Tools

I enjoy tools that are pieces of art in and of themselves. This page is inspired by Kevin Kelly's CoolTools site. Below is a continually updated list of tools I use in my personal and professional life that spark joy.

Everyday Productivity

• Raycast - I use it ~100 times a day for so many things. It is the foundation of my efficiency on macOS.
• Shottr - So many useful tools baked into one: ocr, scrolling screenshots, quick edits, etc.
• Linear Mouse - Increase cursor movement than highest speed on Macos. My pointer speed is 0.13, do not go to the max speed as it will be extremely hard to reset it!
• Notion Calendar - Good design. I preferred when it was named Cron
• Ice - Hide apps in the menu bar. Clean, modern design and actively maintained.
• Bitwarden - Password autofill is so satifying. Simple and it just works.
• Superwhisper - To send longer prompts to LLMs quickly, speech to text is so satisfying and this app is infinitely better than the normal dictation on macos and runs locally AKA free.
• Karabiner-Elements - Keyboard customizer. I mapped my FN key to trigger Superwhisper so I can talk more and rarely touch the keyboard.

Terminal

• Ghostty - So clean. The default place for launching agents for now.
• Cmux - On the verge of replacing Ghostty for me. Notifications when an agent needs me, vertical tabs, and split panes. Just waiting for it to get a little less buggy.
• Oh My Zsh - I love zsh-autosuggestions purely for spinning up Claude faster. It ghost-completes --dangerously-skip-permissions so I don't have to type it out.
• Powerlevel10k
• Zoxide - A smarter cd. I love flying around the terminal with it. z to jump anywhere, zi for a fuzzy finder.
• Eza - A modern replacement for ls with colors, icons, and git integration.
• bat - A cat replacement with syntax highlighting. Aliased cat to it.
• fzf - Fuzzy finder for the terminal. Powers fuzzy history, file picking, and zoxide's zi.
• Neovim - For quick edits without leaving the shell.

Developer Tools

• Claude Code and Codex - I go between both.
• uv - Python package and project manager written in Rust. Absurdly fast, and it's replaced pip/venv/pyenv for me entirely.
• Disk Inventory X - best way to visually manage storage on macos.

AI Tools

• gws cli - So nice to have one CLI to do everything Google related. It's how I read and manage almost all my emails.
• Paper - As an engineer learning to become a designer, it's nice to have it use a canvas.
• Granola - Meeting notes. I'm very close to replacing it with my own tool, but for now it's just so easy to use.

Skills

Find my skills here: github.com/max4c/skills. My favorite is the grill-me skill.

Ergonomics and Focus

• Binaural beats for focus and relaxation especially when coding
• ZSA Moonlander
• Logitech Lift Mouse
• Roost laptop stand

Sites

• Brave - Minimal Chromium that I like to use.
• Duckduckgo - answer engines haven't figured out how to do good image search yet so I go here. I love being able to watch videos here instead of getting sucked into wasting time on youtube.
• AlternativeTo - anytime I need a software tool I go here.
• Packhacker - Really great site to find travel gear.
• Monkeytype - Best well-designed typing practice site.
• Catalog Choice - Want to stop junk mail coming to your house? Here's how

Notetaking

• Notion - Has been my LifeOS for six years, but Claude Code is slowly erasing every need I've had for it. I'm leaning towards everything being file over app.
• Obsidian - Local notetaking that makes a beautiful writing experience.
• Pilot G-2 05 - I handwrite in my journal nightly and this pen makes it so satifying.

Clothing

• Ibex - Sustainable lululemon that aligns with my interest in hiking and plastic-free clothing.
• Ryker - plastic-free gym shorts were so incredibly hard to find. Now I use these for running, hiking, lifting, and even swimming.

Health

• Colemak - I never learned to touchtype until college when my wrists started to hurt a lot due to ignorance concerning propr ergonomics. I chose colemak as my keyboard layout and enjoy it so much. Instead of looking at a diagram of where letters are, I just started completely fresh on monkeytype and looked at the screen and let muscle memory develop over time. After 2 years, I am floating around 84 wpm with 96% accuracy