/uses

On this page I am listing stuff I am using to get my work done, as suggested by uses.tech.

Smartphone

My smartphone is a Google Pixel 8. I am quite happy with it, because of its relatively small size, its good camera, and the fact that it is running stock Android.

Laptop

For development (and actually also everything else laptop-related) I use a MacBook Pro 16” with a M2 Pro processor. I really like the hardware, however, I think that the user experience of Apple software is subpar at best. I hope I can use my MacBook with Linux one day. AsahiLinux looks promising already, but I doubt it is a good idea to use it on a everyday basis currently. I hope at some point I will find the time to give it a try!

Browser

As a browser I use Mozilla Firefox. I really like its privacy features and also think that it is important that we have more than one browser engine. As with many other things I try to avoid using extensions as much as possible, since I feel like they might make software less stable. The only exceptions are an extension making Ecosia the default search engine, since I like the idea of saving the world a bit while doing searches on the internet, and maybe some development tools, depending on which projects I am currently working on.

Editor

I used Neovim as an editor respectively IDE for quite some time. In contrast to popular belief it supports quite a lot, including auto-completion and debugging (at least with some extensions). Maybe it takes a bit more time to set everything up the way you like it, but in my opinion it is totally worth it. My Neovim configuration is available on GitHub.

However, I made the switch to Helix. Even though it sometimes feels a bit rough around the edges it supports of the features I need out of the box, which means there is almost no need for extensions. The hardest part was re-training my muscle memory to get used to its keyboard mapping, which is quite different, but it feels like I can get things done with less keystrokes.

Terminal

Since I am programming using Helix and previously Neovim, I am spending most of my time in a terminal, which is kitty in my case. It is incredibly fast and is highly configurable. I also like that it has built-in support for tabs and window splits. This means there is no need for an additional terminal multiplexer like tmux, which did never work very well for me, especially when I wanted to copy multiple lines from the terminal. My kitty configuration is also available on GitHub. In the same folder I have some .kitty files, which I use to setup new tabs for certain situations.

The shell I am using is fish, which works pretty well out of the box. I love that it parses the man pages installed on the system and provide auto completions based on it. I am also making heavy use of its abbreviation feature. My entire fish configuration is also available on GitHub.