Uses – Morgan Wattiez

It's amusing and eye opening to see what other people are using to get their stuff done. So like many folks at /uses (https://uses.tech/), I'm sharing below some of the tools I'm using daily.

Software

💻 Information system (OS): mostly Linux Ubuntu (work) and MacOS (ex-work, now rather for projects).
📮 Mail: Gmail and Hostinger. I'm looking for true privacy friendly alternatives to Gmail but it's not so easy.
💂🏻 Privacy Kill the Newsletter! and private email generator by DuckDuckGo.
📝 Notes: Obsidian + Signal 'Note to Self', and Shaarli.
✅ To-Do: Notes + Calendar events + my pocket notebook, Obsidian, Shaarli.
🔖 Bookmark: Wallabag, Shaarli.
📅 Calendar: Google Calendar for sharing various agendas with my partner. One for her events, one for mine, one for our common events (company, and both of us), one for the little one/school.
📖 News/stalking: I'm using Miniflux (and RSS-Bridge) + Changedetection to curate content, read news, track RSS feeds, follow blogs, and monitor changes in websites.
🌐 Browser: Brave. I don't trust Mozilla Firefox (whose existence depends on Google) but the appeal of extensions in Firefox would be great on mobile. Anyway I stick with Brave for now for it's advanced privacy protection.
🗣️ Blogging : WordPress (self-hosted), it's not as fast to load as a static site (pure HTML) but it saves me from the pain of having to deal with extra tooling and docs. It just works.
🔎 Search engine: DuckDuckGo, occasionally QuackQuackGo, even feedle. Bing and Google in last resort and if possible not directly. Look also the search engines in my /links.
📜 Word Processing: Google Docs, Obsidian.
🧮 Spreadsheet Processing: NextCloud (personal ones), Google Spreadsheets (shared ones).
📊 Accounting: Cloud Demat (much to my regret, my accountant is stuck with it but I prefer OkiOki or Bizzey).
🧾 Invoicing: InvoiceNinja.
📻️ Podcast & Music: Spotify, Navidrome, Last.fm, Rate Your Music.
💾 Files sync : Syncthing, Dropbox, Signal.
💬 Messaging: Signal, Session, Slack (work), WhatsApp (unfortunately everyone).
I don't trust Telegram nor WhatsApp nor Slack.
👨🏻‍💻 Code Editor/Text Editor - VSCode, Neovim. Usually with Ethan's Solarized Dark theme applied. And even if rich UIs are lovely, I'm a terminal nerd.
🤖 Automation, monitoring: Changedetection, n8n.
🪄 Productivity: all above and ChatGPT sometimes, also Tampermonkey, CLI/Scripts.
🔐 Password manager: Vaultwarden.
🖥️ Self-hosting web apps: Cloudron.
⌨️ Cloud Server/VPS: Contabo.

🔳 Terminal tools

I run most of the commands below within the comfort of Terminal on Linux or iTerm2 on Mac, Usually with Ethan's Solarized Dark theme applied. And even if rich UIs are lovely, I'm a terminal nerd.

asciinema - terminal session recorder.
bat - cat clone with syntax highlighting.
chezmoi - dotfiles manager.
colordiff - colorize diff output.
diff-so-fancy - human readable diff.
dive - explore docker layers.
fd - alternative to find.
fish - user friendly shell.
git-delta - syntax-highlighting pager for git, diff, grep, and blame output.
git-extras - git utilities.
htop - interactive process viewer.
httpie - modern CLI http client, alternative to curl.
hyperfine - CLI benchmarking tool.
k9s - CLI to manage your Kubernetes clusters.
lazydocker - manage everything docker.
lsd - next-gen ls.
lynx - text web-browser.
ncdu - better du (disk usage stats).
neovim - Vim-fork with better usability and extensibility.
ohmyzsh - zsh manager to unleash your terminal.
rclone - sync data, similar to rsync but between various cloud providers.
🔎 rg (ripgrep) - blazingly fast grep.
shellcheck - static analyzer for your shell scripts.
shfmt - shell formatter.
tig - git repo browser.
tldr - simple community driven manual pages.
wttr - the right way to check the weather.

Hardware

💻️ Home Laptop: Apple MacBook Pro M1 Max 32GB.
💻️ Work Laptop: Dell Precision 5550 with Ubuntu 22.04.
📱 Phone: OnePlusOne 10 Pro.
🎧️ Audio : Sony WH-1000XM4 Midgnight Blue + KLIM Nomad CD Player.
☕️ Coffee: Breville Barista Express. I drink my coffee mostly black and mostly espresso.
🖱️ Mouse??? Fuck the mouse, I'm a keyboard user.
⌨️ Mechanical keyboard: Mechanical ? No thanks. I don't need fancy keyboard yet, as long as my current keyboard is not noisy. And I don't play computer games, any keyboard is well.

Food & drinks

🍺Beer breweries: Cantillon, La Source, La Mule, L'Ermitage, L'Amère à Boire, Brussels Beer Project, Atrium.
☕️ Coffee beans: I like coffee beans from Wide Awake Coffee, and Cafés Windara.

Further

I recommend visiting https://usesthis.com/ it's like /uses but in the form of interviews.