Some notes being productive with a Mac from Anubhav

Basic setup

• Macbook Pro 13” laptop

• Thunderbolt Display (now discontinued)

• Apple keyboard

• Apple Trackpad - less precise than mouse, but can be very productive if you learn all the gestures (e.g., for web browsing back/forward, for mission control, for swiping between different Mac “Spaces”)

I use an Apple keyboard and Trackpad so that typing/navigating is similar whether I am at my workstation or whether I am on my laptop.

Early on, I turned up my Trackpad speed all the way to the max. This means I can very quickly move the cursor all the way across the screen. It took a few days to get used to this very sensitive setting but now I don’t even notice it (when other people use my trackpad, they usually freak out…)

There are many options I set to make OS/X more oriented for power users. For example, my Finder window shows directory paths at the bottom, I have sidebar shortcuts to many important locations, I display hidden files, I have a shortcut to copy the path of the current Finder location to the clipboard, etc. There are many settings like these for various built-in OS/X apps, but unfortunately I don’t remember them all. Getting a good Finder setup is probably the most important.

A note on app purchases

Many apps are available via our group's subscription to SetApp - contact Anubhav for details

We also have a Grammarly subscription for proofreading

Apps I use for programming

• I use the PyCharm IDE. Things I like about PyCharm include:

  • underlining errors

  • underlining code “lint”, e.g., spacings that do not follow PEP

  • code highlighting / editor features (e.g., when you open a CSS file, lines of code that define a color automatically display a swatch preview of that color)

  • a nice and powerful search tool (regexes, find/replace in certain files, easily filter through results visually and categorize by what type of file they occur in)

  • autocomplete (ctrl+space)

  • autofix errors, i.e. red underline stuff (option+enter)

  • follow definitions of variables, methods, classes (Cmd+b)

  • quickly open classes (Cmd+o) and files (Cmd+shift+o) and variables (Cmd+option+o). Or simply tap shift twice to search across everything.

  • go back to previous/next file being edited like forward/back on a web browser ( Cmd+[ or Cmd+] )

  • the “find usages” command

  • quick documentation lookup (F1)

  • fixing all the various spacing / formatting issues automatically (Code -> Reformat code and Code --> Auto-indent lines).

  • code refactoring

  • structure view of code. I usually have “Project” view and “Version Control” at left of window, code in middle of window, “Structure” view at right of window, and “Todo”, “Terminal”, and “Python console” at bottom of window (along with search results).

  • debugger (sometimes, typically only for heavier debugging issues)

  • easy IPython console to test code snippets

  • there are other commands that I use, but those are the ones I use most often

  • note that others use the git integration, which avoids needing to leave PyCharm to pull/push/etc. to Github, but I prefer Gitbox for this purpose.

  • I just leave Gitbox in an adjacent “Space” (virtual screen) on my Mac and use a swipe gesture to quickly flip between screens.

• MongoHub (for visually exploring Mongo databases). Other options are Robo 3T (https://robomongo.org), NoSQLBooster (free version), Studio 3T, and MongoDB Compass. ● Gitbox (I almost never use the Git command line; Gitbox is unique in that it is really easy to preview changes to the remote before pulling them in. It is also the most intuitive Git tool I know of). Another one to consider is GitKraken which has a free version and looks fun (if I were starting from scratch, I might learn GitKraken).

• Patterns (for tricky regexes) - although the free web site https://regexr.com is just as good.

• Smart JSON editor

• Balsamiq Mockups - wireframes

• TextMate as a regular text editor.

Apps I use for Science

• CrystalMaker (and sometimes Vesta) - crystal structure visualization

• Zotero - reference management

• MS Office Suite

Note that I use Zotero not only for reference management but also for taking notes on articles. Some of the things I like about this system:

• The notes are kept together with the articles, so I can quickly bring up the article if I am reviewing the notes

• I can easily see which articles I took notes on because I can add a column header in Zotero to show the number of notes for each article.

• The notes are very quickly readable as plain text (versus hunting for notes on the PDF itself) and I can export them easily via BibTeX export. This retains all the notes I took in the BibTeX in case I need to migrate to another system later.

This system isn’t perfect but has worked well enough so far.

Apps I use for working more quickly

• Evernote

• 2Do - allows for complex todo lists, but also easy to use and intuitive. All my tasks are managed here.

• Screenshot Plus - Mac widget for quickly capturing screenshots (if like me you can’t remember the keyboard shortcuts)

Misc Apps I use

• Bartender - allows you to clean up and reorganize your (top) menu bar; especially useful on a 13” screen. (Also check out a free competitor called Vanilla)

• Moom - keyboard shortcuts for half-screen, full-screen, etc. like Windows has had since Win7. Magnet is an alternative that works well, though it is paid.

• Mousepose and IMovie - screencasts

• Tomato One - if I find it hard to be productive or am avoiding doing something, I revert to Pomodoro method with 40 minute sessions and 10 minute breaks

• Focus - for sometimes restricting internet browsing if I really can’t focus (usually combined with Tomato One)

• Safari for web browsing (I find the experience to be very visually smooth and pleasing, e.g., when paired with Trackpad Gestures. For example, a two-finger pinch shows all tabs in a window.)

• Pocket - for saving web pages to read later, and then usually never getting around to it

• Time Machine - not only for backups, but also for sometimes recovering past versions of files that might have gotten accidentally changed / overwritten.

• CrashPlan - online backup (also consider BackBlaze)

• Inbox When Ready - a Chrome extension that helps control the flow of your email (requires checking your GMail via Chrome)

• Spotify - music

• Pixelmator - image editing

• Not an “app”, but I subscribe to “10 things you need to know today” e-mail newsletter by TheWeek which contains enough news that I don’t need to check it throughout the day.