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Comment by casion | Hacker News Reader

I know this is going to come off as snarky or dismissive, but please believe me that it's not intended that way. I just can't come up with a better way to say it:

No. I'm too focused on my work to care much.

I used to waffle back and forth, being a dwm super-nerd or hacking on my own tooling for whatever in macOS. Then I got a job where there was simply no time to spend on that it at all. At the end of the day I'm mentally exhausted and I don't look at a computer. Wake up excited to work on hard problems. I haven't thought about a window manager, editor, complex startup scripts, writing my own news aggregator, hacking on display drivers or whatever.

Too busy working, happily.

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I get it. I'm the same way. my 14" mbp with 64gb/ram is the perfect size/performance for me. I run intellij, docker, iterm2, chrome, obsidian and vscode. If there's OSX under there well...I guess so, but fuck it. I can't remember the last time I opened up system prefs, or any config file on my laptop.

earlier this year I tried fedora 32 on my xps9500(a supposedly great linux laptop). After a freakin week random shit still wouldn't work right. And sleep/resume was like rolling a dice. No thanks.

For me at least I felt like MacOS was actively getting in the way of my work. "Oh, you want to debug with GDB? Sorry I need you to waste 3 hours following tutorials to get it signed.". I never even got GDB successfully signed! Lots of little stupid shit like that. Every single MacOS update would bring some change that added some new security cockblock layer or random change keeping me from working.

You can certainly fiddle a lot with WM, complex startup scripts in Linux but you can also just not?

Definitely agree here, but I do a similar thing with a boring Linux distro like Ubuntu where I don't change anything (except maybe the wallpaper, never liked theirs). MacOS is good as this too, especially because utility software that's GUI based is often much more prevalent (and better in general) on MacOS.

This was my issue with running OpenWRT on my routers, and FreeNAS. It stopped being an investing hobby and became a part time network admin job. Do I have less control over my network? Sure, but also more time doing other things in my life.

I've run a default Ubuntu since 2017 for exactly this reason: I got a life.

But late this year I started missing having a desktop environment that was good.

So I started customizing again. It's a rabbit hole, so I leave it at "somewhat working".

Don't take this as snarky or dismissive, but you sound like one of those people that willingly use some breaky distro and then complain that they spend too much time fixing stuff, hence the like for mac os.

I've run a plain/basic xubuntu desktop for years at work and was super productive. It just didn't get in the way of me working.

I didn't say I preferred macos or that things "being broken" was a problem.

I honestly have no clue how you came away with those ideas.

The phrase "pathological tinkerer" stuck in my mind when someone was describing why they didn't want to use Emacs anymore and instead just focus on their work. That's sort of how I feel when I get the itch.

Funny enough, I use Emacs because it feels like I don't have to spend as much tinkering to make it do what I want.

I am a lisp dev though, so that factors in to the fluidity of the experience for me :)

Not snarky, I feel the same. My work laptop is a MacBook Pro, and I run a bunch of tools to be productive (Rectangle, Raycast, SoundSource).

My personal laptop is Ubuntu, and I have a stack of dotfiles to configure it the way I like.

My work laptop is the same, and I’ve never thought to look into productivity tools. Any other recommendations you find worth mentioning to those of us not in the know? Those three look excellent.

Automation, window management, scripting, text expansion:

- Alfred (must have in my opinion, have not tried raycast yet though so can’t compare)

- Hammerspoon

- BetterTouchTool

- Keyboard Maestro

- Espanso

Better Finder: Forklift

Screen Resolutions: DisplayMenu

Virtual Machines: UTM

Tidier menu bar: Bartender

Easier on the eyes: HazeOver

Unlock Mac with iPhone Touch ID when in clamshell mode: Unlox

See calendar events in menubar: MeetingBar

Remap keys on keyboard: karabiner

Dark mode for all websites: Noir

Command Palette in all apps: Paletro

View all app shortcuts easily: Cheatsheet

Remote Access: Jump Desktop

Better tab between applications: AltTab

Use old iPhone as webcam: elgato camera hub (Mac) and elgato EpocCam (iOS)

Create backlinks to any file on your computer: hookmark

Better file management, research and bookmarks: DevonThink

Audio Routing: loopback

Audio Recording: audio hijack

Internet usage monitor: tripmode

Enable Touch ID in terminal: Follow instructions here https://sixcolors.com/post/2020/11/quick-tip-enable-touch-id...

Quicker terminal: Alacritty

Makes sense. I also every day when I'm coming home barely have time or energy to code on my own projects.

Same. I pretty much have the following:

- Browser - with a window per topic and tabs

- Terminal - tabs + tmux

- IDE - tabs

Mostly full screen, sometimes on a second screen when in reference mode (i.e. needing to see two things at once).

Rectangle.app provides the keyboard shortcuts enough to move / split windows. What else do I need?

Contexts for app switching

https://contexts.co/

I generally am fine with using Alfred for this when I can't just Cmd+Tab. Cmd+Space, first letter or two of the app name works fine

This, 100%.

I like closing my lid at the end of the day and knowing that when I open it again the following morning it'll resume without a hitch and i'm straight back to where I was.

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