What I actually use day to day. This is a snapshot, meant to go stale, and that’s part of the point.
Last meaningful update: 2026-06-19.
Working on one thing at a time is a deliberate choice, not something I do because the hardware makes me. I find single-focus the better way to work: full attention on one app, everything else out of sight. The lean machine just happens to suit it.
I’ve tried the other end of it too, multiple monitors up to three, tiling, IDEs with panes. This is where I’m settling.
The principles:
I also keep the font relatively large. Partly it’s the same focus instinct: less on screen means more of my attention on the part I’m actually reading. But it doubles as a gentle code-reading heuristic. A big font makes complexity expensive to read, so I feel its cost sooner. When a single piece of logic won’t sit in one screen, I treat that as a prompt to ask whether it should be broken up, not proof that it’s bad. Length isn’t complexity, plenty of long code is perfectly simple, so it’s a question worth asking rather than a verdict.
The constraints do shape the tooling, though: limited RAM and a single screen push me to keep window management and terminal multiplexing tight. I came from i3 on Linux, but even there I didn’t really tile; I leaned on its fast keyboard-driven switching between full windows, and that’s the feel I wanted back. I tried Aerospace and yabai, but neither got close. So I stopped trying to recreate it at the OS level and pushed the workflow into the terminal instead: