While rebuilding and moving the sites I had on the Oracle Cloud server, I reviewed some of the pages I haven’t checked (or updated) in quite a while. I’ve done a bit of clean-up, noting things that were once “temporary” that have become more permanent.

One thing I did notice was my Uses This page on the homepage. Over the last, say, six months I’ve been making an explicit effort to get out of a rut in terms of the tools I use on the regular (as well as work in some new tools). The reasons range from feeling like a de facto standard isn’t cutting it anymore, recognizing how I work has changed, or change for its own sake. Clearly I’m going to update that, but what’s changing?

Text and Document Editing

My main tool for writing and coding is combination of EMACS, Pandoc, and Markdown.

On one hand, all of this is still part of my workflow:

  • EMACS is still what I use when I’m connecting to remote systems.
  • Pandoc is still quite handy for changing formats. I especially like to use it for moving Markdown to HTML. I’ve taken to using it more with pbcopy/pbpaste.
  • Markdown is still leaned on quite heavily. I even found a Thunderbird extension to compose emails in Markdown.

The main thing that has changed is what I use on my MacBook for text editing. I’ve started using Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code for coding, blog, and web page creation. I’m using it for the first draft of this very page. A large part of it was a desire to use something more contemporary–what the cool kids use. It uses TypeScript or JavaScript as extension languages. If I felt the need to write extensions, these are more useful to know than Elisp. It supports remote code editing (though, for this rebuild, I’ve been using EMACS local to the server in the interest of simplicity).

There is also an element of a desire to move away from EMACS. Its creator is not a man I wish to support, even if in usage numbers. At a minimum, he’s a bit of an extremist when it comes to the Free Software movement. He’s made some bad comments about Epstein, and plenty of cases where he’s created a hostile workplace at MIT.

The other factor is embracing my workflow. There was a joke that EMACS was an operating system disguised as a text editor. People would use it not only to write code, but do email, note taking, and a million other tasks. While a lot of people have extended it to work with contemporary workflows, I find it to be a bit cumbersome. I have to use other tools if I need to access something from a browser or phone, and there are tools that are simply better suited to the specific task. Rather than continue to shoehorn it into my workflow, I migrated to those tools.

One other, minor-but-related change is Microsoft released an updated version of the old MS DOS 5 editor. I’ve been installing this on my remote systems to get a lightweight editor for quick tweaks to things like configuration files. This is easier than learning vi.

Browsers

I use…Google Chrome because that seems to be the de facto standard right now.

Google Chrome is still probably the de facto standard right now, but it’s starting to creak a bit. It’s performance has dipped, it hogs memory and power, and just doesn’t offer anything super-compelling. Folks are even recommending Microsoft Edge, a surprising shift from the days when Microsoft’s default browser’s only function seemed to be to download something better (granted, it was Internet Explorer at the time).

I also started using vertical tabs, with “windows” as the horizontal icons for different functions. It is a paradigm and workflow shift that I found has improved my workflow. I can keep tabs related to a given project together, and not have a big jumble. This was something I got from Edge at work. I started with Arc. Support was discontinued, as they went to focus on an “AI-powered” browser. No thanks.

Right now, I’m using Orion. Frankly, I’m not in love with it, but it seems to be working. I’m still trying different browsers. But, as browsers didn’t change much after Chrome for a long while, it’s good to seem some more experimentation.

Office Suite

To engage with the rest of the world, I use Microsoft Office. You have to have Word and PowerPoint to interact with the rest of the world. In my opinion, converting from alternatives never quite work, though in isolation there are a lot of perfectly fine options. That said, nothing does spreadsheets like Excel–I actively like it.

For the most part, this hasn’t changed. I still need to send documents to others in Word format, and the world runs on Excel. If it was still the 1990s and paper was the primary output, I might be able to live in an alternative, but that’s not where we are.

That said, I’ve started to use Apple Pages for some personal documents. It’s pretty nice. I could see using it instead of Word if I didn’t have to use Word everywhere else in my life.

New (and Small) Things

The biggest net-new thing in my workflow is Notion. It’s billed as a notetaking app. Previously, I used Simplenote, in part because it could sync with EMACS. But it was text-only. Some of the things I’m linking about it

  • Markdown support–both what I type, as well as import and export.
  • Support for images
  • Equal functionality across a native desktop client, a browser-based client, and phone client
  • A database function that is more than just a static table. I can do some computation or reporting on it, or link databases in a relational database-y way.

Notion has become a multi-purpose notebook. I will record things that I want for the long term, create templates, write drafts of blog posts, and similar things. I even keep “virtual pocket notebooks,” as a place to put small notes I normally would write in a pocket notebook (like one from Field Notes), but don’t have one with me. It probably comes closest to “missing application” I original wrote about: a digital-native notebook with some enhanced spreadsheet/database capabilities.

There are two little menu bar utilities I’ve started to use. One is BetterMouse. This allows better tuning of how my mouse works. It also allows me to configure other buttons on mice with auxiliary buttons. This is functionally similar to Logi Options+, but support for other brands and a finer degree of control. It even supports configuration of the keyboard and trackpad.

The other menu bar utility is Maccy, a clipboard manager. The main thing is that it keeps a history of what I copy, so I can retrieve it and paste in again later. It’s exact use case is hard to define, but when I’m editing web pages, coding, or even writing things, it’s super handy.

The Frustration of Multiple Systems

I have changed jobs twice since that was originally written. One of my frustrations is I can find really cool tools for my personal use, but can’t leverage them at work. Part of it is that my WorkTop runs windows, so a lot of this stuff isn’t available. It’s also rather locked down, so I couldn’t install something I love at home (or an equivalent) if I wanted to. This is one of the reasons I use Microsoft Office rather than get serious about an alternative.

This is probably my biggest frustration with the Touch Bar. In a world of GUIs, the function keys are not as dominant as they were back in DOS. Most laptops I know default them to media keys.1 Putting a multifunctional control seemed like a great idea!

I tended to forget about it. The first, the Touch Bar was supported by every application. I could use BetterTouchTool to create my own mappings, though it was a bit of a pain. The bigger reason was bouncing to machines that lacked it. Office had great support. But, since Windows machines didn’t have a Touch Bar, my Office workflow never incorporated it.

This leaves me frustrated: I’d love to use Notion at work, or a clipboard manager. But I can’t! Granted, from the point of view of an employer, I get it. In a way, this defines my dream setup, more than anything: I’d like to have the ability to have complete control over all of my computing. If I want to use Notion, or Numbers, or something else, I can simply live in it.

I realize that’s not likely, but it does define a general direction I’d like to go.

(Honestly, lately, my daydream would have me in some quasi-retired-from-IT state, running a stationary store/coffee shop that, while there would be WiFi and some technology, I’d run as much as I reasonably can analog-first.)

1Where I can, I set those to be normal function keys. This works on my MacBook, but not the Dell WorkTop, which maps home and end to F12 and F12, respectively.