People often ask me what programs I use for my writing and design. In truth, my workflow tends to look like this or this, but here’s a more detailed list of all the interconnected programs I use focusing mainly on productivity tools and less on the Machine learning tech stack.
I try to keep this updated fairly regularly. As of December 16, 2024 this is what I’m using:
Writing
- I permanently ditched VSCode in 2019 after starting grad school. I do all my writing in Neovim (including e-mails and paper-and-pencil writing)—it’s incredibly intuitive, imminently readable, flexible, and lets me quickly move around and focus on content.
- I do my academic writing in several different programs: for stats-heavy stuff, I use Tex or Positron, and for prose-heavy stuff, I use iA Writer or Typora. I used to use Ulysses, but I found that I wasn’t using it as much in the past few years as I’ve switched to Neovim even for my writing.
- I store all my bibliographic references, books, and articles in Zotero.
- I read and annotate all my PDFs with Zotero, both on desktop and on iOS, since it can export annotations as clean plain text and I can sync my annotation between my devices.
- I store all my notes in Obsidian. Before switching to Obsidian I used Bear, which was great but didn’t support fancier things like math or syntax highlighting. Before that, I used Evernote, but I abandoned it in September 2018 after 9 years of heavy use, given their ongoing privacy controversies and mass layoffs.
Development
Science and research
Miscellaneous
Desktop apps
Graphic design
- Though I regularly use LaTeX (through pandoc), I adore InDesign CC and use it to make fancier academic and policy documents. I also used it for all the typesetting I did for BYU’s Neal A. Maxwell Institute.
- I use Illustrator CC all the time to enhance graphics I make in R and to make non-data-driven figures and diagrams.
- I use Lightroom and Photoshop too, but less often nowadays.
- Despite my dislike for Word and Excel, I use PowerPoint for all my presentations. It’s not my favorite, but in the apocryphal words of Churchill, “PowerPoint is the worst form of slide editor, except for all the others.”
Productivity
- My secret for avoiding the siren call of the internet is Freedom. I have two blocklists: (1) antisocial, which blocks Facebook and Twitter, and (2) nuclear, which blocks everything. I have the antisocial blocklist enabled on my laptop and phone from 8:00 AM–6:00 PM and 8:30 PM–11:30 PM. Since I accidentally discovered that it’s relatively easy to circumvent the blocking on the Mac, I also use Focus with the same schedule.
- I was an early convert to Todo.txt and used it for years until my tasks and projects got too unwieldy. I switched to Taskpaper for a while, used 2Do for a couple years, and now I’m a convert to OmniFocus.
- Fantastical 2’s natural language input is a glorious thing.
- I use Timery as an interface to Toggl to track my time during the day
- I keep a log of what I work on (and occasionally do more traditional diary-like entries) with Day One on both iOS and macOS.
- I use TextExpander to replace and expand a ton of snippets, and I use Keyboard Maestro to run dozens of little scripts that help control my computer with the keyboard.
- I use Übersicht to show weather, iTunes track information, and my todo lists on my desktop.
- I use Dropbox religiously and use Backblaze to back up all the computers in our house to the cloud.
- With all these little helper apps, I use Bartender to keep my menubar clean.
Hardware
- I use a 2020 13″ M1 Air, my lab PC that I built and which I regularly update.