HACKER Q&A
📣 Nilrem404

What are your "Must Have" utility apps on macOS?


I finally bought in to the apple m-series hype and picked up an M1 Pro Macbook Pro refurbished.

It seems like everyone has a load of different utility and QOL apps that they use to help make MacOS more usable for them.

What are your go-tos, and how do you make use of third party MacOS apps and tweaks day to day?

  👤 nathanredblur Accepted Answer ✓
I use and recommend this:

- Iterm2 - Better terminal

- Fig - terminal setup

- Raycast - better Alfred

- Rectangle - windows organizer

- Bartender - if you don’t have much space for apps in your top bar

- KeyCue - keyboard shortcut hints that you can configure

- Aldente - To protect your battery life

- Adgurad - add blocker in DNS level

- Reflex - fix annoying behavior with media keys

- Visual Code - Nice IDE with cool plugins and awesome community behind

- In Your Face - to never miss a meeting

- time-out - to remember take brakes in a cool way

- Cleanshot - to take perfect screenshots and screen gifs

https://github.com/nathanredblur/nathanredblur/blob/main/mac...

👤 oblib
I don't have many QOL apps.

I like Pixelmator. Photoshop is way to expensive and Pixelmator is both affordable and feature rich.

I also have Alfred set up so I can monitor what's going on outside. Doesn't always work well for me, but the phones I use for cameras are really old.

Aside from that I have quite a few web browsers I use to test my apps.

I mostly use BBEdit and Fetch, and those are about the only apps I pay to keep updated, but that's pretty rare.

I will take a look at the apps "is_taken" has listed here though.

👤 is_taken
I use

  - Alfred
  - Cheatsheet
  - Bartender
  - 1Password
  - iTerm2
  - Moom (you could also check Rectangle)
  - Some IDEs from Jetbrains
👤 chrism238
Well one used to be Dropbox, until it became completely disfunctional under Sonoma.
👤 gaoryrt
Since no one else has mentioned it, I propose the Dash the documentation program.
👤 fjarlq
A recent thread with some good ideas: https://lobste.rs/s/d5qwzs/what_is_your_mac_os_setup