I’m always curious about how people set up their computers and what software packages they have, so I thought I would share mine. So you know where I’m coming from, I use Windows, Mac, and Linux nearly every day. Part of my goal is to make transitioning between these systems as seamless as possible, but the exact setup varies by the operating system. For those of you on Windows, many of these can be installed with Ninite. I do a pretty good job of keeping this list up-to-date, so it should reflect my current recommendations for software.
Table of Contents
- Writing
- Utilities
- Web Browsers
- Programming
- Media
- Cloud Storage
- Productivity
- Terminals
- Shells
- Security
- Social
- Databases
- Images
- Other
- Evaluating
- Honorable Mentions
- No Longer Used
Writing
Text Editors
- I absolutely love this. Use it every day
- With package control
- Be sure to include the Markdown Editor
Evernote (Ninite)
- Really good but I just don’t use it that much anymore
- Good for long-term memory stuff, storing pictures (like receipts)
- Great for note-taking
Office Suite
- Don’t love it, but great for sharing and multi-person editing
- I prefer Excel, but it’s free and I don’t use spreadsheets enough to buy Excel
LaTeX Editor
- Requires a distribution with it. I like MIKTEX
- I also recommend pdflatex (through miktex)
Spelling and Grammar
- Very good. I hope it keeps getting better as natural language processing improves
Utilities
File Explorer
Commander One (Mac only)
- Dual-panel file explorer
- Much better than Finder
Path Finder (Mac only)
- Dual-panel file explorer
- Might become my new file explorer for Mac
- You might need to customize the hot keys
Files (FOSS, Windows)
- I recently started using this on Windows and like it
- Good use of tabs and windows
File Search
Agent Ransack (Windows)
- Perfect search tool. I strongly favor this over the (otherwise also very good) alternatives
- No equivalent for Linux or Mac, although there are decent built-in options
- Command line tool that works on all platforms. Very fast
Screenshots
Greenshot (FOSS, Windows)
- This is a perfect screenshot tool. It does everything I want
For a mac I just use the built-in tool
- Note that if you want to select just a part of your screen, you should use
command + shift + 4, then if you want to copy it straight to your clipboard (so you can paste it), holdcontrolwhile you draw the outline
Package Managers
Homebrew (Mac)
- By far the best package manager for MacOS
Unzipping
7-Zip (Ninite)
- The clear winner for Windows
Checking disk space
WinDirStat (Ninite, Window)
Disk Inventory X (Mac)
Web Browsers
I always have three or more web browsers on each computer. I use them for different things. All are very good.
- Google Chrome (Ninite)
- Mozilla Firefox (Ninite)
- Brave
Browser Extensions
New Tab Page
Programming
Python Distribution
Anaconda (FOSS)
- Now a no-brainer for data scientists
Python Package Manager
- Now the best package manager
- Extremely fast and easy-to-use
- This is a superior package manager to conda
Integrated Development Environment (IDE)
VSCode (Ninite)
- Configuring your IDE that way you like it is essential, and VSCode is incredibly extensible. See how I customize it
- The clear winner in my opinion for R IDE, although I don’t use R much anymore so this could no longer be true
Version Control
- git has by-and-large won the version control market
- Used in partnership with GitHub
- Git is great but frustrating when you can’t figure it out (yes, I’ve done this)
- GitHub Desktop is amazing and makes git much more beginner-friendly
- I also recommend the GitHub CLI
- GitHub Desktop also has a version for Linux that I use
Hex Editor
Media
Spotify (Ninite)
- Seems to have won the music player market for now
VLC (FOSS, Ninite)
Audacity (FOSS, Ninite)
Cloud Storage
Google backup and sync (Ninite)
- Unlimited photos, very good app
- They keep renaming it, and I expect that to continue. It’s Google
Dropbox (Ninite)
- Poor website interface but other than that one of my favorites
Microsoft OneDrive (Ninite)
- This does syncing very well
Yes, I do use many different cloud services. All for slightly different purposes.
Productivity
Rectangle (FOSS, Mac only)
- Makes moving and resizing windows easy on a Mac
- Here are the default hot keys
Alfred (Mac only)
- In the running for one of the best productivity apps in existence
- This is probably my favorite app for the Mac
- Can be as simple or complex as you like
cmd + option + cto open clipboard history
Make macOS more like Windows
Karabiner-Elements (FOSS, Mac only)
- Great for remapping keys
- See my software customizations for how I set it up
Usually the apps you need to give permissions to pop up in the list when you look for them, but not everything for Karabiner did for me. So I had to click the plus sign and go find whatever was missing.
Scroll Reverser (FOSS, Mac)
- Here’s how I set mine up
- Switch between applications more like Windows
Terminals
Mac
- The clear winner for Mac and my overall favorite. I wish Linux and Windows had this
Windows
In Windows, I use a mix, mostly because none of them are perfect. Here’s a case (unlike browsers) that I would rather just have one
- Allows Unix style commands, makes switching between Mac and Linux and Windows much easier
- A top contender for the best terminal in Windows. This is a really good terminal
- Sometimes I like it and sometimes I don’t…
- I only use this for Anaconda stuff
Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL)
- Promising, definite promising. Keep working on it Microsoft!
- Still a work in progress. Gets better all the time but still has room for improvement.
- Update: This has gotten much better. I’m now using this with zsh like I do on my Mac and am liking it a lot.
As you can see, I’m strewn across half a dozen terminals in Windows and have found the one on Mac. For me, nothing beats iTerm2.
Linux
- Favorite for Linux at the moment
Shells
- Default on Mac now
- Manage it with Oh My Zsh
- You can also install it on Windows
- Overall, I like it. Easy to customize
- Also zsh-syntax-highlighting is great
Terminal Add-ons
- Syntax highlighter
- I use it so often I alias it to the letter “c”
- it’s like
catbut with colors
- This is the best way to get around a Unix terminal
- A great system monitoring tools
- Works across all platforms
You can also find a lot of great tools here: https://github.com/ibraheemdev/modern-unix
Security
Malware Protection
I have no loyalty to any of these. I usually just go with the top free one recommended. I’ve also used paid ones in the past but I don’t know if it’s worth it.
Malware Bytes (Ninite)
Password Managers
- I feel like I’ve finally found the password manager that I’ve been looking for. Does what I want without being obnoxious
Managing Updates
Patch My PC (Windows only)
- I’m still looking for something to help me automatically update software on my computer. So far I’ve gone with patch my pc but there’s nothing I like
Social
Messaging
Discord (Ninite)
- I can’t believe this took so long to be invented. This is how communication should be
- Beware: has ads, though I don’t find them particularly intrusive
Video Conferencing
Zoom (Ninite)
Online Get Togethers
Databases
DBeaver (FOSS)
- My current favorite open source database software
Images
Image Viewer
Xee (Mac)
- I make this my default image viewer
- To do so, right click an image file type in your window viewer (Command One in my case) and hold down
optionso “Get Info” turns into “Get Finder Info”. Then you can expand “Open with” and select your image viewer of choice.
- To do so, right click an image file type in your window viewer (Command One in my case) and hold down
You’ll have to go into preferences to change the way to scroll left and right.
Image Editing
Adobe Lightroom (Windows, Mac)
- As much as I’d like to say GIMP is just as good, it’s no match for the features of Lightroom. For someone who spends serious time editing photos, I don’t think there’s a better alternative.
Paintbrush (FOSS, Mac only)
- Simple image editing on Mac
Photography
- Free tool from Microsoft to stitch images for panoramas. Works better than Lightroom
- Great for making star trails
- A really nice simple piece of software that does one thing well
- Online only, no download
Other
Google Earth (Ninite)
Speccy (Windows only)
- Get beautiful backgrounds every day
Inkscape (FOSS, Ninite)
Excalidraw (FOSS)
- Can download it but also words directly on the website
- Super simple to use
- Can also make graphs with it
- Still a pain on Windows Home. Wonderful for Linux and Mac
- just stick in somewhere in your path, C:\Windows
Sumatra PDF (Ninite)
- For reading pdfs
- I mainly just my web browser now
Wireshark (FOSS)
- The clear winner for free network protocol analyzers
- Cloud-hosted logging
- Very nice tool to tracking GPU usage
- Includes which user is user the GPU, significant upgrade to
nvidia-smi
- Another nice tool for looking at GPU usage
QGIS (FOSS)
Research
- The best app for keeping track of scientific papers
- Definitely use the browser extensions as well
Evaluating
- Similar to Speccy
Sysinternals (Windows)
PowerToys (Windows)
Boop (Mac, FOSS)
Pixea - good for a scroll through images on a Mac
Static Type Checker - mypy
- I put my mypy config in ~/.mypy.ini
Honorable Mentions
Some applications were either neck-and-neck with other ones, or I use very infrequently, or I used to use but no longer do. I generally still think they’re worth checking out.
- Free and feels like VSCode in many ways
- FOSS alternative to Navicat for PostgreSQL for me
GIMP (Linux)
- The Paint program I like on Windows doesn’t exist for Linux, so I use GIMP instead.
Wox (Windows, FOSS)
- Like Alfred for Windows
- Default is Alt + Spacebar, which is a little different on the keyboard than Alfred.
- Not free but good tool for databases
- Great for working with APIs
No Longer Used
LibreOffice (FOSS, Ninite)
- I prefer cloud-based editors so I don’t use this very much anymore.
- More lightweight than Commander One, so I sometimes use it
- This website offers good tips on how to get started with it
Postico (Mac only)
- Not free but still very good