Tools to improve your productivity

All operating systems

ZSH & Oh-My-ZSH

ZSH and ohmyz.sh

Oh-My-Zsh is an Open Source, community-driven project for managing your ZSH configurations. It comes with several useful functions, helpers, plugins, themes and some things that make you want to use the terminal more.

A great feature that Oh-My-Zsh adds is the enhanced auto-complete with <tab> for many things. For example, typing npm run <tab> will show all available npm script commands in package.json, all navigable with arrow keys. The same goes for cd and git commands. Plugins need to be activated in the .zshrc file.

I use other extensions and you can see them in this post A terminal to call your own

Franz

meetfranz.com

Franz is a messaging app for WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Slack, Telegram. I use it to follow more than one slack, for example.

Brave Browser

brave.com

Fast, secure and unmatched privacy by blocking ads and trackers.

VSCode

code.visualstudio.com

Fast, Open Source code editor with support for practically everything you’ll need.

MacOS

Alfred & Power Pack

alfredapp.com

Over the years, Apple has greatly improved Spotlight, but it still lacks integration with third-party products and other developer tools.

Alfred is a well-known alternative that has been around for a few years. On its own, it’s a simple alternative to Spotlight, but with the Power Pack it gets support for workflows/plug-ins. I use several workflows daily: Evernote (search/create), Translate , Copy paths to clipboard , My IP and much more. I’ve also written some that open all terminal windows (iTerm) that start all commands for a project (api server, test, client-side server, db console etc.). It’s easy to write your own workflow using the built-in editor and a programming language.

HyperDock

bahoom.com/hyperdock

Bartender

macbartender.com

The macOS menu bar fills up quickly with many app icons. Not all of them are needed frequently. Bartender lets you hide some bar icons and place them in a designated submenu.

Gestimer

maddin.io/gestimer

Quickly create a timer. I mainly use it when I need an extra reminder to do something, when I’m involved in my work and not paying attention to time.

Homebrew & Homebrew-Cask

brew.sh

The missing package manager for macOS.

Installation example with multiple projects:

brew cask install google-chrome atom spotify skype iterm2 sublime-text franz

Ubuntu

Paper Theme

https://snwh.org/paper

Just like the material design guidelines that inspire it, Paper also relies on the use of strong colors and simple geometric shapes. Each icon has been meticulously designed for perfect pixel visualization at any size.

Dash to Dock

Dash to Dock

This extension transforms the Activities Dash into a highly configurable Dock, which you can place anywhere on your desktop, mainly at the bottom, emulating the great macOS dock feature.

Terminator

gnometerminator.blogspot.com

Terminator is a terminal emulator that includes countless useful features, such as multiple terminals in the same window (split view), notifications, supports saving and restoring custom layouts and much more.

Other tools?

Remember any other tools that help with the workflow?

Send me a message on twitter @lauralesteves