Default Apps Early 2026

It’s a time of slow change for me when it comes to the apps I use most regularly.

• 🔐 1Password for passwords, but ideally I’d like to switch to Apple’s Passwords/Keychain for most things. Partly because of iOS. When I save a new password on iOS, it’s always the native Passwords app that offers to save it, not 1Password, and that neuters the usability of 1Password to me. I don’t like having one foot in both apps, but it feels somewhat inevitable as 1Password is required for work sharing.
• 👨‍💻 Cursor for large project coding, but I’ve bounced around a lot. There are so many VS Code forks with AI integration it’s been interesting to try them, but I mostly find them all pretty similar. Windsurf, Trae, Antigravity… nearly identical. There are also alternative extensions to Copilot in canonical VS Code that are also largely the same. Some have better design polish than others, but the overall UX of Cursor seems the best. I also used Zed for a good month and found it pretty good. And obviously I use CodePen quite a bit for coding, but not for CodePen itself or other larger-scale projects.
• GitHub Desktop for Git. But I’m pulled back toward Tower because I think the features are nicer. But I’m really torn as GitHub Desktop is free and works flawlessly with things like precommit hooks that Tower sometimes has trouble with.
• Things for TODOs. I’m still really happy with Things and don’t feel any particular pull away from it. Other than that my TODOs are fairly disjointed overall. My inboxes are TODOs. My notes app can have TODOs. My open tabs can be TODOs. GitHub issues and pinned Notion pages can be TODOs. I wouldn’t mind a smidge better consolidation. Really wish it supported images/videos.
• Bear for notes. Everyday I find myself needing a notes scratchpad to write things down and it’s always Bear for me for this. I’ve had two failed-starts with Obsidian though and feel a pull toward that.
• Mimestream for Gmail. Surprises me as I’ve always like the web interface for Gmail, but I’m a few years on Mimestream now and feeling no big desire to leave it. Although, I’ve now got Fastmail going now too and find it very nice. I’ve got coyier.com now and chris@coyier.com as well as setting up some family member emails through it, all through Fastmail.
• More Discord than Slack for group chat. I’m still in a few Slacks, including the internal CodePen Slack that is my most important one, but not terribly busy. I do more active chatting on community Discords than I do in Slack.
• Zoom for video calls. But gosh, wouldn’t it be nice to get off Zoom? Like maybe Google Meet is good enough since we pay for an organization there anyway? Maybe the stuff built into Slack is fine? I don’t need any features of Zoom at all other than “look at each other and talk and share screens sometimes” and it feels like that’s a commodity now and Zoom as a standalone could go.
• Local for WordPress Local Dev. But I think I’d rather get on Studio as I’m on Pressable hosting now and quite happy with that and Studio seems more integrated.
• BusyCal for calendering. But I feel like I don’t have any specific love for BusyCal. Would Apple’s default Calendar be good enough? Apparently I can’t use Google Calendar directly as there is no great way of seeing events from multiple accounts without weird trickery (which is wild??).
• NetNewsWire for RSS. But I also use Unread. And Reeder for iOS, but the classic one not 4. But it’s all powered by Feedbin under the hood.
• Ghostty for a terminal. But I’m switching back to iTerm2. Ghostty is nice in how painless it is to switch to it, but I don’t need it to be so feature-free. The lack of search in Ghostty is the main thing pushing me away.
• Figma for design. Whatever though I don’t do a massive amount of design outside of the browser. I’m sure I’d be happy in Sketch or whatever Adobe thing. To me the killer feature of Figma is that it’s web based so it’s easy to link to things and share across a team.
• System Color Picker is the best for color.
• Raycast for a launcher, but I make so little use of it’s robust feature set it’s tempting to just nuke it can go back to spotlight.
• Arc for a browser. I’m still annoyed with the abandonment of Arc, as it’s just a damn masterclass in browser design. I switched away for most of the year, giving other browsers a real shot, using them for a week+. I tried Dia but it’s just shallow shadow of Arc. I tried Orion and switched away for reasons that ended up being my fault (it was nice though, expect for Safari DevTools), and same deal with SigmaOS. I tried Zen which was quite nice but didn’t sync as well as I needed it to. I tried Shift, Atlas, etc, there are so many. But Atlassian buying The Browser Company of New York because the CEO loves Arc was encouraging to me and I switched back. Haven’t seen any big Arc improvements, but whatever, it still works great.

I also maintain my subscription to SetApp, because I use a handful of things it offers that makes it super worth it: TablePlus, Typeface, Paste, CleanMyMac, Bartender, etc.