There are lots of great tools out there. Far too many to try. Here are the ones that I’ve tried, and found worth recommending. Mostly they’re

OS X

Developer Things

Quiver is a “Programmer’s Notebook”. I’ve recently switched to it from CodeBox which seems to have been abandoned by its developer. I’ve got some minor quibbles with Quiver, but overall it’s pretty nice and I’ll be bringing all my code snippets and reference material over to it.

Dash is excellent for anyone who needs to search language / framework docs semi-regularly.

MacVim because I can’t fathom why anyone who wants to use vim on a mac would limit themselves to using it in a terminal when they don’t have to.

Kaleidoscope It’s a great visual diffing app. If you use diff on anything resembling a regular basis, you should give Kaleidoscope a try.

Markdown

Marked 2 for previewing Markdown files and exporting them to other formats, this is the app you want. That being said, I’d only recommend it to people who really love Markdown. People who only use it occasionally probably don’t care enough to justify buying this.

Deckset It’s presentation software, but you build your presentations with Markdown. Yay. Not as full featured as I’d like, but it’ll let you build very nice presentations.

Flow Charting

OmniGraffle is the king of the flow charting apps. It’s awesome. End of story.

But…
Monodraw has earned a special place in my heart. Recently I had to wrap my head around a complicated data flow. When I was done, I created a flow chart in Monodraw and pasted it into the source code so that the next time I have to look at that code I’ll have a nice graphic to guide me through it.

Miscellaneous

Noizio is great for noisy work environments. Turn it on, along with some music and you won’t make out anything your coworkers are blabbing about. And no I’m not suggesting making everything so loud as to drown them out.

Day One This is a really beautiful app, and the iPhone version is great. The companion app on the watch looks like a really nice addition too. I haven’t been using it much, but it’s the kind of app that makes you want to use it.

Pixelmator Screw Photoshop. Get Pixelmator. It’s affordable, powerful, and exceptionally well made.

DaisyDisk Helps you figure out what’s taking up your disk space. I don’t need this very often, but when I do it’s invaluable.

Skitch If you need to make and annotate screenshots, this is the app to use.

Bartender Helps address an excess of menu bar icons.

Transmit If you deal with FTP, SFTP, S3, or pretty much any other file transfer system on a regular basis, then you want this app.

Screenflow Excellent, easy to use screencast software, that lets you go back and add really useful annotations, highlights, and more.

Multiplatform

Spacemacs “The best editor is neither Emacs nor Vim, it’s Emacs *and* Vim!”. I love Vim. I envy the extensibility of Emacs. This is the first implementation of Vim (technically it’s Evil) on Emacs that has come even close to working. Normally they piss me off within 30 seconds. This has me wanting to take the time to figure out how to replicate my vim workflows in it.

Scrivener Writing anything of significant length? This is what you want. Be sure to go through the tutorial. There are a ton of powerful features hiding in plain sight. Out of the way until you need them.

1Password It’s the best password manager out there, and they’ve had their code independently audited by security experts. Don’t even get me started on how ignorant / stupid it is for people to not be using a password manager.

Vim plugins

The list of plugins I’m currently using is generally in flux. I’m always trying to improve my vim setup. Check my .vimrc for the lastest complete list. Here are some that I think are definitely worth sharing by all.

Vundle Best vim plugin manager I’ve found.

Fugitive Spectacular git integration. If nothing else, check out the GBlame command.

Tabular Align your text! Make things more readable. Check out this vimcast for a good idea of what you can do with this.

tcomment lets you easily toggle if a piece of text is commented out or not.

airline it’s the successor to Powerline.

expand region is a Vim plugin that allows you to visually select increasingly larger regions of text using the same key combination. Doesn’t seem like much but in practice has proven pretty nice.

vim-renumber For folks who like to edit markdown in vim. This will renumber ordered lists for you.

Command Line

Git related

Oh My Git The best prompt enhancement I’ve found to tell you what branch you’re on, if it’s been pushed or not, and tons more. That link’s to my fork of the project, which has some visual tweaks. The original is here.

git-wtf Helps you know wtf the differences are between your current branch and the upstream branch it’s tracking.

The Fuck Every time you type out some long command and then git is all “did you mean…” because you made a typo? Yeah well, The Fuck fixes that. It picks up on the suggested correction, and let you type fuck to execute the command you meant to type.