I love simple and fast software. The kind that feels native to the platform you are using and tools that are almost invisible. Frictionless.

This is a list of the tools and services I find myself using most in my daily life nowadays. I keep using them for a reason. Few things are more distinct between people than personal taste, so I have kept myself from pushing them on family and friends, except on rare occasions.

Things 3

Things 3 is my favorite piece of software that runs on Apple devices.

This is my task manager, schedule and reminders system. It feels native, never freezes or crashes, and keeps working fast no matter how much of my context accumulates.

It has helped me manage everything from taxes, appointments, deadlines, mortgage applications, tracking investments, cat vaccination schedules, travel checklists and likely a lot more I don’t have to remember anymore.

I am a paid user (no other way to use it) on my iPhone and my iPad. Next, macOS?

Zed

Zed is a breath of fresh air in the world of code editors.

This is the fastest launching editor I’ve used on both Apple Silicon and Intel Mac platforms. It has AI features, which if you find distracting, can turn off with a toggle. It is written in Rust.

Coming from IntelliJ, and still using it most of the time, I just needed to activate the JetBrains keymap and everything works fine, just faster. Markdown editing, Mermaid graph rendering, even writing Java code with some minor formatting quirks, are a joy.

Even this own blog, I am writing on Zed these days, including this very post.

Ghostty

Ghostty is an awesome terminal I use as my daily driver.

Created by Mitchell Hashimoto (Terraform, HashiCorp), Ghostty is a fast terminal emulator and my daily driver on macOS.

Could he have predicted that developers are going back to the terminal in 2026 to spend most of the day working with Codex CLI/Claude Code?

It is written in Zig and it boasts very fast loading times and GPU rendering. I prefer it over the Electron GUIs of Claude and ChatGPT to talk to my agents.

Codex

Codex is the agent I use on my personal projects.

Launched by OpenAI as a response to Anthropic’s Claude Code, it has been my copilot in the tech I’ve been learning and developing. I currently use gpt-5.6-sol as my model. The fight back to Anthropic has been epic, and Codex/OpenAI has won a huge community of developers on X.

Its distinction from Claude Code and Google’s Antigravity CLI is that it’s the only harness of the three that is open-source. Reminder that while all three have OSS repositories (Antigravity, Claude Code), only Codex actually publishes its source code. Grok Build CLI recently became open-source too, likely pushed by its public image becoming under scrutiny for uploading entire users home directories to xAI servers.

I feel so empowered by Codex, I feel like there are fun times ahead.

uBlock Origin Lite

uBlock Origin Lite lets me see the internet that I want.

This is actually the alternative to uBlock Origin that the browser market made Raymond Hill build after MV2 was deprecated and later removed from Chromium. No good things come out of a monopoly.

According to its developer, uBlock Origin is the most effective on Firefox. Using Apple devices and platforms though, the arrival of the Lite version on the App Store last summer made it my Safari’s companion.

Browsing an internet without it would make me go back to a flip-phone.

NetNewsWire

NetNewsWire is a project with a long legacy, that I only discovered last year.

If you want to take a sabbatical from the algorithmic feeds, pick your favorite RSS feeds and subscribe to them.

It’s neat, fast and clearly made out of passion. From How to Support NetNewsWire:

First thing: don’t send money. This app is written for love, not money. :)

I like to have it in the set of tools I use, almost on a daily basis. My digital handpicked newspaper of the internet.

Honorable mentions

BBEdit

BBEdit is a bare-bones text editor built by Bare Bones Software.

Whenever I want to go back to the simpler days of Sublime Text, this is my Mac’s text editor I go to.

Babbel

Babbel has recently been my companion to learn Dutch.

I have only used it on my iPad, and it has succeeded in making the language-learning process a bit more joyful.

Apple TV

Apple TV is my favorite streaming service right now.

This has been in the making for a few years, after some great shows such as: Severance, Slow Horses, Pluribus.

The latest hits have been Widow’s Bay and the finale-approaching Cape Fear. If I had to keep one streaming service, this would be it.

The casts, acting, production, and the best streaming quality on home TV (4K Dolby Vision) make it one step ahead of the competition.

9292

9292 is my go-to public transport app in the Netherlands.

I don’t even have Google Maps on my phone. 9292 is a lot simpler, faster, and more reliable.

Apple Podcasts

Apple Podcasts is my commute companion.

The audio quality is in my opinion, better than Spotify, UI and UX a different world.

Some of the shows I’ve been listening to: The Pragmatic Engineer, Still Burning by Kent Beck, Jill on Money, and in Albanian: Besi Andi Podcast.