What Chris Uses
(Last updated August 6, 2025)
A common question a lot of developers get about almost anything they are doing is "what are you using?". In that spirit, here is a list of things I am currently using.
Hardware
- 2021 Apple MacBookPro with M1 Max chip. 64 GB RAM, 1 TB Drive
- Apple Studio Display monitor
- Kinesis Advantage2 LF ergonomic keyboard with modded QMK controller
- Ploopy Classic Trackball
- Apple iPhone 15 Plus
Software
This is for my day-to-day programming work
- Sequoia 15.5
- PhpStorm as my day-to-day IDE for PHP via paid subscription
- PyCharm for some Python coding at work
- NeoVim for everything else (like this document)
- Homebrew to manage OS-level dependencies
- iTerm2 as my terminal emulator
- Alfred as my launcher/helper
- Safari as my browser (I use Chrome at work because they only support it)
- Atuin for shell history and searching
- Docker for containerization via Podman
- This blog is generated using Sculpin
Evaluating
I have been giving a lot of thought as to what my next laptop and/or mobile phone will be. I am so heavily invested in Apple's ecosystem that leaving would be painful both for me and my immediate family as we have gotten used to all being on the same platform when it comes to mobile devices. I make heavy use of FaceTime and Messages, so I have to figure out what happens when I cannot use them.