Stuff I Recommend You Use

Arjun Panickssery

16 Stuff I Recommend You Use

by Arjun Panickssery

7th Feb 2023

3 min read

2

16

This is a linkpost for https://arjunpanickssery.substack.com/p/stuff-i-recommend-you-use

Inspired by the listicles past:

You’ll see a lot of stannous fluoride toothpaste, electric toothbrushes, sleep masks, and various brands of computer mice, mechanical keyboards, laptops, and headphones—and sometimes password managers, chairs, monitors, and supplements.

I’ll avoid dramatizing the particular brands of routine products that I happen to use. I use a Logitech G502 wireless mouse and Jabra Elite 75t earbuds and like them but it’s not as if I’ve ever owned another mouse to which I can compare mine’s effectiveness. The exceptions are Google Calendar, Todoist, Zotero, and Obsidian, whose main alternatives—except for Roam in the case of Obsidian—I’ve tried and rejected. I’ll stick to products and tools whose possibility you might not have considered at all.

AutoHotkey Mappings

I have Caps Lock remapped to the Escape key (I have Left Alt + Caps Lock remapped to Caps Lock but I never use it). The normal Escape key is a big stretch away and you’ll be using Esc a lot with the Vimium Chrome extension (see below).

I also map “==-” to “—” so that I can type em dashes quickly. When I made this change, I almost immediately started using dashes much more often.

I have “-->” mapped to “→” but I don’t use this one much. In some fonts, the right arrow looks very small and unpleasant. It’s nice on Twitter though.

Capslock::Esc
LAlt & Capslock::Capslock

; em dash
:*?:==-::{U+2014}

; right arrow
:*?:->>::{U+2192}

Chrome Custom Search Engines

Right-click the address bar in Chrome and click “Manage search engines and site search.” Scroll down to site search and click add. This lets you create shortcuts for pasting text around your search query. The one I use most often is my Wikipedia shortcut:

Shortcut: w

URL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%s

The “%s” takes the place of your query. Whenever I want to search for something on Wikipedia I just hit CTRL+l → “w ” and then the name of the Wikipedia article.

Some others that I use (title—shortcut—URL):

Dictionary—m—http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/%s
Spanish Dictionary—sd—http://www.spanishdict.com/translate/%s
Etymology—e—https://www.etymonline.com/word/%s
Synonym—s—https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/%s
Rhymes—rz—http://rhymezone.com/r/rhyme.cgi?Word=%s&typeofrhyme=perfect&org1=syl&org2=l&org3=y

There are also three I use often without any query, just as a URL shortcut:

I use “z” as a shortcut for the URL “data:text/html, <html contenteditable>” which just opens a notepad in the browser which you can save as HTML
I use “d” as a shortcut for “http://doc.new” which opens a new Google Doc
I use “ss” as a shortcut for “http://sheet.new” which opens a new Google Sheet

Vimium Chrome Extension

Vimium lets you navigate Chrome without having to use the mouse much. You can scroll up and down with j and k, go back and forward in history with H and L, and navigate between tabs with J and K. Most usefully, you can open links by pressing f (or F to open the link in the same tab) and pressing the keys that appear over the link or button that you want to click. This will make sense when you try it.

Lock Laces

These elastic laces that I don’t have to tie could save me hundreds of hours over the course of my life, I guess.

Keychain Products

Rolling Square inCharge 6 portable cable
Gerber Shard keychain tool (I had a Spyderco bug before the TSA took it; this is better anyway since I can still cut cardboard with the pointy end and it’s easier to open bottles with)
I have a keychain portable charger (can’t find the exact brand but it’s similar to the image) but it might not be worth it; it charges slowly and bends easily