Things I Use
Writing
At the moment, I’m writing everything in VS Code. There are some advantages to doing so which maybe I’ll write about someday.
Enso comes in handy for distraction-free word-dumping. I’d use beat if I still wrote screenplays, except maybe not, because VS Code also has a very good fountain plugin.
Dictionaries
In order of consultation.
- The New Oxford American Dictionary (macOS)
- Merriam-Webster
- The Free Dictionary
- The Oxford Dictionary of English (British English, macOS)
Thesauruses
- Thesaurus.com
- Roget’s Thesaurus
Use less, but not useless
Reading
I track feeds and read articles with Readwise.
For books, I have a Kindle and library card. The Internet Archive often comes in handy. I recently switched from Goodreads to LibraryThing because Goodreads is sluggish and I hate it. LibraryThing, by contrast, is faster, might be open source (I’m not sure, but it has the feel of it), and overall is kind of cool.
Notetaking
I manage notes and files with VS Code and Foam, but I use Obsidian to publish them. That’s the one thing Obsidian does better than Foam. Foam has a way to do it with GitHub Pages that seems fairly straightforward, but backlinks don’t render. I’d love to figure out a way to integrate Foam with Astro, but I’m just not skilled enough at the moment.
I annotate articles and ebooks with Readwise. All notes I take in Readwise, on my Kindle, or in iBooks show up in my Readwise database. I export that database to Obsidian and Google Drive.
For memorizing facts, quotes, and other information, I use spaced repetition via Anki.
Webdev
I code in VS Code. I use GitHub for version control. I use Firefox Developer Edition for development. I design in Figma. I built this website with Astro.