I’ve always been fascinated by good tools, let me just record those tools have amazed me and I regret I didn’t try them earlier.
Footrest & toning ball for my stiff neck
I’ve been suffered from neck stiffness for years, I know it’s because my sedentary lifestyle and work style, I can’t change them in a short time. I did notice whenever I sit in front of my desk, my hands put on the surface of desk, the pressure either goes to my shoulder or I lay down more it goes to my lower back, no other way around. Until I found the footrest, it only takes $10+ bucks, I can vivid aware some of my upper body pressure goes to my foot which is awesome.
I’ve found stretching my body every once in a while during the day is a good habit to relax my body, specially for my wonky stiff neck. All of sudden I notice the toning ball in grocery outlet only cost $5 bucks, I started using it as an accompany during stretch since then. The ball is so comfort and versatile, I like it. 😸
True color for Terminal Vim
I’ve always been bothered by the anemic UI support in terminal vim. It’s just so bland and primitive, before that I thought I don’t care about UI at all, it taught me I do care in a basic level. I turned to MacVim for years for the basic UI support. Now things will turn around, the terminal vim has better color and contrast then the MacVim, it might be a game changer, I might turn back to terminal vim and work with Tmux multiple windows and sessions for all my writing tasks.
Vim smoothie plugin
This plugin is recommend from email subscription of “Mastering Vim quickly”, at beginning I was suspicious of this unpopular plugin which just has just 100+ stars in Github then. I gave it a try, it struck me for the first few minutes❗.
I never thought the scrolling in Vim should be smooth, but why not 😄? The user experience is so good, I can’t understand how I could I tolerate the bouncing jump, I can never go back.
Google photos
I went to Google photos just for the unlimited photo uploading for free (with some photo quality losing which is acceptable for me). As a person not that sensitive to privacy, I like Google a lot. I can lost or break my phone anytime, the most valuable assets are the photos/videos in my phone, it’s better have a cloud backup, automatically, painlessly. That’s a big mentally relief.
The feature abundance of Google photos really amazed me, I like it!
Tig & Git rebase interactive from Git
I’ve always loved Git, I admire the stability, versatility and powerfulness from Git so much (Tho I started thinking Git does have bug as well, it struck me again since Git as an open source software we use all the time, but we almost assume it doesn’t have bugs).
But I’m kind of getting sick of the inconsecutive sequential commands in Git, the most notorious is the git stash, it’s just so inconvenient to check them up or clean them, lots of time we end up with tons of stash list we even can’t tell what are those shit inside, and we had to drop them all in batch which is awful practice. Another one like showing the content in the commit one by one is just drudgery work in terminal.
I’ve always loved those commands have the simplicity and easy to pipe ability in terminal, I thought I don’t care about UX much, Tig changed my idea, I do care. Tig provide the nice interactive terminal UI interface, I can make lots commands in consecutive, that’s awesome!
Another one is git rebase interactive, I’ve been amazed by how powerful and well-thought out about this subcommand. It might worth taking another post to illustrate, it gives me the ability and granular control of change history, like dancing in my repo, it’s so much fun.