A consistent by-product of periods of intense building (software, a book, a team) — really anything where I am heads-down focusing on the craft — is that all the utilities and habits surrounding building said craft get scrutiny.
Why? Because small imperfections or inefficiencies stand out when my brain is in build-it mode. Put simply, and as one example: Two keystrokes are vastly less than three over a long period of time.
By far, the most investment has gone into Raycast. I was a fervent LaunchBar enthusiast, but you can smell when an application is no longer supported, and LaunchBar has been in that state for years.
Raycast is way too much in terms of attempting to be an everything app, but on its journey there, it’s made itself quite configurable in every possible way you can imagine, which is good news for my fingers.
The one feature to rule them all, for me, is Hyper Key. The idea is simple: pick a key on your keyboard that is infrequently used — in my case, CAPS LOCK1. Combine that key with an easy-to-remember letter, and that fires up that application or script. The greatest hits for me:
- Slack (S)
- Ghostty (G)
- Messages (M)
- Calendar (C)
- Spotify (A — not memorable, but nearby)
- And so on.
Hyper+P plus “directory” fires up Claude Code in that directory in my Projects folder… of which there are many.
Perhaps the biggest win from an efficiency perspective is what each Hyper Key press does:
- Hyper Key + S — Fire up Slack — if Slack is not running, run it. If it’s active, bring it to the front
- NEXT Hyper Key + S — Hide (don’t close)
If I’ve placed all my windows correctly, this setup means I always get the same windows in the same spot — every time. macOS Finder has multiple competing sources of truth, which means it feels like windows randomly shift. And they do. And that is bizarre. This Raycast Hyper Key setup fixes that.
This app is vastly less important than Raycast. Its job is to prevent clutter in your menu bar. This doesn’t affect workflow, but it certainly affects distraction. I have everything that wants my attention in the menu bar hidden except for Date, Time, and the ellipsis provided by Bartender that, when clicked, show all the menu bar items.
At the time of this writing, macOS Golden Gate rearchitected the menu bar mechanism and broke every single menu bar manager. There is a beta build of Bartender 7, but after a few hours of tinkering, it doesn’t appear to get me back to a clean menu bar. Stay tuned.
My continued terminal app of choice. Actively developed. Incredibly flexible. It has that stench of intense productivity that I used to get from TextMate back in the day. Claude Code continues to be my robot of choice, and it plays nicely with Ghostty. There are too many tweaks to list here, but my top quality-of-life tweaks are:
- Script to switch between monospace fonts (currently, still: Inconsolata)
- Notifications when scripts finish during intense multi-tasking robot sessions.
- Session colors based on project and SSH state.
Honorable mentions:
- Tailscale — this gives me seamless secure pipes to and from my various Macs.
- Bear — my writing tool of choice — has an MCP — I use it incessantly.
- xScope — y’know — to align the things.
These apps, scripts, and ideas are listed because they’ve been tested. How? See, there are a lot more apps, scripts, and tricks that I’ve tried, but once I’ve landed them, the question is: do I learn them? It’s that when I use them, my brain gives me that shot of dopamine — yeah, this is better.
So I do it again.
- CAPS LOCK still works as you expect, click on, click off. It’s when I hold it that the Hyper Key feature works ↩︎
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