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Productivity Tools I Use

Nick Taylor on March 29, 2022

Here is a short list of some great tools I've discovered over the past year. macOS Only Free Apps Raycast - Workflows, sni...
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Thomas Bnt ☕

Thank you for making me discover Starship 😁

I've got some errors in my WSL Ubuntu console with Nerd font, but I'll have fun getting more information and a nice terminal.

WSL Ubuntu console on my Intellij with Starship

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Dhravya

Starship is amazing! i wrote about it almost a month ago. nice to see it becoming more mainstream haha

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Nick Taylor

Geordi Laforge in a sweater saying “No problem”

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Tina Huynh

Beautiful apps! Sometimes I miss my macbook but it's been years since I switched to Windows and now I'm in love with Linux

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Nick Taylor

You should write a post about the tools you use on Linux! 😎

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Tina Huynh

That's a great idea! I'll put it down on the list 😀

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Ben Sinclair

After spending 2 minutes looking at the fig web page, I have no idea how to install it or even what it really does.

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Nick Taylor

I had the opposite experience. It’s seemed pretty clear to me that it provided autocomplete for the terminal based on the first image.

I’m sure @brendan from Fig would appreciate this feedback as they aim to make things as straightforward as possible.

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Ben Sinclair

Yeah, it provides autocomplete, but it looks like it does some sort of graphical shenanigans, yet says it's not a terminal emulator, but works with pretty much any terminal emulator. My guess is that it does something like the way you can show jpegs in terminals that support it, but who knows? Watching a gif of it in action could be showing native Cocoa stuff for all I can tell. Maybe there's a different spin of it for each OS?

There's no installer, and a lot of things that are links on the site don't go anywhere.

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Nick Taylor

It's a lightweight webview on top of your terminal from what I've understood. It's using TypeScript and I believe they've been working on a moving parts to Rust.

@blackgirlbytes did a Twitter Spaces with @brendan this past week if you want to give a listen to the recording.

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Ben Sinclair

OK, I've listened to that. I'd never heard of Twitter "spaces" either, so TIL :)

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Ben Sinclair

And ah... it's MacOS-specific at the moment, which is why nobody can download it. I'm actually really curious about this and how it'll be different from existing auto-complete shell functionality besides looking more graphical.

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Nick Taylor

Ahh, thanks for mentioning that. For some reason I thought it wasn’t macOS specific. I’ll update the post.

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Brendan Falk

Yes, macOS specific. Confusion likely came from the fact that on macOS we show a download button, on Linux/Windows we show a waitlist sign up form!

Good catch, we should make this more clear.

And thank you for recommending Fig, @nickytonline !

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Connor

Starship is a top of the line addition to any shell that it supports. Been using it for about a year and some already; makes spending lots of time in the terminal a lot more bearable since I have a mini-HUD available right above the prompt.

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Andy Piper

Useful stuff here, I'll definitely be trying Starship.

Sell me on Raycast? I'm a long-time Alfred user, keep hearing / reading comments about folks using Raycast, but since you're someone who made the switch, talk me through it?

I'm well overdue to put together a .uses myself, might get around to it sooner rather than even later...

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Nick Taylor • Edited

I was happy with Alfred and then I tried out Raycast. It did everything Alfred did that I was using and even more.

I use it for window management, it has built in converters for measurements, etc.

I know there are Alfred workflows for that, but basically I just couldn't be bothered to switch back.

Although I already paid for the Alfred PowerPack, for folks looking for a free solution for personal use, Raycast is a good option.

More on the differences here, raycast.com/faq.

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Ivana Vnucec

You unlocked a new level of productivity for us!

Few days ago I was also researching all productivity tools I know and organized them by categories - such as code writing, task management, knowledge collecting, time-tracking, keeping the focus. Then explained them. Maybe it would be helpful as well 🤞🏽

➡️ Productivity tools

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Atharva Shirdhankar

@taskade is one best and awesome productivity tool currently I m using the most🚀😃.

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Kacha

+1 to @thomasbnt 's comment, Starship is a pretty awesome find!

Thanks for the recommendations!

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Nick Taylor

A T-Rex saying Yeah!

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Asdrubal

this is perhaps the best tool there is for screenshots, app.prntscr.com/es/ you can make anotations, copy in your clipboard so you don't have to save it in your PC and paste the content anywhere.
if you are using linux/ubuntu, get flameshot, is basically the same

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Andrew Baisden

Love Starship its one of my favourites.

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kamal ganwani

nice and thanks for providing amazing tools

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Nick Taylor

Actor Zach Galifianakis giving a thumbs up in a convertible car

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HyoSung Bidol-Lee

Thank you for sharing this list. I look forward to testing out some of these tools.

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Nick Taylor

Chow Yun-fat giving a thumbs up

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Nerando Johnson

Gonna steal a few tips

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Nick Taylor

Ben Stiller in Starsky and Hutch saying Do it

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Waylon Walker

Starship is POG! I'm still on the fzf game, I've tried mcfly and it just never stuck for me.

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Nick Taylor

I’m giving mcfly a go. So far I’m enjoying it. As always, use whatever tools make you the most productive. 😎

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Liviu Lupei

I'm obviously going to mention Endtest here.
It's the fastest way to create automated tests and run them on a cross-browser cloud.

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Zachary Price

I'm curious to know more about why you switched from Alfred to Raycast?

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Nick Taylor

I answered it here.

I was happy with Alfred and then I tried out Raycast. It did everything Alfred did that I was using and even more.

I use it for window management, it has built in converters for measurements, etc.

I know there are Alfred workflows for that, but basically I just couldn't be bothered to switch back.

Although I already paid for the Alfred PowerPack, for folks looking for a free solution for personal use, Raycast is a good option.

More on the differences here, raycast.com/faq.

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Gamerseo

In our experience, the employee bonus improves productivity very well.