Brett’s Favorites 2025

It’s time for my yearly roundup of my favorite tools, hardware, and projects. I’m combining everything in one post this year. You might find something new, or you might just have your own preferences validated. Feel free to add your own suggestions in the comments!

It’s been an interesting year. I lost my job in April, and have spent the remainder of the year furiously coding, mostly on Marked 3. A lot of my top picks for the year are a result of that.

macOS Apps

Cursor

As skeptical as I am about AI in the world in general, I’ve almost mastered getting great results from Copilot and Cursor, Cursor being my tool of choice. Claude is good, but I like the interface of Cursor better.

I should also mention cmux, which has been helpful, but a lot of what I originally liked about it has already been incorporated into Cursor.

Cotypist

A little more AI. This one offers predictive text anywhere you’re typing. It’s very intelligent and generally completes my words and sentences like it’s reading my mind. It’s especially useful in Cursor, where it completes variable names and writes prompts basically magically for me.

Tower

More great improvements this year from my favorite Git client. The UI keeps getting better. They added support for Graphite (stacked PRs), plus other advanced functionality. Tower even released a rebuilt version of git-flow (git-flow-next)

One thing I discovered is that if you paste a full commit message into the commit subject field, with the message on the first line, a blank line, and then the commit body, it will automatically format it for you, breaking the body into the notes field. I have Cursor write my specialized changelog commits for me, then just paste them into Tower, where I have full control over what gets staged and committed.

Kaleidoscope

Still my favorite diff tool. I love it for resolving merge conflicts, but also for things like directory comparison/merging and image diffing. The image diff in Kaleidoscope got a huge update this year and is pretty spectacular.

KindaVim

This nifty utility lets you enter a limited “Vim mode” in any text field. I use it everywhere, allowing me to use Vim navigation when I’m typing in places like nvUltra or iTerm.

You can use b and e to move to word boundaries, f and t to jump to characters, and even dd or d$ to delete text. a and i work for returning to “insert mode” (ending Vim navigation), as well as o and O.

LeaderKey

Another really handy tool. I use LaunchBar for most app launching and navigation, but for some reason I’ve really enjoyed assigning key sequences to specific apps and URLs. With LeaderKey I can just hit Hyper-A, f, q to launch MailMate (I know it’s not mnemonically intuitive — long story). Once you have the muscle memory for it, it makes navigating and launching super fast.

I believe you can achieve the same effect with Keyboard Maestro conflict palettes, but LeaderKey is super easy to configure and, well, free¹.

DEVONthink

I’ve been a DEVONthink owner for over a decade, but never fully invested in it until this year. Researching my own health issues, saving my reading highlights, and creating a knowledgebase of PDFs and web pages has been really useful. And holy moly DEVONthink has an extensive feature set for building your database exactly the way that works for you.

The thing that really made me love it is that I can integrate everything with my plain text notes (in nvUltra), syncing between the two with zero effort.

Mona

I’ve deleted my Twitter account (yes, I refuse to call it X) and my Threads account. I dug in entirely to Mastodon, and after trying a bunch of native apps, I found Mona and it blew me away. Great functionality. You can find me on Mastodon at ttscoff@hachyderm.io and on Pixelfed (Instagram alternative) at ttscoff@pixelfed.social. Come find me with whatever client you choose.

I had 5x as many followers on Twitter than I do on Mastodon, but I get way more interaction on Mastodon than I ever did on Twitter. It’s a vibrant and active community and you should join if you haven’t.

TaskPaper

I know it’s not actively developed anymore, but I still rely heavily on TaskPaper for organizing my project todos. I keep a separate TaskPaper file in every project directory, which I interact with via Next Action, but when I want to manage the todo list, TaskPaper is still my go-to. I love OmniFocus for the rest of my life, but for coding projects, TaskPaper rules.

Typeface

I use the Setapp version of Typeface for all my font management these days. I spent years paying for expensive font management software, but none of the major players have kept up, and they’re mostly bloated apps these days. Typeface is a clean interface for viewing large font collections, with great preview and typography tools, and easy activation and deactivation of font families.

Hookmark

Hookmark is crazy useful, once you get in the habit of linking things. It lets you link anything to anything, and easily navigate between the current item and related documents, web pages, todo items, lines of code, and more. If you want to purchase, here’s my affiliate link.

If you’re a developer, check out this blog post for ways Hookmark is a vital tool for coding.

MailMate

I try pretty much every email client that comes out, but nothing has tempted me away from MailMate. It’s so powerful and flexible that I pay twice for it.

iTerm

Similar to email clients, I try every terminal emulator that comes out. There are a lot of cool options, but none of them have all the features that iTerm provides. It’s another one that’s free but I pay for anyway.

Setapp

There are a bunch of apps on Setapp that I use — more than enough to justify the cost. Marked is on there, and v3 will be automatically available to subscribers. I won’t list all of the apps, but check out the apps list to see what all you can get.

One highlight is CleanShot X, which is still the only screen capture app I need. It does everything so elegantly.

Another indispensable tool is Paletro, which gives me a type-ahead search of all menu items for the current app. I hit ⇧+⌘+P and access any function I need, in any app.

I also use Setapp for: TaskPaper, Typeface, BetterTouchTool, Permute, Downie, AlDente Pro, Ulysses, Forklift, Timing, NotePlan, Dash, CodeRunner, Default Folder X, Soulver, HoudahSpot, In Your Face, Hookmark, BoltAI, IconJar, Unite, SSH Config Editor, Trickster, KeyCue, and MindNode Next.

I own a lot of these apps outside of Setapp, but I use the Setapp version of those because it means the developers also gets a chunk of my subscription fee.

Web

Kagi

I just switched to Kagi as my default search engine at end of 2025. No ads, better AI stuff, great keyboard navigation, and you can report and exclude AI slop sites from your search results (which was my primary reason for switching). It’s a paid service, but it’s worth $5/mo (or $10 with unlimited searches), and you can also get a family plan that gets 6 people professional access for even less per person.

Readwise

I’ve been paying for Readwise all year. It’s an awesome way to handle read-it-later lists, with highlighting, tagging, and note-taking. I save all long-form articles I want to read to Readwise, and I use it as my RSS reader as well. I can sync it with other apps, turn highlights into flash cards, and I can access all of my reading on my Mac, iPhone, and iPad.

The Reader app works with your Readwise reading list, and offers a great reading experience with full keyboard control.

The browser plugins make saving articles and highlighting text right on web pages a breeze.

Apache Answer

I’ve switched Marked support over to Answer. I lost a little functionality like the ability to reply to email notifications and have the response go to the ticket instead of the user, but overall I’m finding it better than my previous Tender setup. Tender hasn’t been updated in like 10 years and their customer support is poor. Answer is free, and I run it on PikaPods for a couple bucks a month.

linkding

I’ve completely replaced Pinboard with linkding, running on my Synology and publicly accessible. With my card-based custom layout and complete API, it’s an excellent bookmark manager.

Umami

I’ve long used Fathom for privacy-focused web analytics, and it’s still an excellent option, but I’m running Umami in parallel right now. It’s a fantastic interface with lots of extra data, still completely privacy focused.

SaneBox

SaneBox has made my list for years. I’m so used to it tidying my email workflow that I don’t even think about it anymore, but would sincerely miss it if it were gone.

SaneBox sorts your email into trainable folders, automatically cleaning out your inbox so it only contains important emails. You can scan your @SaneLater folder when you have time, and you can train it to sort things like newsletters or promos into folders you may or may not ever look at.

Use this link to get a $25 credit.

iOS

I mostly use my iPhone for texting and gaming. And I play mostly the same games I’ve played for years, so I don’t have a long list of new stuff to share here. I use a ton of apps, but not many new or exciting ones, aside from this short list.

Drafts

I also really dug into using Drafts this year. When I wake up in the middle of the night with an idea, I just open Drafts and type it up to get it out of my head so I can fall back asleep. Then I can easily check it on my Mac when I’m up, and use Drafts actions to send it where it needs to go.

I use the Drafts Mac app as a scratchpad for what I’m going to do next when working on a project. It’s especially handy for sketching out AI prompts while another one is working.

Impressia

A great little client for Pixelfed. I do most of my Pixelfed interactions via Mona (it’s just a Mastodon server), but Impressia and the Pixelfed app are great for browsing.

Paprika

Paprika is the best recipe manager I’ve ever found. I’ve used it for a decade and it’s well-maintained and great for saving recipes, creating and sharing shopping lists, and for actually cooking in the kitchen with checklists and timers.

Super Monsters Ate My Condo

Still one of the best games I’ve ever played. As of 2025 it’s available in Apple Arcade.

Threes

I spend more time in this app than I do in any other. It’s a perfect puzzle game. It’s been around for as long as I can remember. It’s available on Arcade now, but the classic version is better for reasons I won’t go into.

Zen Pinball Party

This is OK on iPhone but great on iPad. A whole bunch of different pinball tables. The physics and gameplay differs between tables, so it’s really a bunch of apps in one. I generally focus on one table at a time and get really good at it, moving on when I get 3 stars or feel like I’ve reached my potential. I’ve cycled through most of them repeatedly.

Spark

Spark is my email client of choice on iPhone and iPad. It’s quite powerful, easy to use with multiple layouts, and has great snooze and quick reply features.

Spark incorporated more AI this year, but I don’t use it. I don’t think I’ll ever want AI to write emails for me.

Hardware

Living on unemployment and not having Marked 3 or nvUltra out yet, I haven’t had a lot of extra cash for hardware. I invested in a few things, though.

Homepod Mini

I’m really late to this scene, but I’m finally ridding my house of all Amazon products, and the Homepod was the least of all evils when it comes to home assistants. I’ve only purchased the minis at this point, and they fulfill all my needs just fine. There’s a little more latency than I had with Alexa, but far fewer privacy concerns.

I’ll be honest, my primary use for an assistant is controlling multiple timers in the kitchen hands-free. Siri is good at that. And the sound quality for playing music while cooking is exceptional.

M4 MacBook Pro

This is the greatest machine I’ve had since the 2012² MacBook Air, which I long considered Apple’s best product. I still love my first-gen Studio, but the combination of speed, battery life, and portability make the M4 MacBook a killer machine.

I have my Mac Studio paid off, but I’ll be paying on this beast for a while.

StarTech.com 4-Port USB-C Charging Station

I needed a powerful charging hub that could charge my laptop, phone, and iPad all at the same time, and I needed it to be mountable. I used to use nano tape to attach a charging hub to my bedside table, but to get a hub powerful enough to handle all these new devices, you have to get one that weighs too much to stick with tape. So I needed one I could screw in. This is the best one I found, complete with VESA mounting plate.

Projects

Bear & Glass

Christopher Gamblée Wallendjack and I launched a consulting firm this year. We’re still getting a foothold, but I’m excited about the possibilities. If you’re looking for help with automation and streamlining your business, drop us a line for a free consultation.

Readwise to DEVONthink

This script runs on my always-on Studio, and as I create highlights in Readwise, they automatically show up as annotated Markdown documents in my DEVONthink database. It’s been a really handy way to save articles.

SearchLink

I added URL Previews and link shortening to SearchLink this year. It’s still a tool I use every day and I think it might be the most useful thing I’ve ever created.

Off White

My stupid color picker for barely off-white and -black colors, now with gradients.

RNKD

This was a project I built for my own needs but made public. It allows you to create polls with text and images, and then share them with ranked choice voting. There are other polling services, but you often can’t use images (which is important for getting design feedback), and I couldn’t find any that offered ranked choice, which offers more usable results than just simple voting.

SVG Viewer

I wrote the BT SVG Viewer WordPress plugin for Allison Sheridan. It lets you embed large SVG diagrams in your posts, with full navigation, zooming, and text search. It was a fun project.

I also made a Jekyll plugin version with an editor that generates Liquid tags for you.

md-lipsum

I made a massive v4 update to my Markdown lipsum generator, and also published the random-words gem for generating your own tools.

Ripple

I went down a rabbit hole creating indeterminate progress indicators. This Ruby library and accompanying CLI is the result.

Apex

This in an ongoing big project: I started building my own Markdown processor late in the year. Apex is designed to be a permissive Markdown processor that incorporates syntax from man other tools into one unified processor. Pandoc, Kramdown, CommonMark, MultiMarkdown, plus advanced table syntax, index support for multiple syntaxes, and full bibliography support.

NA

I made a lot of updates to Next Action, my tool for command-line management of TaskPaper files. Among other improvements, I added support for TaskPaper search syntax, and updated my TaskPaper to MD script.

Howzit

My project documentation and task runner got a ton of updates. This is another tool I use daily. I’ve taught Cursor how to write Howzit-compatible build note files, so after I scaffold out a new project, it can automatically generate the build notes with runnable topics for me based on the project requirements.

Marked 3

As I mentioned, most of my time in 2025 has gone to Marked 3. It’s an insanely huge update to Marked 2, with completely rewritten DOCX, Scrivener, CriticMarkup, PDF export, writing tools, and much, much more. Coming soon, and the beta is public!

nvUltra

Fletcher and I made a lot of progress on nvUltra this year. The final piece of the puzzle should be solved by some things I’ve built for Marked, and as soon as that’s public I’ll start porting them to nvUltra, hopefully getting it out the door pretty quickly after the Marked release. The beta is basically public at this point, just contact me through the website for an invite.

Those are my highlights at the end of 2025. Not nearly a complete list of all the great apps and services I’ve tried and used this year, of course. Share your own favorites on the forum!

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