Jason C. McDonaldI was inspired by this post...
Honestly, I figured sharing this would be a fun trend! (Use the tag #mygear.) So, here's mine...
Hardware
- System76 Gazelle Pro (15 inch)
- Extra monitor, so I can have code or a manuscript on one screen, and research or documentation on the other.
- CODE Mechanical Keyboard, which is every bit as awesome as advertised.
- Logitech M510 Wireless Computer Mouse
- JVC HA-NC250 noise cancelling headphones. These things are great, and the detachable cord means they'll have a long life.
- TI-89 calculator -- I LOVE this thing!
As a writer, I also have The Chicago Manual of Style, The Writer's Digest Grammar Desk Reference, and Strunk and White's Elements of Style close at hand. (I usually also keep a couple of programming reference books there.)
And yes, off to the left, that is a Palm Tungsten T. And it works. I sync it to my laptop with JPilot. As far as handheld devices go, it's delightfully useful and distraction free.
I don't know if it officially counts as hardware, but you can see my Doctor Hooves figurine just under my monitor. He usually just stands guard, but that's what I use when I need to do some rubber-duck debugging.
System
I work entirely on Ubuntu MATE. I organize my windows into separate workspaces to help minimize distractions.
- Guake is my main everyday-usage terminal, which I can bring up with F12
- Terminator (or occasionally cool-retro-term) for a dedicated terminal environment.
- Mycroft.ai is installed on my system for timers, reminders, and checking up on things while working.
- When I need a VPN, I use ProtonVPN. I also use 1.1.1.1 for my DNS.
IDE
I use Visual Studio Code for almost everything, and have it packed with a host of extensions for C++, Python, Java, HTML, CSS, RestructuredText, Markdown, and XML. That said, no matter what I'm working on, I use:
- Bookmarks
- Bracket Pair Colorizer
- Codealike
- Code Spell Checker
- Comment Anchors
- Contextual Duplicate
- Indent-rainbow
- Overtype
- Peacock
- Reflow Paragraph
- VSCode Great Icons
- Wakatime
I also tend to cycle through a half dozen or so themes depending on mood. Most recently, I use Sea Green Theme, LaserWave, and skGRTT.
Writing
I do almost all my writing in LibreOffice, although I sometimes fall back on Focuswriter or Visual Studio Code.
When I really want a distraction-free environment, I actually pull out my Royal Heritage manual typewriter.
Browser
I mainly use the Brave web browser, with...
- Privacy Badger (in case I need to disable the main Brave shields)
- MyWOT
- Leechblock
- Stylus
On occasion, I fall back on Firefox.
Productivity
- DuckDuckGo is my search engine all the way!
- Hexchat is my IRC client, for connecting to Freenode and OFTC.
- I use Rambox to gather all my other chat service accounts into one unified place.
- Despite a couple of pesky bugs, I use Evolution for my email, calendar, contacts, and to do list...
- Syncing to my personal Nextcloud.
- Simplenote is my favorite service for storing notes.
- Calibre for managing and reading my massive library of eBooks.
Coding
For C++, I use...
- C++17
- LLVM Clang 7
- GCC 8
- cppcheck
- CMake
For Python, I use...
- Python 3.7/3.8
- venv
- pip
- Flake8
- Mypy
- Pytest
- Bandit
- Black
And, of course, I use Git for all my VCS needs.
