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Developer Musings

Awesome macOS apps

Spotlight Replacement

Section titled “Spotlight Replacement”

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

Extensions

Section titled “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

Section titled “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

Section titled “Alternatives”

Just use the native Raycast windows management extension.

Terminal Emulator

Section titled “Terminal Emulator”

Kitty is my terminal of choice.

Add the right font Monaspace:

Terminal window
brew install --cask font-monaspace
~/.config/kitty/kitty.conf
font_family        'Monaspace Neon', monospace
tab_bar_style powerline

Alternatives

Section titled “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

Section titled “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.

Setup

Section titled “Setup”

Use CMD+Shift+D to enable the Toolbar.

Section titled “Menubar Organisation”

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

Section titled “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

Section titled “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

Section titled “Alternatives”

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

Terminal window
caffeinate

Better Battery Life

Section titled “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

Section titled “Video Player”

IINA is the modern video player for macOS.

Notepad

Section titled “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

Section titled “Clipboard History”

Raycast has a native Clipboard History extension which is phenomenal.

Alternatives

Section titled “Alternatives”

Maccy

HTTP Client

Section titled “HTTP Client”

Bruno is a git based HTTP Client.

Ticktick

Section titled “Ticktick”

Ticktick is just a great TODO app.

Make sure you disable the global hotkey which interferes with VSCode’s open command palette command (CMD+Shift+P)!