2011 brought a slew of new utilities to my table:

1Password Sign up for 100+ services, and you’ll soon find yourself forgetting passwords all over the place. 1Password lets you offload credentials to it, and later have them magically served back to your browser of choice through the magic of a keystroke. Did I mention that it can suggest new passwords when you sign up for new services? Or that it syncs to Dropbox? It’s better than sliced bread.

Alfred Being a keyboard lover, I’m having a hard time accepting that many parts of Mac OS X requires me to use the trackpad on my computer. Enter Alfred. This little beast shows Spotlight how an interface for search and browse should be done. Additional benefit - it lets you choose what kind of action it should perform on the search result in question (wanna show the app bundle’s contents instead of opening it? no problem!). Searching for files is just the tip of the iceberg… hook it up to your scripts/services of choice, and assign keyboard shortcuts to operations you perform more often than others. Want to search for that source file in the (giant) Chromium repository? No problem! It’s like someone took Automater, Spotlight and the concept of services in general and put them all in a mixer and came up with the most delicious smoothie ever. Thanks Andrew, my life would be some much more cumbersome without you.

Day-O Nothing fancy - just a menu bar clock replacement, with the important addition of a simple calendar view. Can’t understand why Apple hasn’t added this themselves just yet.

Vimium If you’re serious about navigating in Chrome using your keyboard, this is the extension you should have installed. Couldn’t live without its ‘f’ option, which labels (using unique short names) all links and input elements within a page so that you can type the label name of the resource you should be interested in to have Chrome navigate to it.

weechat When Jonas told me about weechat, I couldn’t believe my ears. Like irssi, but actually sane without hours of configuration? That couldn’t be true… or could it? Turns out it is, and now I’m running weechat in a screen on a remote dev server. Download it through Homebrew, and you’ll be happy that you put Adium in the corner.

That’s it. If you want some more inspiration, you might want to check out my bookmarks labelled ‘reinstall’ on Pinboard (which should always be up-to-date, unlike the contents of this post…).