Skip to content
Developer Musings

Awesome macOS apps

Spotlight Replacement#

Raycast is a better Spotlight search. It can also be used to uninstall applications and search for screenshots!

Extensions#

  • Clipboard History - Never go back to copy something twice again just because you overwrote your clipboard.
  • Git Repos - Quickly access your local git repositories and open them in your favorite editor or any app.
  • Port Manager - Quickly kill processes that are taking up your ports.

Windows Management#

Rectangle Pro is the one-off payment premium version of Rectangle used for windows management. Absolutely worth it to have only one keyboard shortcut for all of my windows management needs.

Alternatives#

Just use the native Raycast windows management extension.

Terminal Emulator#

Kitty is my terminal of choice.

~/.config/kitty/kitty.conf
tab_bar_style powerline

Alternatives#

  1. iTerm2 - Old but reliable
  2. Warp - Slow startup for new shells
  3. Alacritty - No native support for tab panes which means using tmux 😔

Browser#

Arc is the only browser worth using. It has vertical tabs, automatically closes tabs, easy shortcuts to copy the current URL (CMD + SHIFT + C) and native support for picture in picture video play.

Sometimes you don’t want to see everything up in the menubar all of the time.

Hidden Bar just works and lets you declutter the menu bar.

Sane Scrolling#

The page should go up when I scroll upwards and when I push downwards on the trackpad. Unfortunately, macOS does not natively support decoupling scroll direction on trackpad vs mouse.

Scroll Reverser solves this problem.

Stop Sleeping#

Sometimes you want to prevent your machine from sleeping automatically.

Amphetamine is a nifty small app that stops your machine from falling asleep by manually toggling the app or by preventing the machine from falling asleep when apps you define are in focus.

Alternatives#

Run caffeinate in an open terminal while you want your machine to be awake.

Terminal window
caffeinate

Better Battery Life#

Aldente helps keep your laptop battery charge maxed at a threshold you set. This is useful because I always keep my laptop plugged in all day.

Video Player#

IINA is the modern video player for macOS.

Notepad#

heynote is a brilliant notepad for keeping code snippets and random notes. It supports syntax highlighting, easy to copy code snippets, auto-formatting and Markdown support.

Clipboard History#

Raycast has a native Clipboard History extension which is phenomenal.

Alternatives#

Maccy

HTTP Client#

Bruno is a git based HTTP Client.