README

A list of mostly useful apps that I use on macOS that make things easier to get done. I try to stick to one-time purchases or free.

Table of Contents

• README
  • Table of Contents
  • Apps
    • General Quickness
    • Notes
    • Terminal Emulators
    • Applications CLI and GUI
    • Utilities and Maintenance
    • Kubernetes
  • Retired Apps

Apps

General Quickness

• maccy
  • Clipboard Manager.
• Rocket Typist
  • One-time fee, but a big time saver. I can have it replace text with small shortcuts, as well as templates to make things go faster. This is useful for typing out Linux commands that are very long, repetitive, or for always typing someone's name correctly in Slack.
  • Example: !H types hostname -f
• espanso
  • Free, open-source text expander that works across all applications. Similar to Rocket Typist but lighter weight and highly customizable.
• shottr
  • Screenshot tool (one time fee, but worth it!)
• Raycast
  • Extensible launcher with powerful extensions. Includes a Project Manager extension for easily opening GitHub repos and projects.
• Watson
  • Command-line tool to track time spent on projects. Great for logging work and understanding where your time goes.
• MacUpdater
  • Updates for macOS applications.
• Leader Key
  • This is the app that makes Raycast better. I disable the Spotlight shortcut and now use this for spotlight and it makes things so much faster!

Notes

I have a mix of a few.

• Apple Notes 📔

Terminal Emulators

• iTerm2
• cmux
  • A modern terminal with built-in multiplexing. Manage multiple sessions and panes without needing a separate tmux setup.

Applications CLI and GUI

• Moves
  • Mac struggles with good window management. The hot keys are intuitive and the result is great. Oh and it's FREE!
• Rectangle
  • Free, open-source window management app for macOS. Snap and resize windows using keyboard shortcuts or drag-to-snap. A straightforward alternative if you want solid window management without much setup.
• LICEcap
  • Funny name, but it helps make GIFs.
• PopClip
  • Start looking at their extensions; this app is so simple, but a magnificent time-saver.
• Dockdoor
  • Easy customization and organization for your dock. Available via Homebrew.
• Latest
  • Updates for applications in macOS.
• TextSniper
  • A one-time fee, but well worth it. While macOCR is free, this app does better at keeping the text on different lines and can speed up OCR on-screen capture.
• Better Touch Tool
  • Powerful automation tool for custom gestures, shortcuts, and window management. Great for power users who want to streamline their workflow.
• pyenv
  • A simple way to manage multiple versions of Python. So easy I don't even know how I got it to work and how it's still working.
• mise
  • Polyglot runtime version manager — handles Node, Python, Ruby, Go, and more in one tool. A modern alternative to managing separate version managers per language. Also supports environment variables and task running.
• homebrew
• pass
  • The standard Unix password manager. Stores passwords in GPG-encrypted files organized as a simple directory tree. Works great from the command line and integrates well with Git for syncing.
  • See this setup guide for getting started on macOS.
• VS Code Project Manager
  • Easily switch between projects in VS Code. Supports Git, SVN, and Mercurial repositories, as well as any folder you define as a project.
  • The Raycast extension can be installed to open projects directly from Raycast, making it even faster to jump into any repo.

Utilities and Maintenance

• mac_software_updater
  • A helpful utility to manage and automate updates for Homebrew applications. Keeps your brew packages up to date easily.

Kubernetes

• kubens
• stern
• popeye

Retired Apps

Apps I no longer use:

• LeaderKey
  • This app just makes it a piece of cake to do things!
  • See the author's config
  • Retired: Raycast did all this and more, while adding additional cognitive load to remember functions, instead of type what I wanted. The developer is working on a new launcher, so the future prospects look dim. Additionally, I'm trying to reduce duplicate apps, so the burden of backing up configs is reduced.
• Wins
  • An app for Window management.
  • My main issue with this app is the license didn't transfer when I upgraded my mac.
  • Leader Key and Moves also filled the need with less mouse fiddling.
• PagerDuty CLI
  • Easy way to interact with PagerDuty. You can use it to find out who is oncall, or also to ack incidents and get incident stats. Documentation is good enough to get things done, but more examples would be nice.
  • See HomeBrew installation brew install zph/zph/pagerduty-cli
  • PD retired this one, what a mistake! 😔
• mas
  • Command line macOS app store. Still experimenting with it, not sure how useful it is.
  • mas list
  • mas outdated
  • mas upgrade
• mailsy
  • Generate command line disposable e-mails mailsy g and mailsy m
  • mailsy -help
• macOCR
  • Allows you to type ocr and have the text output to your terminal. Apple has a similar feature for images, but it's nice to not need to take a screenshot to quickly grab some text on screen that is not copyable. It does have some problems with special characters at times.
  • TextSniper fills this need, so I don't have much use for this anymore. The simple key command makes it more useful than the CLI alone.