It’s not good to judge a book by its cover but I always judge someone by their comupter setup, so here’s mine, judge away.

Device

My preferred device has always been a laptop as I can’t seem to sit still. I’ve taken it with me through different countries, used it as a personal computer as well as a work computer, tore the keyboard and watched movies on it and backpacked around with it. The laptop is great as it allows you to work in cafes which seems to be the quintessential need of a modern programmer/entrepeneur.

I currently use a Surface Pro 3, i5 with 8GB RAM.

Mouse

As a mouse at my more permanent locations I utilise the logitech trackball mouse which allows movement via a trackball positioned under the thumb. It supossedly reduces RSI but it does make my thumb hurt on ocassion, also not great for gaming. A big benefit is that you can use it in bed, something I’ve definitely taken advantage of when I’m feeling especially lazy.

I’ve always kept sensitivity at max, I guess I have a need for speed (whoosh!). This can be a little painful but for really finicky things like photo editing the combo of right-thumb on trackball, left-thumb on trackpad actually works pretty well if it does take some time getting accustomed to.

Keyboard

My keyboard is set to Dvorak, of course. On my device the keyboard can’t be changed easily so I still have the QWERTY layout however for the permanent stations with external keyboards I like to rearrange the keys permanently to Dvorak which does make my life a little easier.

I’ve also gone and swapped the key mappings for the Ctrl, Shift and CAPS keys. The CAPS key has been removed and everything shifted up which means the left-pinky isn’t required to stretch so far, a nice change.

Screen

I strongly believe having two screens greatly improves productivity. As such, I like to always have a dual-monitor setup when working.

To avoid ruining my eyes when working at nights I use f.lux which adjusts the colour of my computer display to match the lighting around. Basically it gets yellow towards the evening. As a user, you hardly notice it, but when you compare screens with someone the difference is astounding.

Browser

Chrome, but I really like Edge and try to use when I can.

On Chrome I have the addition of the Vimium browser add-on which allows you to use Vim like shortcuts to navigate the web without a mouse. The best being the typical up and down scroll of Vim and the h-key which allows you to navigate any link on the page. It’s a great addition and I recommend it to all!

I use the Stylish add-on to customise the css of websites I view, the main use being to enable dark themes for things like Github, Google, Youtube, etc.

For reading websites I have the Spritze-inspired Readline add-on which allows for much faster reading speed on big articles.

IDEs

Python: PyCharm, Jupyter Lab Javascript: Visual Studio Code

For each of these IDEs I have a vim add-on to enable vim features.

Tools

SOCLI - A command line interface for Stack Overflow that allows for quick answers to basic questions. jrnl - A command line journal for keeping a record of my daily happenings.