There is an idea that the right tools can get you closer to your goal. That the missing piece in your journey towards realising yourself is access to the right tools. Most often, these tools are taken as tangible objects, which includes hardware and software. Hence the popularity of UsesThis and similar sites. Rather, when we think about the very idea of the tool, it appears that a tool is not just material (even software is material in some sense) but can be a practice, a way of doing something. For instance, if I want to read a book, I can use the tool of skimming, i.e., looking at the contents page and the index, then the first and last paragraphs of each chapter, and maybe reading the introduction. It is a tool. And most importantly it is a tool that extends your ability to read without being external to your body.
In my particular situation, my work is research. This includes a few broad areas of activity: collecting, reading, finding relations, and writing. What tools will help me? For all of these processes, it is imperative that I have a mental schema of how to go about doing them. What are the terms that will decide my collection? What is a tool that will help me read better, closer, slower, but also efficiently? What tools will help me organise the input, find patterns, find ruptures, find disorganisation, find what is missing? And finally, what tools will help me write down my findings?
There are obvious answers: curl, wget, python for data scraping. Internet Archive and other online archives are sources. Get better at touch typing. Don’t use the mouse. Get a better keyboard. Use a particular editor. Use a reference manager. Use a web clipper. Make backups. Use this nifty utility. Eke out one more action with one less keystroke. Make sure these tools are sustainable and stable.
Then there are answers which do not exist prior to our inventing them. And these are the ones that should be shared. For instance, after almost ten years of training in English Studies, it dawned on me that I do not know how to write a sentence of academic prose. So I sat down, chose a random sentense from some scholarly text, and took it apart. I sampled a few more. Took them all apart. Saw the variety. Then I saw that even the variety had an underlying logic. I had a schema with me. This tool is what will help me move forward. Not MS Word, not VIM, not Zotero. They give you an edge, but not the entire thing.
I would suggest that you look for these non-existent but highly effective tools first.
The following list includes tools which give you the edge, that fine-tuning.
Most of my academic writing happens using the tools listed above. Occassionaly I use VSCode to write stuff for the website. In a pinch, any text editor works.
An organised desktop if you are using a computer. Cmd-Tab should switch between the text editor and the reference (say, a note on the novel, an outline of the chapter) and nothing else.
Say, six virtual desktops easily accessible via keyboard shortcuts, displaying
Get this into your muscle memory so that two keystrokes will take you to any of these.
Use any plain text editor to write in markdown. Syntax highlighting and citekey auto completion are good extras. Zettlr is great but can be slow at times. VIM can be configured to get these features. But if all you got is nano, then that works too.
If you must, use MS Word. But remember that it is a word processor and not a layout tool. And that it tries to do both content and form at once and does not excel (hehe) at either. If content is what you are after (you should be), please use plaintext.
Read: https://wordmvp.com/Mac/PagesInWord.html