uses

Hardware

MacBook Pro 14-inch (M3, 2023). The battery life is the only meaningful advantage over what I used before; the performance headroom is real but I have not yet found a workload that makes it visible.

External display: a 27-inch 4K IPS panel. No curve, no refresh-rate theatre. The point is accurate colour and adequate resolution, both of which this does.

Keyboard: HHKB Professional Hybrid. Topre switches. The layout matters more than the switches. Control where caps lock was, and nothing else where it does not belong. Takes two weeks to stop noticing.

Audio: Sony WH-1000XM5. The noise cancellation is the feature. The sound quality is adequate.

Software

Editor: Neovim with a configuration maintained in a private dotfiles repository. No AI code completion. The pause before typing is the point.

Terminal: WezTerm. Lua configuration, GPU rendering, multiplexer built in. Replaced tmux for most uses.

Shell: zsh with a minimal prompt that shows the git branch and exit code and nothing else.

Browser: Firefox for daily use. Chrome for testing.

Database client: DataGrip for anything requiring a GUI. psql for everything else.

HTTP client: httpie and curl, depending on the session.

Note-taking: plain text files in a folder, synced via Syncthing. No Notion, no Obsidian, no Roam.

Type

The three typefaces on this site are the three I find most useful.

Inter Tight for UI and headings. The tight optical size makes it readable at small sizes without looking cramped at display sizes. The variable axis means one file covers the full weight range.

Newsreader for prose. An old-style serif with enough optical contrast to be readable at 18px. Designed for reading, which is a more specific brief than it sounds.

JetBrains Mono for code and metadata. The ligatures are off. Slashed zero is on. Tabular figures are on. These are the only three settings that matter.