What do I use?

Hardware

Category	Device
Main Workhorse	16" M4 Pro MacBook Pro, Silver
Travel Computer	13" M5 MacBook Air, Starlight
Gaming Computer	Lenovo Legion 5i Gen 6, Released in 2021
Tablet of Choice	13" M3 iPad Air, Starlight

For more about how I utilize each of them, check here. Check this page for older devices I used to own and use.

Software of Choice

A lot of the software I use is available from a popular package manager, Homebrew.

Category	Software
Programming	Visual Studio Code (mostly), IntelliJ IDEA / CLion (for Java and C++ respectively)
Web Browser	Zen and Arc (main), Firefox (gaming computer)
Databases	DBngin, phpMyAdmin for MySQL, pgAdmin for PostgreSQL
Terminal	Warp primarily, iTerm2 otherwise
Audio	Audacity
Note Taking	GoodNotes

Web Browser

I very much prefer Chromium browsers. I used Google Chrome during the early years from around 2010, back when it was seen as a popular alternative to Microsoft's Internet Explorer. This was as such up until around early 2021 when I switched over to Microsoft Edge (I had tried using this earlier, but the keyboard shortcuts back then were hard to follow). Finally, I tried Mozilla Firefox properly for the first time in around mid-2024 - this was when I felt that there were some growing pains of losing what I had already been comfortable with on my computer. Fast forward to my MBP purchase in 2025, I had tried Vivaldi, Arc, Zen and Dia in an attempt to try something new that was not as stereotypical.

After using all of them, along with deciding which drawbacks I was willing to tolerate, here's my list of browsers I decided to keep using:

Zen

This came as an option after trying Arc for about 6 months. While Arc was a Chromium browser, Zen is practically a Firefox browser that just looks the same. It isn't the browser I stuck with for long (I switched to Dia to give an AI browser a try), but I'm in the process of switching back to Zen after some minor annoyances (ahem, keyboard shortcuts) adding up to make the experience there a little unbearable.

There are a few things which I either still don't prefer or annoy me, but I would still put up with at the moment:

• Cmd + S shortcut now delegated to hiding and pinning sidebar instead of saving documents or images (fixable; I have a rant about this for Dia)
• opening images or documents is practically the same as saving them instead of using a temp folder
  • it's a Firefox problem in general, but fixable across all of them
  • enter about:config in URL bar \(\rightarrow\) set browser.download.start_downloads_in_tmp_dir from false to true
• Inspector tool is just not the same (I could cry a river about this, but call it growing pains.. I'll hopefully get used to it)

Arc

I honestly wished The Browser Company kept working on this browser, even though technically in maintenance mode it will continue to receive security updates which are quintessential these days. That being said, this is the browser that made me fall in love with having one with very few distractions and the most screen real estate when surfing the web. Unless Arc gets discontinued for real without any maintenance, this browser's a good fit if you don't mind not having the latest features as they come out, and/or prefer stability instead (no new features means less things to go wrong nowadays).

What about Dia?

I did switch over to Dia from Zen temporarily, just to open myself up to the idea that we will be surrounded by AI browser whether we like it or not. For a lot of new features that would entice many AI or tech enthusiasts, they didn't persuade me that they are in any way essential for me.

One thing they did annoy me to no end - Arc and Zen introduced a(n) (initially) minor annoyance in relegating the typical Cmd + S shortcut for saving documents and images to hiding and showing the sidebar (of which made me very much prefer vertical tabs over horizontal ones); the new shortcut for saving documents and images by default now is Cmd + Shift + S. Despite this, I could flip the shortcuts between each other if I wanted to.

Dia, however, while also relegating the Cmd + S shortcut to the same thing for vertical tabs, does not have an option to allocate any keyboard shortcut for saving documents or images - if this was a prank to get the average Joe to use the in-built AI agent to do this for us while losing a few seconds waiting for it to parse the tokens in the process, I think they succeeded. Dia is by far the best (and only) implementation of an AI browser in my opinion (for how much it looks more minimal compared to those like OpenAI's Atlas and Perplexity's Comet), but as is right now I will favor priorities over gimmicks I can't feel drawn towards.

Mozilla Firefox

I still daily drive this on my Windows machine (given Arc and Dia are not options there and Zen isn't the best). Same problems as with Zen, just I prefer Zen's interface.

Terminal