List of applications and tools that make my macOS experience even more amazing
Dark appearance. All apps are in one desktop since there is delay in switching between macOS multiple desktops. Dock is hidden. Desktop background is dynamic.
Light appearance. Use light themes when outside or when there is glare from the sun as it makes text more readable.
I use a lot of apps on my mac. Below is a list of my favorite tools with descriptions of how I use them.
I also share my dotfiles together with my iOS setup. And I made a Telegram group to discuss all things macOS/iOS.
I have extensive wiki where I share everything I know. I go in detail about how I use each of the apps in the wiki. Not to duplicate the content, I simply link to the wiki from here as the wiki will always be up to date.
My workflow in general is described in detail here.
I made KM macro with this AppleScript to switch between light/dark macOS appearances. As appearances are switched, the themes get updated accordingly on most apps.
- Alfred, Raycast & Script Kit for everything search related. I create many custom plugins to do specific searches I need.
- Karabiner is essential tool I use to remap my keyboard. It's the tool on which my entire mac workflow is built. Essentially all the keys on my keyboard are dual purpose keys. Press once, it enters the key, hold together with another key and do custom action. I have 100's of these custom actions all within 1 second of activation for me.
- Keyboard Maestro for all automation needs that are not search related. Both Alfred/Raycast/ScriptKit and KM are activated from Karabiner directly. I share all my KM macros here.
- 2Do for personal tasks. It has the best onscreen keybinds ever like
yto move task for due tomorrow. Easily change priority or assign task to list. - Height for project & personal goals management. It's one of my main tools to break down problems as I solve them in team or personal setting.
- 1Password use it to keep all passwords and secret info. I prefer to use Single Sign On via GitHub or Google as I do dislike keeping track of passwords.
- BetterTouchTool use it for custom trackpad gestures. Specifically love three finger swipe left/right to move between tabs in Safari. Three finger swipe up to create new tab. Three down to close. Four finger swipe global swipe to show Safari. Four to right to open VSCode. Four left to open Warp.
- Fantastical use to manage my calendar and events.
- Dictionary surprisingly useful to quickly search Wikipedia.
- CleanShot use it for quick editing of screenshots.
- Transmission is great BitTorrent client.
- Notion is useful to manage team wikis or share documents with others. Don't like using it as my general knowledge management tool.
- NetNewsWire use it to read all my RSS feeds.
- Obsidian use it for note taking. Love its linking complete feature and various plugins it has.
- VS Code is my main editor and where I spend the most time in aside from Safari. Use and love its extensions. Keep my UI minimal and useful. I use Insiders build as it has latest features.
- Sublime Text use it for quick edits of markdown, specifically my wiki. It opens up instantly and is joy to edit in. Have custom KM macros such as quickly creating markdown links and other little useful actions.
- Sublime Merge use it as visual Git client. It gives nice overview of files changed, what branches exist and more. I have custom actions bound to go through Git tasks fast. I also use gitupdate for throwaway commits either on PR branches where main commit will be written when squashed or some random doc related repos.
- Warp use it my primary terminal together with Fish Shell.
- Dash use it to search for APIs fast. Use it through Alfred workflow.
- Paw use it for sending HTTP requests as I test endpoints.
- Xcode use it to build iOS apps in SwiftUI.
- Postico & TablePlus use GUIs to access my databases. Postico works well for Postgres, TablePlus for the rest.
- Telegram use it as my main messenger and absolutely love it. Love its stickers, the speed and honestly everything about it.
- Spark use it as my email client. Does good job of sorting mail and getting out of my way when writing/replying to things.
- Discord use it the main way to interact with various communities. Much better than Slack as it keeps the history forever and recently added a nice Forum feature better question asking.
- Figma use it as my primary design tool.
- IINA use it to play video files of movies/series.
- Safari spend majority of time on mac in the app.
- Google Chrome Canary use Canary over regular as I don't use Chrome for browsing but for development as its dev tools are superior. Sometimes canary builds break so I go to regular Chrome.
- Safari Technology Preview use it only for browsing Twitter and sometimes dev. Have 2 feeds open in tab 1/2 and have bind
space+kto instantly open it.
Use Brew and global pnpm packages for most of my CLIs. Although eventually want to settle down on Nix as I learn it more.
I try to keep my macOS declarative. Currently it's a Go file in my dotfiles and is not up to date.
I list CLIs I use here.
If you found this interesting, I also have similar repository going over what applications I use on iOS/WatchOS as well as how and why I use them.
Here you can find more setups by other people that you can take ideas and inspiration from.
- Works for me - Collection of developer toolkits.
- Use This Interviews - What do people use to get stuff done?
- Omar Bahareth's my-mac-os - Another my-mac-os.
If you shared a similar personal setup to this, be it for Windows, Linux or anything else, you can add it in Similar Setups section.
I love finding new awesome tools and apps. If you have a favorite tool or app that you think I missed, please say it.
You can support me on GitHub or look into other projects I shared.
