My setup

"To make great work, you need more than a fork. From the many tools available, choose wisely, set them on table. Maybe then, will you get, the fame, the money, no regret."

Operating system

I prefer MacOS, because of Unix environment, iOS connection and nicer look. But I worked on Windows and Ubuntu as well.

Keyboard setup

I discovered a way to use English keyboard while having Czech letters easily accessible. The method is suited for a classic ISO (Europe) physical keyboard. I use a special software layout to achieve it.

I created the layout in Ukelele program on MacOS. You can download the layout here. Open it in Ukelele and install it. Then select the Czenglish in MacOS Keyboard settings.

Then you need [Karabiner-Elements](https://karabiner-elements.pqrs.org/) program to customize few keys. Please check the config file:

Simple modification: grave_accent_and_tilde -> left_option
Complex modification: caps_lock -> escape, to_if_held_down -> caps_lock

Finally you are able to:

use US keyboard layout for symbols,
write Czech letters in the top row normally,
write numbers: hold the tilde (~) key (next to left shift) and use top row,
write ů using the tilde, same for ú,
use caps_lock key (usually useless) instead of esc,
hold caps_lock to enter caps_lock mode if you really need it.

However, there are few problems:

Writing capital Czech letters doesn't work with Shift nor CapsLock.
Writing Czech accents (háček, čárka, apostrof) isn't supported.

This is solved by switching to CS keyboard. Recently, I also discovered you can hold a letter and OS shows you variations you can select! E.g. hold d to get ď.

I'm sure it could be solved in Ukelele layout by further setting, but the program is not very intuitive and I was glad it's working like this at least :D.

Applications

Desktop

iTerm 2 - terminal
VSCode - code editor
BBEdit - editor for random texts
Chrome - browser (I used Firefox before, but stopped due to compability issues)
Notion - for notes
iMovie - video editing
f.lux - screen color adjusting based on time of day

Web

Microsoft Copilot - general AI stuff
Google Gemini - research, image generation
Suno AI - song making