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What are your essential macOS apps?

Cromulent

Cromulent

macrumors 604
Original poster
Oct 2, 2006
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The Land of Hope and Glory
I'm curious about what macOS apps people find essential. Here are mine:

Rectangle Pro
AltTab
Alfred
ProtonVPN
Bitwarden

I'm also testing out Path Finder, which sounds useful as I'll be able to "mount" an SFTP connection to a virtual machine running FreeBSD.

What are your essential macOS apps?
 
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Default Folder First thing I install since the Mac OS7 days. ($34.95 and worth every penny!)

Rectangle Minimalist window screen & position control. (Free)

Dato For simple Date/Time/Calendar integration in the macOS menubar. ($7.99)

Yoink Almost essential for full screen, laptop & multiple display users. ($8.99)

Monitor Control Brings volume/brightness keyboard controls to displays that don't support the built-in keyboard keys for those functions. (Free)

RightFont Simple yet powerful font management with auto-activation. ($47 now, normally $59)

PDF Squeezer You can fuss with manual compression to make your PDFs smaller, this does it much faster. ($9.99)
 
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I'll add a couple more. I stopped using Path Finder when I found Commander One, which is pretty good. I'll also add UTM for virtual machines. It runs FreeBSD perfectly.
 
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Some that haven't been mentioned yet.

MenubarX
Menuwhere
DriveDx
SilentKnight
SwitchGlass
SimpleNote
Keka
InYourFace
CheatSheet
Carbon Copy Cloner
Lingon X
Pure Paste
 
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Not sure if we are only doing utilities but apps I use every day, all day include:

I work a lot in terminal.

Apple Notes
Carbon copy cloner - it just runs on its own every night.
iTerm/ZSH
Midnight Commander
 
Chrome - because even when my family does not care to keep track of me, I know that Google cares

Safari - because sometimes Google cares too much

Music - because sometimes I need a break from clicking around in Chrome and Safari

Podcast - because sometimes songs get annoying

Books - because sometimes podcasts get annoying

Notes - because dumping all my thoughts in Notes frees my mind to come up with other things to dump in Notes

Word - because I write so that I can eat, and I eat so that I can write

Messages - because I have friends, but I don't want to see their stupid faces or hear their irritating voices

Photos - because I take beautiful photos and I want to admire them on a bigger screen

Magnet - because Mac still can't get Windows management right

Bartender - because Mac still can't get menubar management right

Balance Lock - because Mac still can't get bluetooth audio right

Amphetamine - because Mac still can't get external hard drive timeout right
 
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the first 5 apps I install:

hazel
1password
textexpander
keyboard maestro
alfred

then:

devonthink
every rogue amoeba app
adobe pr, ps, au, ae
fantastical
omnifocus

then the rest of my stuff.
 
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BackBlaze
GraphicConverter
Notes
iWork
Affinity suite
Safari
Messages

I had BackBlaze running for years and never thought about it. This summer I had a big issue, I had them send me a drive with a full back up. Fantastic. What a relief.
 
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Interesting app lists… for me…

Notes
Mail
TextEdit
Safari
Firefox

to a lesser extent:

Word
Pages
CoconutBattery (not essential but I like to monitor it)
Zoom (don’t love it, but have to use it for work)
 
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Hunter5117 said:
Not sure if we are only doing utilities but apps I use every day, all day include:

I work a lot in terminal.

Apple Notes
Carbon copy cloner - it just runs on its own every night.
iTerm/ZSH
Midnight Commander
Click to expand...
you are tempting me with midnight commander, as I am not happy with forklift or pathfinder. But I can't even find a binary to download :-(( as I don't want to install homebrew
 
tosbsas said:
:-(( as I don't want to install homebrew
Click to expand...
Curious why you don't want to install Homebrew?

PS I am old enough that the original, Norton Commander, was my goto app for managing and fixing DOS file systems back in the day. At the time I owned a small-town computer shop and NC was indispensable in helping keep my customers systems running well.
 
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Hunter5117 said:
Curious why you don't want to install Homebrew?

PS I am old enough that the original, Norton Commander, was my goto app for managing and fixing DOS file systems back in the day. At the time I owned a small-town computer shop and NC was indispensable in helping keep my customers systems running well.
Click to expand...
only got a 256 GB ssd
 
Essential:

- some browsers (e.g. brave)
- Terminal (bash/zsh)
- openssh
- nmap
- some development stuff (python, git,..)
- Cisco VPN Client
- some PDF Viewer
- MS Teams (really hate it) for collaboration

that covers > 90% of the usage.
For documents we unfortunately use the MS Office suite, for personal stuff I use LaTeX.
 
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tosbsas said:
you are tempting me with midnight commander, as I am not happy with forklift or pathfinder. But I can't even find a binary to download :-(( as I don't want to install homebrew
Click to expand...

It's in the macports repo, if you don't want to use brew.

Manually downloading binaries feels so microsoftly
 
Mine are:

1Password
Thunderbird
Quicken 2017
VLC
AppCleaner
EasyFind
Onyx
TechTool Pro
Brave
LibreOffice (primarily its Writer and Calc modules)
SuperDuper!
 
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