I’ve tried a lot of different tools looking for those that are reliable, a joy to use, and visually appealing when applicable. These are the tools I’ve arrived at and currently use:
An elegant and efficient text editor that balances productivity and configurability.
A desktop Git client that pairs well with Sublime Text. While nothing beats the power of Git on the command line, the majority of the time what I need is simple. Diffing, composing commits, handling merge conflicts, and branch management make up 90% of the features I regularly use in Git and having a GUI makes each of these tasks significantly easier.
A modern terminal that is pleasant to use.
Roam is a powerful knowledge management tool and it is where I dump my notes, thoughts, and ideas all throughout my day. The tagging features of Roam enable me to quickly search, find, and pull together notes from different contexts into a cohesive structure.
The best database manager I’ve used on MacOS that supports both SQL and a variety of NoSQL databases.
Dependably backs up my MacOS machine to cloud storage.
The rest of the features I wish were built right into MacOS - hotkeys, text snippets, scripting, all the MacOS automation your heart could desire.
Keyboard customizer for MacOS that most importantly allows me to remap CapsLock to both Escape and Control.
Nyne is a configuration tool and event processing library that I wrote for Acme/Edwood. You can think of it as the .vimrc for Acme.
nvi is the text editor originally distributed with the Fourth Berkeley Software Distribution (4BSD).
Vi IMproved - The most widely used "standard" vi implementation
The Emacs Lisp interpreter that happens to also be a text editor