The tools I use daily

People ask, so here’s the list. It’s short on purpose. If something isn’t here, it’s because I tried it and stopped.

Hardware

• A laptop with a good keyboard and a screen I don’t think about.
• One external monitor. Two made me worse at focusing.
• Cheap wired earphones. They never need charging.

Software

• A terminal. Most of my day happens here.
• A plain text editor with as few plugins as I can get away with.
• A notes folder of Markdown files, synced by whatever happens to be on the machine.
• A browser with an ad blocker and no extensions beyond that.

Not on the list

Task managers, habit trackers, dashboards, second brains. I’ve owned all of them. They mostly produced a feeling of productivity rather than the thing itself.

The pattern, if there is one: every tool here is boring, has been around a while, and would be easy to replace. That turns out to be exactly what I want from a tool.