myxof / my-mac-os

 a list of applications, alfred workflows and various tools that make my macOS experience even more amazing

my wonderful world of macOS 🍏

Applications

I use a lot of applications on my mac. Here is a list of the ones that I love and use the most in my day to day life, sorted by their importance :

1. Alfred (this is by far my favourite application that I have. It saved me a lot of time in my life and has a really great community and very powerful workflows that you can use. I have attached the ones I use the most to this repo. Feel free to use any that you like) (here is a full list of workflows I use)
2. iTerm (recently moved completely to using the command line for all my development needs, this is probably the best terminal emulator out there that exists, have it assigned to w + j and can open it on demand at any time that I want) (here are some homebrew packages I like and use) (really powerful and great tool)
3. 2Do (I love GTD methodology, this application is phenomenal with helping me organise my tasks and things I want to do and achieve, has global quick add with a hotkey, lists, priorities, powerful search and a lot more) (really reccomend it)
4. SnippetsLab (a very powerful code snippet manager that I have intergrated very heaviliy in my workflow, with recent addition of its own alfred workflow, retrieving the snippets that you need it staggeringly fast. Use it as my own personal programmer's notepad with code and lots and lots of comments.)
5. Day One (probably the best journal writing application there is, use it every day to write my Day Evaluations and many other small little tidbits of text with thoughts, plans and experiences that I have had) (if you don't journal, I really suggest you to start, it really is a very powerful mind cleanser and acts as a wonderful history record of your life)
6. Mindnode (make all of my weekly plans in there, found it to be a very powerful tool for that, however planning to expand its use to have it be used for almost every planning and structuring work I need to do before starting any project of mine) (wonderful application that is a real joy to use)
7. Ulysses (all your writing in one place is the motto and the underlying design of the app. Very powerful search, freedom of structure, great themes and export to markdown / PDF. Really promotes you to write with its great design and features) (moved to it from Byword and iaWriter that I used before, having a one place database for all my writing for me was the selling point of the app)
8. Pixave (always wanted to organise the mess that my media files were, moving all of my photographs, gifs that I have saved over the years to one place that is easiliy searchabe and is again just a joy to use was very valuable for me) (probably the best application there exists for storing and organising all of your photographic media content)
9. PDF Expert (I read a lot of PDFs like books, uni assignments and the like. This app is a huge upgrade over Preview app that I used before. Multiple tabs, sepia mode, very nice annotation tools, great search, performance)
10. Keyboard Maestro (a staggeringly powerful mac automation tool that I am only beggining to scratch the surface of. Has a wonderful community that is happy to help with whatever you are trying to achieve. Currently use it for quick app switching and running a small BitBar script that I wrote to display my current 2Do task in the menu bar.)
11. BetterTouchTool (another amazing application that allows me to quickly map and remap any hotkeys that I use both globally and app specific. What more it allows me to also customise my trackpad gestures to do any actions that I want, this is very powerful. I love scrolling through my tabs in Safari with three finger swipes left and right as well as opening and closing tabs with swiping up and down respectively.)
12. Airmail (by far the most well designed and feature rich mail application that I have used so far, really love all of its simple design, support for multiple accounts and a multitude of nice shortcuts that you can use)
13. Spotify (found a lot of great music with this application and the phenomenal Alfred Workflow makes using the application an absolute joy) (quickly finding artists, songs I want to listen, instantly adding the song playing to my 'likes' playlist or any other playlist I want, seeing what other songs the artist has and more)
14. Fantastical (just a straight up best application there is for organising and creating events in your life) (global quick add with a hotkey, natural language input and its great design is what made me switch from an already great Calendar app which comes natively with macOS) (I also added some of my own text expansions to help with natural text input)
15. Dash (very powerful API documentation browser that allows you to download any docset that you might want to use, search for any method, class or anything that you need very quickly, comes with the amazing Alfred Worfklow to simplify the process of searching for the right things.)
16. IntelliJ (Java is the main language used in my university and I started to quite like the language, this is by far the best IDE out there for java, powerful IntelliSense, vim emulation plugin, great support for debugging and a lot more)
17. Focus (I have facebook, hckrnews, reddit, twitter on the black list and have a schedule where I can only use these websites two times in my day, 30 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes in the evening, this acts as my own version of information diet. Really does make a difference and helps me focus on what I need to be working on.)
18. Focus Timer (a really well designed pomodoro timer, I try to do my work in quick burst sessions of 25 minutes with a 5 minute break, sometimes 25 minutes is not enough, this app is very flexible to quickly change the time and skip a break if need be) (a simple app with a simple purpose)
19. TogglDesktop (I track all the time I am working with Toggl, seperated by different projects. This gives me a clear view of how much time I have spent working and on what over the week / month. Fan of quantified self movement, I can then use this information I get and analyse and reflect on it)
20. Magic Number (a really simple and powerful calculator with a very nice interface that is available to me on demand with a press of caps lock + delete key)
21. Karabiner (one of the applications I cannot live without, allows me to bind any key that I want. You can take a look at the config files I use for it here alongside more information of how I use it in the description)
22. Bartender (a great utility app that allows you to customise and hide the contents of your menu bar, really does improve the aesthetics of your OS but also is quite beneficial for me as I customised it to have the most important information that I need in it)
23. YNAB (use it to track and overview all of my finances, the most important part of this app is the ideology behind it. The whole app is built around this methodology and I really reccomend you take a look at it even if you are not planning to use the app, I find it really freeing and powerful.
24. Pocket (moved to it from Instapaper as I found using this Alfred workflow a huge life changer in how I can both save and view my articles on the spot both on mobile and on my Mac. I use Pocket to save and archive articles that I like with relevant to me tags.)
25. Reeder (wasn't a big user of RSS but with me finding a lot of great blogs out there, I needed a place to keep myself updated on the great content that they will be posting. Reeder is the best RSS reeder out there that I found)
26. Marked (if I ever need to preview a readme or any other markdown file that I wrote or just want to read, this app is the best application for that I found) (it also features live updating and quite a lot of very powerful customisation features)
27. Xcello (big fan of Trello as a tool for managing tasks within a team, this app is essentially a web wrapper over online Trello boards)
28. 1Password (my password manager of choice, recently started to generate all of my passwords with it and keep everything in a secured and encrypted vault kept secure by my one master password. No longer need to remember passwords and I now have a unique password for every website that I am signed up on whilist activating two factor authentication wherever possible.)
29. Transmission (a torrent client that I use, very minimal in its UI but is very powerful and has all the features that I need without the bloat that uTorrent and other clients have. Have all my torrents downloaded into their specific folders. I also want to set up a seedbox with my raspberry pie in the future as I have a bad tendency of not seeding the torrents that I downloaded)
30. LiveReload (a great tool for aspiring web developers like myself, allows me to see live changes of the code that I write in the browser, works perfectly and updates instantly) (really reccomend it)
31. Sketch (not very fond of subscription based business models but this app is probably the de facto standard in doing any kind of design work on Mac)
32. Pixelmator (probably the best image editor out there on Mac, is packed with very powerful features and is very simple in its UI)
33. Textual (recently started to grow a big liking of various cool IRC channels that exist out there, this app is a really wonderful client for all things IRC) (it also has an awesome channel search feature that I use a lot)
34. Tweetbot (twitter and tweetbot are blocked for me for the majority of the day due to them being a big cause of distraction but the times I do use Twitter, it would be done through this wonderful client that features a timeline without advertisements and one that is synced with the iOS app) (I also use a safari extension that opens twitter links in the app and not the web)
35. Flux (a simple utility that makes the screen have nice and warm non blue light emitting colour in the evening)
36. Unclutter (a dropdown menu where I can quickly write some text that I need or open any file that I keep in the buffer there, previously used my Desktop for this sort of thing but I really like to keep my desktop clean of things so this greatly helps me with it)
37. Dropzone (a quick utility that pops up when I drag some file into it or open it with a hotkey, use it to upload images to Imgur, dropping files into a preset number of folders that I made quickly as well as going to them in an instant) (a great little utility)
38. Popclip (another great utility I cannot live without, brings up a quick menu whenever some text is selected on which I can do a number of quick actions, like searching Google, Youtube, Wiki, Reddit, Images or translate text selected, copy it or say it aloud, here is how it looks for me)
39. Paste (the most well designed clipboard manager that I found to exist on macOS. By pressing s + i, I can quickly see and search through my entire clipboard and paste whatever I need) (a really powerful tool that is made so well that it feels as a native part of the OS)
40. DaisyDisk (a great tool to quickly get a visual glance over what is taking up your disk space and where)
41. Gemini (a great little utility to find duplicate files in the system, didn't get much use of it so far but it may be quite useful on occasions where I do want to clean up my system from useless files and junk)
42. Next Meeting (a great menu bar tool that shows me how much time is left until the next event in my calendar. It has been quite a big addition to my workflow as I know can quickly know how much time is left until my next class or some other event starts.) (really reccomend it)
43. MonthlyCal (a really great visual representation of my month in form of a notification center widget that allows me to see any day I want at a glance as well as what day of month it is and how many events I have in this week.)
44. iStat Menus (great system monitoring tools of which I use CPU and storage tracking, I find it very valuable to know if my CPU is being abused by some application and if so by which)
45. Unarchiver (a program that simply unarchives any zip file that I need, very simple and just works)
46. Spotifree (dislike ads and Spotify doesn't give any discount to students from Netherlands for some reason so I just use this to get around that)
47. Annotate (best annotation tool I found to exist. After you make a screenshot, it allows for quick edits (arrows, adding some text, blurring parts of the image) as well as ability to quickly save it or drag it to upload to Imgur to share quickly and send the link to anyone I want)
48. BeardedSpice (enhance play/pause as well as previous/next playback keys to not only work in iTunes and Spotify but work for Soundcloud, Youtube and many other services.)
49. HemingBoard (got for free on product hunt during its release but I quite like it, it allows to spice up your writing with various synonyms and saves you some trips to thesauras for synonyms)
50. Little Snitch (an amazing networking tool that gives you a clear picture of what connections are incoming to your computer and what are outgoing. Takes a bit of time to set it up correctly and is quite an insightful experience first turning it on and having it notify every couple of seconds that some app is trying to send data to some server and whether you want to allow that. This is essential if you want to take control of what information gets sent out from your computer and what connections have right to connect to your data)
51. Texpad (had to write some LaTeX files for some of my university assignments and in search of a great editor for writing LaTeX I found this and have really enjoyed using it for that task. Has phenomenal suggestions, a great UI interface and live previewing the LaTeX code that you write.)
52. Slack (find it to be quite a slow application, given the fact that it is essentially a chrome web application wrapped up with electron, it is not much surprise but still it does have some really great features for working and communicating within a team)
53. Telegram (really dislike whatsapp and I quite like Telegram. It has a very clean interface, a native client for macOS and stickers, privacy is questionable as data is still being sent through Telegram servers but it is still a great chat application)
54. Chatty (only use Facebook for its chat as it has an enormous amount of users and nearly all that have used the internet at least once probably have a Facebook account)
55. Anki (still not fully utilising the full power of spaced repetition learning but it was one of my goals this year to really start to use this to my advantage. Essentially all this software does is provide you the means to write your own digital flashcards that you can then test yourself on. It also has a lot of amazing addons that you can get to add more functionality to the app.)
56. ImageOptim (quickly remove all the unneeded metadata from the image as well as compress images without losing any visual quality and saving a lot of bandwidth when uploading these images on your website or blog)
57. Dragand (quickly get subtitles that I want by dragging the file with the movie/series I want to watch to the app)
58. GIF Brewery (allows me to create some great GIFs from video clips as well as converting the entire video clip into a GIF if need be) (a great little utility)
59. Quickcast (what I use when I want to make a screencast of my screen to send to someone)
60. Noizio (rain, whale noises, coffee shop noises right from my menu bar, when I am tired of listening to music and just want to focus)
61. Sip (a really great colour picker that is quite often getting updated)
62. Patina (the closest thing to Microsoft Paint that exists on Mac.)
63. Paw (a really great tool for working with API's, only recently started to use it but the features it has are really handy and the design is intuitive and great)
64. Timing (aside from tracking my time actively with Toggl, I also have a passive tracker, that records the amount of time I spend in all applications, websites that I access on my mac) (I can then use the information to reflect on how and where I am spending my time and what I should change)
65. Airtable (started using it recently as my own personal database of things) (even had the idea of moving and keeping lists of apps I use there as it is much easier for me to update and keep up with)
66. MacDown (the tool I use to write this readme) (a really great tool that I use to quickly edit any single markdown file that I have on the system)
67. Typinator (moved to it from textexpander as I am not fond of subscription models for software but also because typinator is really just better) (it expands text and moves the pointer caret faster and has a really powerful quick search available globally right at my fingertips)
68. hammerspoon (really powerul automation engine, wanted to use it for window management at first but found BetterTouchTool to be more performant) (right now I use it show the task I am currenly working on in a little window in the middle of the screen for a brief moment) (can see my config for it here)
69. hazel (use it to fully automate my filing process) (I use prefixes for everything, bookmarks, notes, ulysses entries and even files) (this allows me to write some great rules for my Downloads folder that will file the files where I want them to be) (here is one example of such rule) (I also recursively lowercase files and hide extensions for all files on my system)
70. Tower (started using it only recently and need to take my commit messages seriously and learn git well, not just the basic commands) (this seems like a good app to help organise all the git activity across different repositories I have on my machine)

Browser

My browser of choice is Safari. Chrome just kills the battery and Safari is really well optimised for macOS plus I have tried both and I really do find Safari a lot more 'snappier' to use. One powerful plus that chrome does have over safari is the amount of chrome extensions that you can get. Fortunately the ones most needed for me do exist on Safari. Here are the ones that I use (in order of importance for me) :

1. sVim (allows me to navigate through pages with h,j,k,l and a lot more) (here are the custom sVimrc settings that I use)
2. Adguard (content blocker which is akin to adblock but uses less resources and really just works)
3. wikiwand (use wikipedia quite a lot, it really needed some good ui refinement so here it is, plus it has night mode availabality which is amazing)
4. AlienTube (youtube comments are useless, this shows me reddit comments on videos that were submitted to Reddit, makes a huge difference)
5. Stylish (allows for local customisations of various websites, I use it to have night mode on every website that I visit (youtube, github, hckrnews, quora, stack overflow and so on) (really reccomend it)
6. Octotree (gives a file tree view on the side of each repository that you visit that you can use to navigate over the codebase)
7. refined github (some small ui and usability improvements on the Github website
8. Reddit Enchancement Suite (a ton of amazing additions to the reddit website)
9. hckr news (I use hacker news as one of my main sources of news and it was really in need of a nicer interface with night mode so here it is, plus I have it show only the top posts from the day)
10. minimal status bar (shows a small unobtrusive bar on the bottom of the page when I hover over some link)
11. Sessions (allows me to quickly save and retrive sessions that I had made, very useful if you have a lot of tabs open and you don't want to quit them all but still start a new session to work from)
12. Social Fixer (really cleaned up my facebook page, no ads, no live updated notifications of what people have done on the right and a lot more, don't use facebook anyway and have it blocked for entire day but the times I do, it makes a nice difference
13. Disconnect (perhaps overdoing it as I already have Adguard as my blocker, but maybe it is nice to have too, doesn't impact browser performance in any way)
14. betterttv (don't use Twitch as it is quite a huge waste of time but night mode is essential for me in the rare occasions that I do want to visit it)
15. noMoreItunes (safari redirects you to iTunes every time you click on some iTunes link or an App Store App, this stops that)
16. 1Password (1Password is a phenomenal password manager, this extension just gives a seamless interaction of it with the browser)
17. Reddit Comments (provides a small button in the top toolbar that when clicked will direct you to a reddit thread where the current page you are on was submitted to, if such page exists of course)
18. Scroblr (decided to make a last.fm account which scrobbles all the songs I listen to, I find it quite nice to see my top artists, songs, albums that I listened to over time)
19. JSON formatter (makes JSON documents that you open with the browser 'human readable')
20. Shellfish (removes all the annoying 'share this page' links and buttons, I forgot such things exist after using this)

Alfred Workflows

I find Alfred with its ability to create custom workflows for it to bring me the most value. Here is a list of workflows that I personally love to use again sorted by their importance to me :

• Searchio
  • allows me to quickly search Google, Youtube, Wikipedia, Amazon, Google Images and Maps quickly and with autosuggestions being provided with every query I type. I can quickly press jk and type anything I want and use the wonderful power of Google and DuckDuckGo to answer any question that I have.

• Dash
  • it allows me to very quickly search through any docset that I have downloaded for anything I want, it allows me to also scope my search for any specific docset that I want to search. I activate it by simply pressing ln together.

• GitHub Jump

  • saves all my starred repositories to a local database and then allows to fuzzy search on the contents of it. Incredibly fast.

• Github Command Bar

  • allows me to quickly find any repository that I want, search through Github, go to my current issues, my dashboard and a lot lot more
  • use it less now due to speed of GitHub Jump

• Stack Overflow
  • Stack Overflow search from Alfred with autosuggestions, nearly always I still just use Google to do my search queries but this allows me to more specifically target Stack Overflow and also see the results from the Alfred prompt itself.

• Pocket
  • allows me to quickly save an article I am reading to Pocket for later reading. I can then also go and search any article that I want to read from my reading list quickly.

• Units
  • if I am ever in need to do any kind of conversion, I do it here

• Safari Search
  • use it all the time now, can instantly search through any bookmarks that I have saved in Safari as well as go through my history. The search is instant and very accurate, it also learns from what you usually choose.

• Spotify Mini Player
  • this is an absolutely phenomenal tool that allows me to essentially control through the entirety of Spotify client through a quick Alfred prompt

• Pod Search
  • a very fast way to search and get autosuggestions for various swift and objc pods

Desktop Screenshot

Launchpad