Tools I Use in 2026

We shape our tools and then our tools shape us. These are the tools that shape my digital life.

• ☑️ Things by Cultured Code is my inbox for everything. Familiarity with keyboard shortcuts helps me capture, clarify, and execute on macOS. Share sheets capture everything on iOS. I don’t use a lot of projects or tags because it’s procrastination masquerading as productivity. I try to keep a thin inbox and backlog of tasks to be done. Most things in the backlog get done, end up as a recurring item, or get canceled when I punt on it too many times. Instead of spinning up projects, I keep a task alive for a long time, with copious notes, or linking out to a supporting document.
• 🎗️ Apple Reminders is for collaborative task lists. I like the separation between single player and multiplayer tools. This is mostly grocery lists with my wife.
• 🐻 Bear is where I keep all my notes. I love everything about Bear other than the tagging system. Having to put a #deeply/nested/tag within the content in order to organize collections is just silly. The inability to have independent sorting rules based on the collection selected is also an annoyance, but not a deal breaker. The ability to link to notes from Things is the current stickiness factor. Also, all the Markdown support. About once every two weeks I think about migrating from Bear back to Apple’s Notes to minimize tooling. Or to plaintext files in folders because I want to live my vim dreams again.
• 📝 Apple Notes is for multiplayer notes. Again, I like having the separation. Having a space of my own is worth the dual tooling.
• 🧭 Safari is my browser. It used to be a career superpower to find bugs that others didn’t while the majority developed in Chrome, Firefox, Brave, Arc, or whatever comes next. These days, it’s because I just don’t care to futz with configuration.
• 👋 Hey is for email. Sometimes I wish for the simplicity of just hooking up any old IMAP account to Apple Mail. But Hey is working for my email needs, which is fairly minimal.
• 📸 Picnic is for taming my photo library. The subscription model feels a little steep and silly, but if you hold out long enough you get offered a deal that matches my appetite. This is the kind of single focus app I want to see more of in the world.
• ⚡ Shortcuts are a pain to develop, but once they’re developed they’re pretty solid. I use these for most of my personal automations so they can work from both iOS and macOS. Apple Notes Shortcuts used to be pretty flaky…another reason why I started using Bear and am hesitant to return to Notes. Bear shortcuts are solid.
• ✍️ iA Writer is where I go when I want to really focus on writing. This flow makes me annoyed about both alternatives in Apple Notes and Bear, who rely on their own little databases to control everything. Part of me wants to just get back to files and folders. A small utility to search them would solve this problem, but I don’t ever carve out big enough blocks of time to develop such a utility, and my workflow is good enough to deliver. But yeah, iA Writer is the best for a flow of creativity, and worst for the flow of curation, reflection, and organization.
• 🤖 Claude is my LLM of choice. I use LLMs primarily to accelerate rather than delegate. I’ve been able to build some things more rapidly than I could have without Claude. I spend more time as an editor than an author.
• 🔍 Raycast is my app launcher on macOS. Ubiquity and Alfred held this seat in years past. Maybe it’s time to give Spotlight a try and eliminate another point of configuration.
• 📊 Hidden Bar tames the macOS toolbar. I made the switch after someone made a passing mention about Bartender being sold and not much was known about the buyer.
• 🔑 iA Presenter is rad when I get to use it. Most often I’m presenting in a context where a shared Keynote is the target, so I go with the flow and use all the Magic Moves I can.
• 📰 Reeder is my RSS reader of choice. I use it’s on device syncing and it’s good enough for my needs.
• 🔗 Supercopy is a simple Safari extension for quickly copying the current tab’s URL with a keyboard shortcut.
• 💻 VS Code is the text editor of choice. My extensions are pretty minimal, and vim support is good enough for most usage. Sometimes I think about getting back to vim proper, or neovim. Life in the Terminal is a life I miss.
• 🧑‍💻 Terminal is a just fine terminal. I have ZSH configuration that needs to be dusted off.
• 🗺️ Maps, Calendar, Music, and Podcasts are all served by the Apple defaults. They work fine, and I feel good about not using Google and Spotify as much as possible.
• 🎮 holedown is the best dollars to dopamine investment you’ll ever make. It’s a great game for having something to do during interruptable idle moments where you just want to take a break.

That’s what comes to mind when I scan my screens. I’ve found the tools that work for me, but will probably migrate between Bear, Apple Notes, Obsidian, iA Writer, and Vim at least once in the upcoming months because I care deeply about text.