. Everything in Obsidian is written in explicit markdown, so you can have essentially the same feel as Notion, but it also helped me become more fluent with Markdown. Moreover, the notes are stored in a directory within your device, called a Vault, so everything is on your machine, and you can use it without the internet.

The community of users are massive, and the customizability of Obsidian is also unreal. Just like VSCode, there is a marketplace to get plugins and update themes. Similar to Ghossty, you can edit your configuration of how you want your Obsidian to look and feel so you can design it in a way that works best for you.

Finally, the mindmap is just cool...

When you link to other pages, you start to create a mind map of how all your notes are correlated and see how your notes are actually intertwined.

Pros:

• Runs on a machine
• Plethora of community plugins
• Customizable to heart's content

Cons:

• Configuration can get pretty finicky initially
• Out of the box, it only has plain markdown

Honorable Mentions

• VSCode
• KeePassXc
• Claude Code
• My Macbook (goated for developers, if your on windows jump ship or at least go linux or wsl, just give it a shot lol)