A running list of what I actually use day-to-day. Inspired by usesthis.com.

Hardware

Computers

• ThinkPad T470s — 14” matte panel, classic keyboard, fingerprint reader, runs cold and quiet on TLP. Old enough to be cheap to repair; new enough to handle everything I throw at it.
• HP Victus — heavier-lift machine for builds, video, and the occasional game.

Display & desk

• Samsung Odyssey — external display.
• Xiaomi monitor lamp — clip-on light bar over the monitor; glare-free, no desk real estate cost.
• Baseus docking station — USB-C dock that turns the T470s into a desktop with one cable.
• Baseus desktop power station — multi-port USB-C / PD hub on the desk; charges everything else from a single wall plug.

Input

• Royal Kludge RK-M75 — 75% mechanical keyboard, hot-swappable, tempest modded.
• Logitech MX Vertical — ergonomic vertical mouse; the wrist angle that killed my forearm pain.

Audio

• HiFiMan Sundara — open-back planar magnetic headphones with a balanced cable into the FiiO; the daily listening pair.
• FiiO KA13 — pocket DAC/amp for headphones.
• Blue Snowball — USB mic for calls and TTRPG sessions.

Mobile

• Xiaomi 11T — primary phone.
• Xiaomi Band 8 — fitness and sleep tracker; deliberately the dumbest wearable I could find.

Power & security

• Anker powerbank — daily-carry battery for phone and the Switch.
• YubiKeys — hardware security keys for FIDO2 logins, SSH, and PGP; one daily-carry, one in a drawer.

OS & desktop

• NixOS with flakes — declarative Linux: every package, service, and theme lives in a flake, version-controlled, and reproducible across machines.
• nh — friendlier wrapper around nixos-rebuild and friends; one command to rebuild, diff, garbage-collect, and search.
• Hyprland — Wayland compositor, dynamic tiling, launched by greetd / tuigreet (a tiny TUI login manager).
• Quickshell — the bar and widgets (battery, clock, workspaces).
• rofi — application and command launcher.
• dunst — notification daemon.
• swayidle + swaylock — idle timeout and screen lock.
• hyprpaper — wallpaper.
• grimblast — screenshots and region selects.
• brightnessctl — backlight control bound to the function keys.
• playerctl — media keys for whatever’s playing.
• PipeWire — audio server (drives ALSA, Pulse, Bluetooth, JACK clients).
• Bluetooth via bluez, bluetuith as a TUI when pairing.
• TLP — battery and thermal tuning.
• Syncthing — peer-to-peer file sync between machines, no cloud.
• rclone — on-demand OneDrive mount, vfs-cached for offline.
• fastfetch — system info banner, mainly for screenshots.
• wl-clipboard — Wayland clipboard from the shell.

Terminal

• WezTerm — terminal emulator, Catppuccin-themed, no tabs.
• Nushell — the login shell — pipelines as structured data instead of raw text.
• Starship — minimal cross-shell prompt.
• Zellij — terminal multiplexer; persistent sessions and splits.
• Atuin — searchable, sync-able shell history.
• Zoxide — cd that learns the directories I jump to.
• fzf — fuzzy finder; the universal “pick from a list” UI.
• Yazi — TUI file manager.

Common command-line tools

• ripgrep / ripgrep-all — fast grep; the -all variant searches inside PDFs, archives, and office docs.
• fd — find replacement, sane defaults.
• bat — cat with syntax highlighting and paging.
• hexyl — colored hex viewer; what I reach for instead of xxd when poking at binaries.
• lsd — ls replacement with icons and tree mode.
• bottom — top-style system monitor.
• dust — disk usage, sorted, in colour.
• procs — ps replacement.
• sd — sed replacement; readable find/replace.
• jq / jid / jnv — JSON: query, interactive query, interactive viewer.
• xh — HTTPie-style HTTP client written in Rust.
• just — project-local task runner (Makefile, but without the footguns).
• watchexec — re-run a command on file change.
• tealdeer — fast tldr client for examples.
• tokei — count lines of code.
• bandwhich — bandwidth usage by process.
• trippy — modern traceroute / mtr.
• monolith — save a webpage as a single self-contained HTML file.
• speed-cloudflare-cli — quick internet speed test from the shell, via Cloudflare’s endpoints.
• pandoc — convert between document formats.
• yt-dlp — video and audio downloader.
• ffmpeg / imagemagick / poppler — video, image, and PDF processing.
• aria2 — multi-source downloader.
• wget — for the simple cases.
• rclone — cloud storage sync (also used for the OneDrive mount above).
• restic — encrypted, deduplicated backups.
• stow — manage dotfile symlinks.
• rust-petname — generate human-readable random names for branches and machines.
• magic-wormhole — send a file between two terminals over a relay, no setup.
• PowerShell — kept around for the rare Windows interop.

Security & secrets

• age — modern file encryption with simple keys.
• minisign — signing.
• sops — encrypted secrets in repos, decrypted only at use.
• gitleaks / trufflehog — find leaked secrets in git history.
• zizmor — static analysis for GitHub Actions workflows.
• vt-cli — VirusTotal lookups from the shell.
• hashcat + John the Ripper — local password recovery on hardware I own; hashcat for GPU-bound cracking, John for the CPU-side rule and format coverage.
• RustScan — fast TCP port scanner; pipes results into nmap for the deep scan.
• Wireshark — packet capture and protocol analyzer; for the times when “it works in the browser but not in curl”.
• Ghidra — NSA’s open-source disassembler and decompiler; what I reach for to read closed-source binaries.
• KeePassXC — password manager.
• Cryptomator — encrypted vaults for cloud storage.
• VeraCrypt — full-volume encryption.
• Filen — end-to-end encrypted cloud storage; client-side keys.
• Obscura VPN — privacy-focused VPNs; two-party relay setup so even the provider can’t see traffic plus identity.
• WireGuard — the protocol underneath Obscura VPN, and the kernel module I use for plain peer-to-peer tunnels between my own machines.
• NextDNS — DNS-level ad, tracker, and malware blocking; one config that follows me across every device on the network.

Editors

• Helix for terminal edits — modal, batteries-included LSP, no plugin manager to babysit.
• Zed when I want a fast, GUI editor that stays out of the way.
• Obsidian — source of knowledge; notes are written straight into the repo’s src/content/knowledge/ folder.

Languages & language servers

System-wide LSPs and toolchains, so each editor picks them up automatically:

• Nix — nixd and nil (LSPs), nixfmt (formatter).
• Python — uv for envs and packages, ruff for lint and format, ty for type checking, prek for pre-commit hooks.
• TypeScript / JavaScript / Astro — typescript-language-server, astro-language-server, plus nodejs and pnpm.
• Markdown — markdown-oxide, an Obsidian-aware LSP for wikilinks and backlinks.
• HTML / CSS / JSON — vscode-langservers-extracted.
• TOML / YAML — taplo, yaml-language-server.
• Docker — docker-language-server, docker-compose-language-service.
• just — just-lsp for the task-runner files.
• ast-grep — structural code search and refactor across many languages.

Git & code review

• Git + git-lfs + git-annex — version control, large binaries, content-addressable annex for media I don’t want in the repo proper.
• git-branchless — stacked branches, undo, smartlog.
• lazygit — TUI for everyday git.
• GitButler — virtual branches; commit by intent rather than by branch.
• gh — GitHub CLI for PRs and issues.
• delta — diff renderer used everywhere above.

Build & data

• Astro — static-site framework powering this site; content collections, view transitions, no client framework.
• FastAPI — async Python web framework; type hints become validation, OpenAPI, and docs for free. My default for HTTP APIs.
• FastHTML — Python web framework for HTML-over-the-wire apps (HTMX under the hood); great when I want a single-file app instead of a SPA.
• Marimo — reactive Python notebook; cells re-run by dataflow, store as .py, scriptable from the CLI. Replaces Jupyter for anything I want to keep in version control.
• devenv — declarative dev shells per project, on top of Nix.
• cookiecutter + cruft — project templates and template updates.
• Docker + lazydocker — containers when I need them, with a TUI on top.
• PostgreSQL — default database for anything that outgrows SQLite or has more than one writer.
• DuckDB + SQLite — embedded SQL for ad-hoc data work.
• harlequin — TUI SQL IDE across all three.
• hurl — text-file HTTP test runner.
• bruno — GUI API client for the cases hurl can’t reach.
• Pulumi — infrastructure as code in real programming languages instead of YAML or HCL.
• Hetzner — where my VPS-grade workloads live; cheap European boxes, plain Linux, provisioned via Pulumi.
• netlify-cli — deploys this site.

Theme & fonts

• Catppuccin Macchiato everywhere — terminal, editors, GRUB, login greeter, even the TTY palette. Latte for light mode.
• JetBrainsMono Nerd Font for code and TUI chrome. Noto Sans / Serif for prose, Noto Color Emoji for the rest.

Daily software

Browser & comms

• Brave — main browser, ad-blocker on, sync off.
• Kagi — paid, ad-free search engine; results ranked for me, not for advertisers.
• speed.cloudflare.com — browser-side speed test; the web counterpart to the speed-cloudflare-cli above.
• Cloudflare Radar — internet traffic, outage, and protocol-trends dashboard; my go-to when something feels off and I want to know if it’s just me.
• Proton Mail — encrypted email; same suite for calendar and contacts.
• Signal — encrypted messaging.
• Vesktop — Discord client; the official one stays off the box.

Productivity

• Obsidian — notes; the source of truth for knowledge.
• Todoist — tasks, captures everything.
• Reclaim.ai — auto-schedules Todoist tasks against my calendar.
• YNAB — budgeting.
• Okular — PDF and document viewer; annotations and forms when I need them.
• Fileverse — encrypted, peer-to-peer docs and spreadsheets; the Google Docs / Sheets alternative I default to for shared drafts.
• Zotero — reference manager for papers and citations; pulls metadata from a DOI, exports clean BibTeX, syncs across machines.
• Calibre — ebook library and conversion.

Files

• Nautilus — graphical file manager when I want to point and click.
• PeaZip — archive GUI for the rare zip/7z/rar.
• LocalSend — AirDrop-style cross-platform file transfer over the local network, no cloud round-trip.
• czkawka — duplicate file finder.
• gallery-dl — bulk-download from gallery sites.
• nyaa — torrent search CLI.
• qBittorrent — torrent client.
• TeamViewer — remote support for family.

Media & creative

• TIDAL — lossless music streaming.
• Clementine — local music library.
• mpv — video player.
• OBS Studio — screen recording.
• REAPER — DAW.
• DaVinci Resolve — video editing.
• AniList — anime and manga tracker.
• PPSSPP — PSP emulator.

AI

• Claude Code — terminal-based coding assistant; my main LLM tool. See ai use for how that shows up on this site.
• Hermes Agent — open-source agentic LLM (Nous Research’s Hermes line) that learns.
• Ollama — local model runner for offline experiments and anything I don’t want leaving the laptop.
• Modal — serverless Python compute for the GPU jobs my laptop can’t run; pay per second, no infra to babysit.
• OpenRouter — single API gateway for switching between LLM providers without rewriting code.
• Hugging Face (and the huggingface-hub CLI) — model and dataset hub; where I pull weights and reference cards.
• arena.ai — blind side-by-side comparison of LLM responses; quick sanity check on which model is actually better for a given prompt.
• DeepWiki — auto-generated, browseable wikis for GitHub repos; faster than reading raw source when I’m new to a codebase.
• Grokipedia — xAI’s encyclopedia; useful as a second opinion against Wikipedia, with a different bias I keep in mind.
• nodepad — spatial canvas for notes that quietly classifies, links, and synthesises with an LLM in the background; AI as a side-channel rather than the centre of attention.