I’ve been intending for a while to write about my esstential toolsets. As I’ve started to write, I kept coming up with others, so I’ve ended up breaking them down into categories.

task/life management

Exist - Life and habit tracking tool supporting journaling, mood and event tracking, and intergrations with weather, fitness, sleep, productivity, and a ton of other tools with a goal of supporting a quantified life. Most importantly, though, the developers are trustworthy and their privacy policy makes clear they provide you a service rather than selling your data as a product.

ToodleDo - Kind of a dumb name and not the most visually pleasing task tracking tool out there, but it is incredibly flexible and the price is excellent in comparison with other, similar tools. If you want to implement a real GTD methodology, Toodledo is the best tool I’ve found.

utilities

Alfred - If you are a Mac user, Alfred will change your life. If the Mac Spotlight tool evolved to it’s highest potential, it would be Alfred. I bought the lifetime upgrades license about 12 years ago for 55£ and it is the best software investment I’ve ever made.

1Password - You need a password manager, no matter who you are, and 1P is, for my money, the best there is. I got a family account and being able to share password vaults with my mother, wife, and kids prevents so many “hey, what’s my password for …” support calls.

Rectangle - A free Mac window manager that will low-key change your life.

Sublime - My go-to text editor. Very light weight and offers a ton of plugins for things like previewing markdown. Also has a command line interface so you can open text files without having to point and click.

developer-centric

iTerm

PyCharm - PyCharm is my favorite IDE for Python development. It’s relatively recently added some AI based code suggestions that are actually pretty useful. I don’t use it to write chunks of code, but it is able to make pretty good predictions of what should be in the line I’m typing, based on what I’ve typed before, and saves a bunch of keystrokes that way.

vsCode - At present at least, PyCharm doesn’t well support dbt, so I use vsCode for dbt work.

DuckDB - An in-memory SQL engine, installable with pip, allowing you to use SQL to query (and create) CSV files, parquet files, JSON files, pandas dataframes, and more. Files can even be read from S3 or HTTPS. If you’re doing any data work, DuckDB is a must have.