MSI Katana GF76 11UC
Intel Core i7-11800H · 16GB RAM · Windows 11
The Gear
What Powers My WorkNot a shopping list. The setup I actually work in, why each piece is here, and what I threw out.
01
Setup.
The Hardware
01 machine · 03 views
- The machine
DetailKeyboard and deck
MSI Katana GF76 11UC
DetailHinge and exhaust
MSI Katana GF76 11UC
“If it doesn't make me measurably faster after two weeks of honest use, it gets cut.”
Everything below survived that test. So did the section at the bottom, in reverse — the tools that didn’t, and how long each one lasted. The reasons are lifted from the write-up; 3 of the 11 apps have one so far.
02
Craft.
Dev Environment
03 tools
03
Command Line.
Editing & Git
05 tools · 3 written up
- LazyGitAliased to lg. Stage hunks visually, write the commit message, push — the whole flow without reaching for the mouse.
NeovimThe centre of gravity. I moved off VS Code because Electron ate memory and extension churn broke my setup every few weeks. Native LSP and Treesitter give the same intelligence, but startup takes 40ms instead of four seconds.- zoxideReplaces cd with frecency-based jumping. It learns your habits — after a week of normal use I stopped typing full paths entirely.
05
Cut.
Didn’t Survive
Adding tools is easy. Removing them takes honesty about what is useful versus what looks good in a dotfiles screenshot.
Neofetch / Fastfetch
1 weekFun for exactly one screenshot. After that it is a startup script adding 200ms to every new terminal for information I never look at. Removed after a week.
Cava
2 monthsAudio visualiser in the terminal. Beautiful, completely useless for development work. I kept it for two months because it looked good on r/unixporn. Vanity tool.
Hyprshot
replacedReplaced with a three-line shell script using grim and slurp which did the same job without another dependency.
Fig (now Amazon Q)
3 daysClever idea, terrible execution. It intercepted keystrokes, conflicted with FZF, and the suggestions were wrong often enough to distract rather than help.
