Most "my setup" posts are shopping lists. This one is not, because the tools below earned their place by surviving contact with a bad week: a deadline, a broken laptop, a paper due, an evening where I could not stop scrolling. Everything else got uninstalled.
Three of them are worth telling properly.
chezmoi: my machine is a git clone
I used to keep dotfiles in a repo with a install.sh that symlinked things into place. It worked right up until my laptop and my home server needed almost the same configuration: same aliases, different git email, different paths, and one of them absolutely must not carry a work SSH config.
chezmoi solves exactly that. The dotfiles live in one repository, the machine-specific bits are templates, and secrets are pulled from a password manager at apply time instead of sitting in git. Bootstrapping a new machine is now one command and a coffee.
The unglamorous benefit is the one I care about: I stopped being afraid of reinstalling. When the setup is a git clone away, wiping a machine is a chore rather than a decision.
chezmoi — Dotfiles in git, secrets left out of it.
Keeps my shell, editor and git configuration in one repository and templates the parts that differ per machine, so a work laptop and a home server share a setup without sharing their secrets. Bootstrapping a new machine is a single command instead of an afternoon of copy-paste.
Atuin: my shell history became searchable
Every developer has a moment of typing history | grep and hoping. Shell history is one of the most valuable datasets you generate, and by default it is a flat file that truncates, forgets which directory you were in, and vanishes when you open two terminals at once.
Atuin replaces Ctrl-R with a real search over a SQLite database of every command, recorded with its directory, its exit code and how long it took. It syncs end-to-end encrypted between machines, and you can run the sync server yourself if you would rather not trust anyone with it.
What changed is subtle. I stopped writing throwaway shell scripts for things I do twice a year, because "the ffmpeg command from that conference talk" is now a two-second lookup instead of an archaeology project.
Atuin — Shell history as a searchable database.
Replaces Ctrl-R with a real search over every command I have ever run, recorded with its directory, exit code and duration. History syncs end-to-end encrypted between my laptop and my servers, and you can host the sync server yourself. The obscure ffmpeg invocation from eight months ago is now a two-second lookup.
A brick, and the app behind it
The one that is not software. I was properly hooked on my phone: in hand before my eyes were open, thumb scrolling through dinners and lectures. Willpower never fixed it.
What fixed it was a small orange square on my desk, a magnet and an NFC tag. Tap the phone against it and the apps I chose disappear. Tap again and they come back, but only if I walk to wherever I left the brick. That tiny bit of friction is the entire trick.
Underneath it is Foqos, an open-source iOS app that ties Apple's Screen Time restrictions to an NFC tag. No account, no subscription, no streak to protect. Two weeks in, my screen time had halved and I had stopped missing it, which says more about the reflex than about the willpower.
Focus Brick — A magnet, an NFC tag, two taps.
Foqos — The open-source app behind the brick.
The rest of the toolbox
These three are the ones with a story. The rest of what I use every day lives on the toolbox page: editor, terminal, research and focus tools, each with a note on why it earned its place, filterable by category.
Nothing here is sponsored and nothing is permanent. If one of these stops earning its place, it comes off the list.
This one first appeared on my site, where I write about the systems I build and the tools I actually use — the rest of the posts live here.
