Making changes to your development setup easier

As I'm occasionally assigned new projects at work and as those projects progress, I find the need to update my development environment on a regular basis.  Having the ability to customize my setup allows me to be more productive.

To that end, I have defined a few bash aliases which help make this process easier for me.  These aliases are defined in my ~/.bash_aliases file.

#  config bash

alias   cfgb='gvim ~/.bash_aliases'

# config vim

alias   cfgv='gvim ~/.vimrc'

# source my bash aliases to pick up any new changes

alias   redot='source /home/rod/.bash_aliases'

You'll notice that I have an alias to make changes to my vim setup.  It makes sense to also have a vim macro to read any new configuration settings or vim macros.  This macro is defined in my ~/.vimrc file.

" source .vimrc ro pick up any new macros

map \.  :source /home/rod/.vimrc^M

Default apps for 2023

Lately, I've seen a lot of the "what apps am I using" type posts, apparently prompted by a podcast episode.  You can see a collection of what a number of people are using here.  I find these interesting as they're a good way to discover new apps which I hadn't been aware of previously.  These are the apps I use for my iPhone, Mac, and Raspberry Pi at home as well as the Linux and Windows machines I use at work.

• Mail Client: Apple Mail, Outlook at work (barely tolerable but dictated by the IT team)
  
• Notes: Apple Notes for shared notes, Editorial for notes I don't want on the cloud (such as those containing sensitive information such as birthdays)
  
• Chat: iMessage
• Camera: Apple Camera, Night Capture for evening sky photos
• Photo Management: manual sync into directories on my Mac
• Photo Editing: Preview on Mac, IrfanView on Windows
  
• Calendar: Google Calendar - I like it for its ability to do custom repeats and for ease of having more than 2 notification reminders
• Browser: On Macs I use Safari for lightweight browsing for its ease of sharing bookmarks with mobile devices, Firefox for general browsing because it has a richer collection of security plugins.  At work I use Chrome (barely tolerable but dictated by IT).
  
• Backup: ChronoSync
• Read It Later: Instapaper
• RSS: Inoreader (web and app)
• News: RSS feeds from news sites which lets me keep up with events without being distracted by things I'm not interested in such as sports
  
• Podcasts: Overcast (great performance and the best UI of any app on my phone, bar none)
• Books: Kindle, Audible, Libby, Hoopla
• Database: Tap Forms (good sync between mobile and Mac)
  
• Personal Finance: GNUcash
• Password Management: 1Password - with 600+ non-trivial passwords to remember, this is a must
• Music - Apple Music, Remote app to control desktop from my phone
• Editing (code and general) - MacVim on Mac, GVim on work machines (Windows and Linux)
• X Servers - XQuartz on Mac, VcXsrv on Windows
• SCP client - WinSCP on Windows, scp from the shell on Linux/Mac machines
• Terminal emulation - putty on Windows and Linux machines