What Chris Uses

(Last updated July 2, 2026)

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 Bean trackpoint
• Apple iPhone 15 Plus

Software

This is for my day-to-day programming work

• MacOS Tahoe 26
• PhpStorm as my day-to-day IDE for PHP via paid subscription
• 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 pre-ordered an MNT Reform Next back in October of 2025 and it should be shipping sometime later in July. I wanted to use both an open OS (I have lots of experience with Linux) and wanted open hardware that I can upgrade myself without needing permission from Apple.