I have been asked a lot of times how am I able to take out time to do so many side-projects, play musical instruments, draw etc apart from regular day job schedule. There are a lot of things that helps you achieve that, but one of them certainly is the tools you use to do your job on a computer.

In this post, I attempt to list down the software tools I use specifically on my computer.

I work on a Mac OSX. So many of the below tools might be just Mac only.

Code Editor — Visual Studio Code

This is one of the most important tool for every software developer. The editor you code in and also your proficiency in it contributes a lot to your productivity.
I have been using Sublime Text for almost 5 years. I loved everything about it — its speed, packages, shortcuts! Until recently. Sublime Text development has been really slow, almost stagnant. Enter Visual Studio(VS) Code! VS Code is written on web technologies and hence is very customisable and its contributor community is growing very rapidly. To be specific, support of font ligatures actually made me switch from Sublime Text to VS Code and I have no complain so far.

Update: Font ligatures support has landed in Sublime Text 3 :)

Web Maker

If you are a frontend developer, this one is must have. This is a self-plug but I can’t emphasise enough how much Web Maker helps me in day to day stuff. Its a frontend playground that works offline and is super super fast! I use it to prototype things, experiment with new stuff and debug issues.

Spectacle

I can’t imagine life without this! Spectacles allows me to manage/position my windows inside mac to anywhere I want, all with a keyboard shortcut. I have seen people who do not have this ability on their machine and they struggle and waste a huge amount of time & effort in doing regular things. For example, positioning browser and its developer tools window and switching between them. Window management might sound a good to have feature, but trust me it helps a lot in doing faster coding, testing & debugging.

ClipMenu

This is clipboard manager. So basically I never have to copy anything twice because I accidentally copied something else after that. I have all the history of my copied items, thanks to ClipMenu, which I can paste as and when required.

iTerm2

Its a powerful replacement for the default terminal app that comes inside Mac OSX. It provides very useful features likes profiles, triggers and various other customisations. I have oh-my-zsh installed on top of iterm for a super speedy experience.
Protip: z.sh is an absolute requirement for a quick folder switching inside the terminal.

These are some tools that I use the most. Though each person has his/her own choice of tools, I would still recommend to try the above ones and see if they can help you become more efficient in what you do.