The Gear I Use

#mygear #productivity #developertools

I was inspired by this post...

Apps, Tools, and Gear I Use

Maxence Poutord ・ Jul 23 '19

#productivity #developertools #webdev #beginners

Honestly, I figured sharing this would be a fun trend! (Use the tag #mygear.) So, here's mine...

Hardware

System76 Gazelle Pro (15 inch)
Extra monitor, so I can have code or a manuscript on one screen, and research or documentation on the other.
CODE Mechanical Keyboard, which is every bit as awesome as advertised.
Logitech M510 Wireless Computer Mouse
JVC HA-NC250 noise cancelling headphones. These things are great, and the detachable cord means they'll have a long life.
TI-89 calculator -- I LOVE this thing!

As a writer, I also have The Chicago Manual of Style, The Writer's Digest Grammar Desk Reference, and Strunk and White's Elements of Style close at hand. (I usually also keep a couple of programming reference books there.)

And yes, off to the left, that is a Palm Tungsten T. And it works. I sync it to my laptop with JPilot. As far as handheld devices go, it's delightfully useful and distraction free.

I don't know if it officially counts as hardware, but you can see my Doctor Hooves figurine just under my monitor. He usually just stands guard, but that's what I use when I need to do some rubber-duck debugging.

System

I work entirely on Ubuntu MATE. I organize my windows into separate workspaces to help minimize distractions.

Guake is my main everyday-usage terminal, which I can bring up with F12
Terminator (or occasionally cool-retro-term) for a dedicated terminal environment.
Mycroft.ai is installed on my system for timers, reminders, and checking up on things while working.
When I need a VPN, I use ProtonVPN. I also use 1.1.1.1 for my DNS.

IDE

I use Visual Studio Code for almost everything, and have it packed with a host of extensions for C++, Python, Java, HTML, CSS, RestructuredText, Markdown, and XML. That said, no matter what I'm working on, I use:

Bookmarks
Bracket Pair Colorizer
Codealike
Code Spell Checker
Comment Anchors
Contextual Duplicate
Indent-rainbow
Overtype
Peacock
Reflow Paragraph
VSCode Great Icons
Wakatime

I also tend to cycle through a half dozen or so themes depending on mood. Most recently, I use Sea Green Theme, LaserWave, and skGRTT.

Writing

I do almost all my writing in LibreOffice, although I sometimes fall back on Focuswriter or Visual Studio Code.

When I really want a distraction-free environment, I actually pull out my Royal Heritage manual typewriter.

Browser

I mainly use the Brave web browser, with...

Privacy Badger (in case I need to disable the main Brave shields)
MyWOT
Leechblock
Stylus

On occasion, I fall back on Firefox.

Productivity

DuckDuckGo is my search engine all the way!
Hexchat is my IRC client, for connecting to Freenode and OFTC.
I use Rambox to gather all my other chat service accounts into one unified place.
Despite a couple of pesky bugs, I use Evolution for my email, calendar, contacts, and to do list...
Syncing to my personal Nextcloud.
Simplenote is my favorite service for storing notes.
Calibre for managing and reading my massive library of eBooks.