tech/honourable mentions
Here is some software I use all the time for a variety of tasks. I think it’s nice to share, and as a way of giving recognition to what are mostly free open-source projects.
Research
- Knowledge management and notes with Dendron
- Citation and reference management with Zotero
- Git for source control and version management
Composition
- REAPER. My preference for a DAW due to the scripting interface.
- Max. Less so now, but still finds its way into various musicking.
- SuperCollider
- FTIS. My own framework for corpus exploration and composition
- HISSTools. Tools for convolution and IR processing.
- Alex Harker Max Objects. Excellent set of Max objects for various tasks.
- FrameLib. Frame-based processing in Max. I wrote the documentation builder for it and have contributed some other bits of code to the project.
- MeldaPlugins. An amazing set of free plugins. I recommend it as a great part of one’s toolkit.
- SoundHack. A very nice set of plugins. I am officially in love with compand++.
- Limiter No. 6. A good mastering limiter.
- ReaScripts help me to do various bespoke tasks in REAPER such as item manipulation, batch rendering and finding awful VST3s.
Web Development
- Svelte, for creating reactive websites. Seriously - Svelte is amazing.
- peaks.js draws all my audio waveforms on this website and provides lovely playback functionality
- audiowaveform for making binary data out of audio files
Coding
- VSCode. Although microsoft are certainly evil, VSCode is equally as pleasant to work with.
- Python
- Nim
- Omni
- lua
CLI Tools
- fish.
fish
is what using the command line should be. - ripgrep. A replacement to
grep
that is fast and a pleasure to use. - fd. I lost it… I lost it… oh,
fd
found it. - zoxide helps me to zoom around my file system with lightning fingers.
- pandoc for manipulating and munging formats to formats.
- restic creates encrypted backups for all my perishable work.
- kitty a really nice cross platform terminal.
Quality of life
- LuLU for controlling what my computer talks to
- Hammerspoon to help reduce friction where necessary. Scripts here
- Rectangle, because window management in macOS is criminally bad by default
- Karabiner Elements maps different shortcuts so I can use my keyboard how I want to (mainly disabling caps lock).
Gibgab
- Telegram for talking to friends mostly.
- Signal for talking to friends also, with a bit more privacy in mind.