In this blog post I list some of the applications I use to make my life easier and more productive. These are Mac applications that is constantly open on my laptop in the fall of 2014. I would definitely recommend all of them.

Evernote

Evernote is great. I use it for almost all of my writing - whether it is meeting notes, e-mail drafts, blog posts or just random scribble. It is so simple and does the job of saving my notes most excellently. The only thing I miss is some kind of syntax highlighting for code and markdown support.

The Hit List

The Hit List is a sophisticated todo list manager. I started to use this application after I had read the Getting things done book a couple of years back. The application is a bit rough around the edges but it really works for me as I continue to use it to do my own basic version of GTD.

MacVim

Vim takes a while to learn but once you are used to it almost becomes part of your subconscious. There is always something new to learn just when you feel like you have mastered a command. It was well worth learning it as I now have editor that has been customised to my own needs over a couple of years. Also as a bonus it is available on most UN*X like systems which means I always have a familiar editor available when I am working on someone else’s machine.

iTerm2

This is a replacement for Apple’s terminal emulator ”Terminal” that is great. It has a lot of options for customisation. For example I have mapped it so I can use the hjkl-keys to move around between panes and tabs. Just like I am used to from vim. To make it look beautiful I have combined the Tomorrow Night Bright color scheme with the Menlo font.

Dash

With Dash you can view and search through documentation for things like Ruby, Rails, HTTP Status codes, Go, CSS, AngularJS, Node.js and much more. I have it running the background all the time and can easily make it foreground with a hot-key (alt-space). The interface is navigable by just using the keyboard so it gets really fast to find the right docs when your writing code and need to look up something. Dash has made looking up documentation such a pleasure.

Mailplane

Mailplane is an application that lets you run Googles Gmail and Calendar web apps as desktop applications. I have a couple of different Gmail accounts that I check at least on a daily basis and this app makes it super easy to handle all the different accounts using one window with each account in its own tab. With Mailplane you can also make Gmail the default handler for e-mail links on web pages.

Stay

I regularly move my laptop around and connect different screens. Stay lets me save and restore the position of windows for each combination of displays. For example when I connect my Cinema Display iTerm2 automatically moves to the Cinema Display and The Hit List window moves to the laptop screen. It let me always have a familiar window setup when switching display.