Alfred

I would recommend using Alfred, even without buying the power-pack it has very useful clipboard snippets:

This way you can save commands that you’re using frequently and find them by typing “keywords” and when you press “enter” it’s paste into your clipboard/terminal. Very useful – especially when you work remotely on nodes in the cloud where you don’t have all your aliases defined.

I think that only if you buy the power-pack – you can use the workflows as well:

The great thing about it is, that with one command/shortcut you can open multiple windows in your browser, open a terminal and connect somewhere, and basically do multiple operations simultaneously.

This is very useful in different scenarios, for example, when you are in emergency situation – it can both save time *and* make sure you’re not forgetting anything. For example, when I get paged for an incident I open the terminal and connect to our production bastion, open our public channel in hipchat to make sure we didn’t get any reports about the incident from other people in the company, open a tab in the browser with our dashboard and etc.

But Workflows are great not only in emergency situations, for instance, we have a service that, given a node-id – it provides all the information about the node (aws-account/region/instance-type/asg/etc) as well as provides links to Asgard and some other stuff. So in Alfred I have a workflow with a shortcut, and now all I have to do is type:
“loc <node-id>” (short for “locate”) and it opens that service in a new tab in my browser.

Alfred has many other features which I haven’t yet explored, but in case you decide to try it out here’s one very important tip:

under “advanced” tab there’s a “set sync folder” button. Set it to save your stuff under dropbox (or any other cloud-drive). This way you’re making sure that:

1. you can use your Alfred setup with multiple computers
2. it’s always backed-up – if anything happens to your computer – you haven’t lost anything (all your shortcuts, clipboard, workflows etc).

Even without using multiple screens I find this app very useful: it provides keyboard shortcuts to resize windows, center them in the screen, and when you’re using multiple monitors – move them from one screen to another and back really easily. And yes, I agree, it is annoying you have to pay for something that you get for free as a Windows user, but I think that Apple users (unlike Windows users) are used to pay for stuff they need/want…

Captures screenshots of all/part of the screen, menus, etc. And then lets you edit and save/embed them. This app is free and I’m using it all the time – the screenshots in this post were done by Skitch!

Thanks to JS who introduced me to Alfred & Sizeup!

Disclaimer: I’m not affiliated with any of the applications above, nor I am receiving any kind of commission/royalties/etc!

 

Mosh is a command-line tool that replaces SSH. The main advantage of this terminal application is that it keeps the connection active, so even if you close your laptop, pack it in your bag, travel somewhere, open your laptop again – and you’re still connected to the same session!

Note: this may be an advantage for the lazy developer (me) but it’s also a disadvantage from security perspective!