Most people have strong views about what they keep in the digital backpack. The below is the tooling I like to use and can recommend:

• Bear for notes; on app store; fremium
  • CommonMark-conforming Markdown
  • Solarized dark colour scheme
• Markoff for quick preview of Markdown files; on app store; free; alternatively:
  • Marked is an alternative with a few more bells and whistles; proprietary; available using brew using brew install --cask marked
  • StackEdit is a very good in-browser Markdown editor with previewer which includes KaTeX and Mermaid support; web-based; freemium
• Anaconda/Miniconda to nicely set up Python environments and get libraries installed and working together; free and open source; I usually use miniconda and add libraries as required; available using brew using brew install --cask miniconda
• Jupyter notebooks; free and open source; probably the best way to use this is with anaconda or miniconda
• nbviewer-app for quick preview of Jupyter notebooks; free and open source; available using brew using brew install --cask jupyter-notebook-viewer
• Visual Studio Code as an IDE; free and mainly open source; available using brew using brew install --cask visual-studio-code; I can recommend the below plugins with VSC. VSC works very well with plain Python and ok with Jupyter notebooks, although not as stable as
  • Vim plugin — Vim emulation
  • Markdown All in One plugin — Markdown plugin
  • Markdown Preview Mermaid Support — Adds Mermaid diagram and flowchart support to builtin markdown preview; very useful if you want to add flowcharts to your Markdown files and visualise them as you go
  • Night Owl — theme
• NeoVim + MacVim as editors; both free and open source; the former for use in the terminal, the latter because it’s nice to have a GUI for tabs etc. Limited reasons to use both rather than one or the other, except it makes sense to have an editor in the terminal for git commit messages. If I had to plump for just one it would probably be MacVim, but this is only because my ~/.vimrc is already set up
  • Solarized dark colour scheme
• prezto + zsh for the shell, with keybindings set to vi and the theme set to sorin in the ~/.zpreztorc
• Trello keeps track of tasks; web-based; freemium
• GitHub keeps track of source code; web-based; freemium