My Mac Setup

I have been using a mac as the primary driver for the past year. Being a huge sucker for productivity, I try to optimize my workflow as much as possible. In this blog, I am sharing the tools and tricks that I use to make my workflow easier and more productive(at least that what I think) ​

Raycast

The default spotlight is very minimal and gets things done, but for nerd for me it is not enough, I have used alfred for the past 7 months. But recently I switched to the raycast. One of the good features about raycast is about the customizability, Basically I have written workflow automation for most of the tasks that I have been doing daily, for example to create the new meet I use the below action

​meet

Package Manager

​ I have been using brew as my package manager for installing the tools. All the tools that I have installed can be backed up using the below command ​

brew bundle dump

Windows manager

​ One of the things I hate about mac is there is no native support wm for mac. I have gone overengineering about this one and use three tools for managing the windows in mac, you can probably do it yabai itself, because I am so used to it I am lazy to migrate the changes ​

Tool use
Slate This is the first window manager that I have used , it is pretty old and discontinued but still works, I have initially worked to split the windows and move the focus to the application For example cmd+shift+c will shift the focus to the vscode
Rectangle Configuring slate across multiple monitors become a pain in ass when I started across rectangle, So I have started to using rectangle, to switch between the multiple monitors
Yabai One of the features that most windows manager lacks is moving the mouse to the active windows this is a huge headache when you are working with an external monitor, So I have used yabai Simply for moving cursor, even though yabai is powerful that can do the above tasks, I am simply lazy to switch it to completely yabai

Terminal

Most of the work I am doing on my computer requires me to interact with the terminal so I have to try to optimize the workflow as much as possible

I am using iterm2 as my terminal and uses Oh My Zsh on top it. It gives me the autocompletion and syntax highlighting features. One of the underrated tools I am using is zoxide. It helps to switch the directory without typing the whole path. I also use git and auto-complete plugin that comes with ohmyzsh ​

Editor

I have been using vscode as primary editor for the past 5 years. I have leveraged all the plugins to improve the workflow.

Knowledge Management

I have been using notion for taking notes for the past 2 years, but recently I switched to the obsidian for taking notes. Although I am using Notion for managing the projects and other stuff, I am using obsidian as my primary knowledge base

Misc Tools

ScreenShot I am using monosnap for taking screenshots, one of the good features of this tool is annotation features which I heavily use for writing documentation and blogs

Text-expander I am using espanso for text expander It’s pretty useful for filling forms for eg :twitter will expand to my twitter handle

Stats menu I am using stat for monitoring my mac resources usage from the menu bar

I hope you find this blog useful, Let me know what apps you are using in your mac :)