GUI Apps
- ClipNinja — clipboard history menu. Pros: works system-wide, not just in IDE. Cons: you’ll need to find alternatives for Windows and Linux.
- Amphetamine — prevents the computer from sleeping during long-running tasks (downloads or AI processing)
- Hand Mirror — quick camera check before a video call
- Rancher Desktop — docker
- KopiaUI — backups
- Excalidraw — for diagrams
- Pixelmator Pro — image editor + some local AI features (background removal, for example)
- GitX — convenient for reviewing changed files before committing
- Ollama — for gpt-oss:20b and translategemma:27b, I don’t use others
- Spokenly — local speech-to-text (NVidia model)
- Raycast — AI chat with Ollama + various automations, app launcher replacing Spotlight, converter, calculator, … (will likely replace Magnet and ClipNinja)
- theJayTea/WritingTools — replacement for Apple’s AI, which works poorly with English and doesn’t work with Russian (unlike Raycast, works as a context menu for editable text)
Good But Didn’t Stick
- I usually don’t draw on screen, somehow forget about them when needed: Draw on My Screen EZ, ScreenBrush
- various local dictation apps (settled on another one, but these are fine too): Whispering, OpenSuperWhisper, MacWhisper
- CopyTranslate — switched to WritingTools (too narrow functionality)
- Magnet — window management (replaced by Raycast)
Ollama has alternatives: LM Studio, LocalAI, but it’s unclear why they’d be needed while Ollama is working fine.
Resulting Hotkeys
- Right Cmd — dictation
- Cmd+Shift+V — ClipNinja clipboard, mostly for VS Code after JetBrains, might switch to Raycast
- Option+Space — Raycast
- Cmd+Shift+ESC — toggle keyboard mode: F-keys or multimedia by default (via https://www.raycast.com/elonwoo/toggle-fn)
- Option+Shift+. — Writing Tools
- Ctrl+Tab — Screen Brush
CLI Tools
CLI Tools from Brew
- ncdu
- far2l
- vim
- zsh
- htop
- sloc
- ssh-copy-id
- imagemagick
- ffmpeg
- tree
Other CLI Tools
- https://worktrunk.dev/ — for parallel work with multiple agents
- https://github.com/sigoden/aichat — experiment, unclear yet if needed or not
- https://llm.datasette.io/en/stable/ — like aichat, but an alternative
- https://github.com/Linuxmaster14/telepipe — for sending notifications from console scripts to Telegram, including for LLMs
Example of working with aichat (translating text to a shell command):
~$ aichat -e "delete all .DS_Store files in subdirs"
find . -type f -name '.DS_Store' -exec rm -f {} +
? execute | revise | describe | copy | quit: (e)
Aliases (New)
gc='wt step commit'— automatic commit with AIwsc='wt switch --create --execute=myagent'— create a new worktree and launch a console agent
Worktrunk configuration for Ollama ~/.config/worktrunk/config.toml:
[commit.generation]
command = "ollama run gpt-oss:20b --hidethinking --think high"