The Toolbox
He're some of my favorite tools I use daily in my dev workflow.
Not detailing much, explore the tools on your own 😉
1. The Foundation
The browser
As a dev, I have all browsers installed on my machine.
But I use Arc as my default.
Some essential extensions 👇
Raycast
Raycast is macOS spotlight on steroids.
Notion
I use Notion for all things. I guess doesn't need any explanations 🙃.
Terminal emulator
I was using Alacritty + tmux before I switched to Ghostty, and it's been a pleasant experience so far. It's very snappy and comes out of the box with good presets.
Oh My Zsh
If you are on zsh, you should definitely try Oh My Zsh.
It has a huge plugin ecosystem. Some of the plugins I use:
Also check out zsh-plugins for some amazing plugins.
Starship
It's the shell prompt I use, beautiful, with all the relevant info out of the box.
Powerlevel10k is also a good option.
2. Navigation & File Management
Zoxide
Ever tired of cd-ing back and forth between directories?
Zoxide is your perfect tool.
All your frequently used directories are just a few keystrokes away with zoxide. Love it ❤️
Yazi
If you want to view directories in a really good TUI, try Yazi.
It's a solid TUI file explorer with a lot of features.
3. Git
Lazygit
I'm in a phase where I'm transitioning away from VS Code. One thing I really miss from the VS Code setup is the Git integration. You really need to give credit to the VS Code team for making the whole Git workflow very intuitive with their GUI.
That's when I started using Lazygit
It's a terminal UI for all things Git.
Worktrees
Major use case for git worktrees on my workflow is for doing the code reviews and comparing different AI model outputs side by side.
4. Editors
NeoVim
I've been going back and forth with NeoVim and VS Code for a while now.
I love working in the terminal, and I genuinely enjoy Vim motions ❤️
But the biggest issue I've always faced is the initial migration.
When you switch from VS Code or JetBrains to NeoVim, the productivity drop is real. You suddenly feel like a toddler again. Everything slows down. Simple things take effort. You're fighting years of muscle memory while trying to understand a completely different way of doing things.
It has a steep learning curve. Building muscle memory and getting comfortable with the ecosystem takes time, and during that phase, your productivity takes a hit.
That's usually where I back away.
But now, I'm getting the hang of it and slowly building the muscle memory.
The best tip I can give is this: use the tool the way it's meant to be used. Initially, you'll try to make it look and feel like VS Code, bending the tool until it feels like home, I did that 🙃
But that's an anti-pattern.
Instead, learn its way of working and how others are doing the same thing.
Some plugins I love:
Zed
I'm tuned into Zed's releases, they've promised a major overhaul of git integration in the editor.
Other than the git integration, the editor is very very fast. If you're coming from VS Code, you'll feel it right away.
5. System
Stow
Stow is a very good symlink manager.
I have a Git repo containing all my dotfiles
Whenever I need to use another machine, I just clone the dotfiles repo and run stow .
Yabai
Yabai is a macOS tiling window manager. I love the tiling window setup over the default macOS behavior. I also miss the i3 and bspwm setups on Linux, but macOS is macOS, with its limitations 🙃
Also do checkout AeroSpace, which is also a good altrenative
6. AI Workflow
I use Claude Code and Antigravity for most of planning and execution.
It's all about setting up the right context and driving the AI to the desired outcome with proper feedback loop.