Tech

We get giddy over customizing computers! This is an overview of some of the tools and technologies we've tried for our setup, inspired by beeps' blog.

Browser: Zen

A bit of history: We first "chose" Google Chrome on a school-issued laptop. Ad blocking is extremely important to us, so we switched to Firefox to get ahead of Manifest V3.

Later, Arc shook up the browser scene with bold new ideas about navigation and tab management. But it's Chromium-based, and automatically closes tabs on a timer, so we only used it secondarily to manage tasks with deadlines. Also, despite having actual innovations at first, the devs kept leaning further into "looking things up is too hard"-type AI nonsense, and have pivoted to creating a new browser, depriving Arc of a future and burning away their remaining trust.

Zen is the good parts of Arc but in the Firefox engine. That's all we wanted to begin with.

Maybe Firefox itself can win us back with updates like a vertical tab view and (finally!) tab groups. For now, Zen still has advantages over it, like an implementation of Arc's Peek feature, where you can ⇧ Shift + click a link to preview it in a temporary overlay instead of dedicating a new tab to it. I hope more of Arc's good ideas catch on and browser ergonomics get continued attention and innovation.

Extensions

• uBlock Origin has been our ad blocker for a while. But hopefully we don't need to tell you to use something like this. Web ads have always been dangerous, annoying, and a waste of the user's device's resources. The advertising industry has our utmost disrepect.
• The official Wayback Machine extension can archive pages automatically as you browse. If you're anything like us, install it now, and save yourself most of the despair of finding pages gone without a trace. For example, we were kicking ourselves for not trying it out until the very end of Cohost, as we could have been easily archiving our favorite posts the whole time. We also use a manual extension for archive.today, for domains blocked from the Wayback Machine, and for backing important pages up into multiple archives.
• Stylus lets you customize CSS. (For our less techie friends, that's the stylesheets that determine how a webpage looks.) It's another convenient way to tweak sites to your tastes, like by changing fonts, hiding unwanted elements based on their HTML attributes, or writing entire new themes.
• We use a few extensions to rein YouTube in. SponsorBlock color-codes the skippable parts of videos, and lets you automatically or manually skip them by category. It connects to a community database so you can mark and submit your own segments. Unhook lets you hide distracting parts of the interface, and even redirect from the home feed to your subscriptions. Enhancer offers some nice bonuses, like disabling autoplay, boosting slow videos beyond 2× speed, and showing the video in PiP when you scroll to the comments.
• Shinigami Eyes marks links to trans-friendly and transphobic groups and profiles. Even if you happen not to be trans, that's a decent heuristic for who it's safe and productive to interact with online.
• A lot of independent wikis are better and less bloated than their Fandom equivalents. Indie Wiki Buddy lets you know about such wikis and jump there. If we see you on mario.fandom.com instead of the Super Mario Wiki there will be hell to pay :3

MacBook

TBA

Utilities

On its own, macOS can feel somewhat sparse and obstinate, so we've collected a bunch of utilities to address that.

• We wanted BetterTouchTool since we got our own MacBook, and yeah, we really should've gotten it as early as possible. The potential for input method customization that it opens up is exciting, from adding the missing three-finger middle-click to the trackpad, to invoking commands and other utilities with hot corners, gestures, and key sequences.
• Our window snapping shortcuts are still set up in Rectangle. It has a bunch of window placement options, including centering, and lets us repeat left and right snaps to cycle between widths (1⁄3, 1⁄2, 2⁄3). With BTT, we also added gestures over the menu bar to invoke various Rectangle shortcuts from a tap or flick, inspired by Swish.
• Itsycal adds a small calendar preview accessible from the menu bar. Since the macOS clock now opens Notification Center for some reason, we set Itsycal to only show the date. With BTT, we can also open the calendar by clicking the very corner of the trackpad. (A Force click opens the Calendar app proper.)
• Ice can style the menu bar and auto-hide items that don't need to be onscreen all the time. We formerly used Hidden Bar, which is fine too. (macOS is desperately overdue for a native Expand button to show Menu Bar overflow. Its persistent omission boggles the mind.)
• We use Hyperkey to remap the ⇪ Caps Lock key to a combination of ⌃ Control + ⌥ Option + ⌘ Command, for easier access to two tiers of custom keyboard shortcuts (with and without ⇧ Shift).
• We wanted to use Logoer just to show an Aqua-era Apple menu icon. But it also has the option of replacing it with the current app's icon. That's, almost unfortunately, way too useful for us to go with the nostalgia kick after all.
• SlimHUD replaces the volume and brightness indicators with a thin bar that appears at the side of the screen, much like the iOS 13 redesign. We customized the colors and animations for an even closer match.

iPad

The iPad has been described as a magic sheet of glass. But interfacing with a big glass pane sucks, so we got a Paperlike. Past that, the interface is surprisingly fun to use; connecting a spare keyboard and mouse provides a bunch of redundant input methods that we can choose based on our mood from moment to moment, which always feels liberating. (Every method of text input without a physical keyboard is miserable, though.)

The Stage Manager windowing system is indispensable here. A quirk we grew to appreciate is the lack of pixel precision: windows snap to preset sizes and positions. We already rely on Aero-like window snapping, and we hate accidentally dragging a window some unknowable amount of pixels, knowing the OS has just saved that mistake as an invisible, unresettable user preference. We are so glad that iPadOS stripped out this particular fine control to make things like window sizing intentional and reversible. It's a shame that iPadOS 26 is walking this back for desktop-style overprecision. Guess we'll switch to relying on window snapping gestures.

The iPad is also useful as an extra screen for macOS with features like Sidecar. But that feels like an indictment with the state of iPadOS's supposedly "desktop-class" selection of big iPhone apps. While the iPad is something we use, we haven't found many ways to embed it into our flow yet.

Procreate

The main reason we got an iPad is to make art with Procreate.

We're forcing ourselves to stick to digital art to avoid logistical issues with physical space and organization. We used a screenless Wacom tablet with our laptop for a few years; it was perfectly serviceable, but we felt like we were hitting a skill barrier with the indirect input method.

Using Procreate does switch one sense of directness for another: now all the controls are touchscreen graphics. You can't use them by feel, you have to look away from your art. To fix this, we got an 8BitDo Micro controller, which is honestly right up our alley anyway. It has a Keyboard Mode; we map D-pad left to ⌘ Command + Z and so on. We took inspiration from the button controls in Flipnote Studio for some of the other mappings!

Of course, only keyboard shortcuts that Procreate supports can be mapped. Every command you can add to the QuickMenu should have a keyboard shortcut, but that's not the case. Hopefully the devs patch this in later rather than never.