Favorite Tools of the Cantinistas

Cantina folks shared their favorite tools from post-it notes to Emacs. Tried and true to bleeding edge, here are some of our favorite things.

Editors

Emacs is ever popular if your fingers can bend in strange and interesting ways.

vi (or vim) keeps the flame war with Emacs burning. screen and tmux make life in the terminal better.

Sublime Text 2, while beta, maintains a strong following as a general purpose editor. Support for Sublime Text 2 plugins allows some nice extensions such as git support and even includes a nifty package manager for discovering and installing extensions.

TextMate (even with the mythical release of TextMate 2) still has popularity despite the rise of Sublime Text. Plugin support is good and other features not so much. AckMate provides ack integration.

Zen Coding allows “high-speed HTML, XML, and XSL coding and editing” with plugins for both Sublime Text 2 and TextMate.

A good general purpose editor should have great syntax highlighting for many formats, intelligent auto-indent, regex find and replace, and macro / script support. Whitespace should be spaces over tabs and the jury is out on 2 verses 4 spaces.

Note Taking

Evernote is killer for cloud-based notes on all your devices. Some dropped it due to a bad user experience sharing notes.

Markdown provides a clean, readable wiki format and has gained a lot of popularity with it’s use in github, Elements, and others. Textile is also worth throwing into the mix.

Org-Mode offers great note and task management for Emacs.

Docco is a simple way to get nice-looking JavaScript docs using Markdown. Rocco provides the same for Ruby.

Graphics and Images

Pixelmator is the smaller, leaner, cheaper Photoshop.

xScope is great for measuring, aligning, and inspecting on-screen graphics.

Skitch (now owned by Evernote) is the best tool I’ve seen for taking and annotating screenshots. Skitch for Android is available as well.

Wireframing

Omnigraffle is still tops. Protoshare is under review but the jury is still out. Axure is expensive and doesn’t seem to compete. Balsamiq is nifty but has a specific feel to the results and is good for quick wireframes but doesn’t go very far.

Email / Calendaring

Mac Mail and web-based gmail seem to dominate. Sparrow is gaining popularity but less so since the release of Lion.

iCal consistently has problems with Google calendar making the web-based version a favorite.

Browsers, Plug-ins, and Networking

Window Resizer for Chrome resizes the browser window to emulate various screen resolutions.

w3m is a favorite text browser, if you need one.

HTTP Client allows inspecting and debugging HTTP messages. Charles is a popular alternative.

Wireshark allows inspecting network traffic or just being evil.

Fake allows automating your browser.

bcat / btee pipes files to a browser.

Version Control and Diffing

Versions and Cornerstone are popular Mac SVN clients.

GitHub for Mac is self explanatory. Tower is a paid git client and gitx is a good, free alternative.

Kaleidoscope is great for visual (and text) diffs. ImageMagick compare is a command-line alternative. mogotest shows visual cross-browser comparison and testing. diffxml and Araxis Merge are worth looking at.

Stop, Collaborate, and Listen

Dropbox is king. Google docs is popular as well. Stay clear of Office 365.

Password Management

1Password seems to be the most popular. LastPass and clipperz are worth considering.

Low Tech

Stickies are great. Whiteboards are ubiquitous. Writing in screen dust is the laptop equivalent of the back window of a dirty minivan. Mechanical pencils have a surprisingly strong and passionate following.

Task / Time Management

Reminders is slick as is Things. Remember the Milk is a GTD favorite. Evernote is as well. You can’t go wrong with paper and pencil. Astrid is popular for social tasks and has an Android client. Supposedly Google calendar supports tasks.

Health and Fitness

RunKeeper and jog.fm are great for running. Daily Burn is great for tracking diet and exercise and has great app support. Noom for Android is also popular.

On the more ridiculous end, Sleep Cycle analyzes your sleep patterns and Brushy ensures you don’t forget how to brush.

Miscellany

prey will help protect against a stolen or lost device.

pry is a better Ruby shell.

What are your favorite tools?

[Read more on Dan's blog at http://mrdanadams.com]