⚡⚙️ My Productivity Extensions

This is a curated collection of custom-built and community-sourced extensions/plugins for Chrome, VSCode, Obsidian, and Raycast that I use every day for a lean and powerful productivity workflow.

Over time, I’ve tried countless tools and these are the essentials that stood the test of time.

To Build or Not to Build?

In most cases, you'll find that community-built extensions cover a wide range of common workflows for mature applications. However, if your needs are highly specific, building or customizing an extension might be the best option.

When Should You Build?

• Niche Use Cases: For example, many community AI extensions defaults to only support OpenAI API endpoints. This is a great opportunity to contribute to the community by supporting other APIs or self-hosted solutions. This trend also applies to other areas such as xloud providers, where many extensions are built for AWS APIs.

• Learning Opportunities: Building an extension is a fantastic way to learn new frameworks, APIs, and publishing processes. Who knows, you might open a new path from there?

• Last-Mile Customization: Community tools are often designed for a broad audience and can sometimes be bloated with 'unnecessary' features that you don't use. For example, I generally only use one or two key features from an extension, and I have a strong preference to access these features via keyboard shortcuts. This is often the driving reason for me to build my own tools to adapt these tools to my workflow and not the other way around.

🌐 Chrome

Chrome is my go-to choice for web browsing, and most of my shortcut keys can be achieved with davzoku/awesome-custom-search-engines. The extensions are mainly to add more shortcuts or for diagnostic purposes such as analyze a website's performance and tech stack.

Name	Description	Built by Me
Black New Tab Focus	A distraction-free new tab that keeps your focus sharp.	✅ GitHub
Dark Reader	Turns any website to dark mode. Use Option + D to toggle.
Glimpse	Offers quick previews of webpages to speed up content scanning.	✅ GitHub
QuickEdit	Allows on-the-fly text edits directly within the browser.	✅ GitHub
ShareMaster	Formats web links to Markdown, HTML format for sharing	✅ GitHub
uBlock Origin Lite	A lean ad blocker
vidIQ Vision for YouTube	Provides advanced insights and analytics for YouTube content
Wappalyzer	Checks the tech stack for websites
Zotero Connector	Saves research articles to Zotero vault

💻 VSCode

VSCode is my primary code editor of choice. The extensions are mainly to enhance code formatting, CSV editing, and Git enhancements.

Name	Description	Built by Me
Black Formatter (Python)	Formatter for Python
FlatlandMonokai Theme	My theme of choice
GitLens	Supports in-line Git Blame annotations
Markdown Preview Enhanced	Renders Markdown files to WYSIWYG
Prettier	Formatter for web development
Rainbow CSV	Syntax highlighting for CSV
vscode-edit-csv	View and edit CSV in tabular format similar to Excel

🧠 Obsidian

Obsidian is my go-to tool for Personal Knowledge Management, serving as a second brain for everything from AI and software engineering to data workflows and personal productivity.

For a research-focused Second Brain workflow, check out davzoku/paperwise that integrates Obsidian with Zotero and other supporting tools to streamline academic research.

Name	Description	Built by Me
Citations	Manages citations from Zotero to streamline research note-taking.
Dataview	Create table-like views for notes
Git	Adds Git version control to track changes
Janitor	Scan vault for empty notes and large files
Quick LaTeX	Renders LaTeX equations in notes
Recent Files	Provides quick access to recent files
Style Settings	Customizes the appearance of the vault
Templater	Support template creation for note-taking
Vault Statistics	Adds helpful statistics in status bar

---

♦️ Raycast

Raycast has emerged as my go-to productivity tool, replacing Alfred and Spotlight. It offers a powerful command palette that allows me to quickly access resources the way I prefer. With built-in features like clipboard history, Focus Session, and Quicklinks, Raycast helps me stay in flow and minimize context switching throughout the day.

I use Karabiner Elements and Hammerspoon for Hyperkey setup as I use a more advanced combination of HyperKey and HyperShiftKey in my workflow. Refer to davzoku/dotfiles for more details.

Name	Description	Built by Me
Amazon AWS	Add Hotkey eg. Option + CMD + A to Console to access AWS resources quickly
Apple Intelligence	Exposes Apple Intelligence such as Writing Tools as Hotkeys
Brew	Manages Homebrew packages from Raycast
Format JSON	Instantly formats JSON data for improved readability and quick debugging.
Google Gemini	Connects Raycast to Google Gemini via API Key as an alternative to Raycast AI
Kill Process	Kill apps instantly from Raycast
Port Manager	Manages system ports from Raycast
Timers	Create timer and stopwatch with Hotkeys

Suggestions

If you have any suggestions for extensions or plugins that you think I should try, feel free to reach out! I'm always looking for ways to enhance my productivity and streamline my workflow.