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I’ve already talked about the OS, so I’ll start my software discussion with what goes on top.

The basics
Let’s start with the basic tool that any programmer needs: the text editor. And don’t give me this crap about IDEs like Dreamweaver and Visual Studio. Real men use text editors. Now, you’d think that for something as basic as a text editor, someone would have come up with the be-all end-all solution for programmers long ago. Not so. Until I discovered the one I use now, I had been on a years-long, seemingly endless search for a development-oriented text editor that met my needs: customizable syntax highlighting with a bunch of languages built-in, line numbers, tab/space conversion, line ending selection, modest autocomplete abilities, the ability to manage many files at once easily in a folder-tree, etc., etc. And until last year, my search had been fruitless; I kept finding something that was close enough, but not quite.

Now, though, I use what has to be the best programmer’s text editor ever: TextMate. It’s got a ton of great features, but the ones I care about most is that it’s easy to use and powerful at the same time; I can manage many files at once with almost no effort, and the endlessly customizable keyboard shortcut system TextMate includes makes my programming experience infinitely less tedious. For example, there’s a keyboard shortcut to automatically close the HTML/XML tag you’re writing, and that is priceless for someone who writes as much markup as I do. There’re keyboard shortcuts to open any file in my project, to reveal it in the folder tree, to preview it in a browser, etc. You have to use it to believe it, but believe me when I say that those €39 are probably the best money I ever spent on a piece of software.

I use another text editor (though I don’t really have to) for my non-development tasks, to manage lists and notes, etc.: Bare Bones’ TextWrangler. It’s easy to use (mostly; see below) and the price is right (it’s free), which is a marked improvement over their $125 (I am not kidding) behemoth, BBEdit. Now, I am usually not averse to spending money on software if I think it’s going to be useful to me (see above note about TextMate), but $125?! I don’t care how fully featured it is, I can’t see myself spending more than $100 to edit text. Besides which, have you ever seen the preferences panels for any Bare Bones software (including TextWrangler)? Two words describe them: huge and confusing. They’re not that easy to use.

Oh! I almost forgot. Let me take a step back to something even more basic: the power user’s best friend. I’m talking about QuickSilver. It’s an extensible keyboard-based navigation system for your applications, bookmarks, emails and contacts. What does that mean? It means that you can, using only your keyboard, open any application, contact, bookmark or email, and what’s more, do a number of preconfigured tasks (like sending an email or IM to one of your contacts without explicitly opening your mail, IM and addressbook applications first). I hear what you’re saying: “You can do that with Spotlight, hotshot,”. Well, yes and no. You can find contacts and files and applications using Spotlight, yes, but doing something other than finding them is a bit difficult and involves more keypresses or mouse clicks. So while finding a contact is easy in Spotlight, you can’t configure it to automatically start an email to that person when you click enter, whereas with QuickSilver you can. The software is in beta now, and I’m so hooked on it that I’ll probably pay any price to have continued use of it once it goes into production. Which wasn’t, probably, a smart thing to say in public.