Louis's Mac software recommendations

Updated: 17th October 2023

GUI Software

Name	Price	in use by me	Description
aldente	Free/ 23.80€	✅	A battery charge limiter (The service life of Li-Ion batteries is significantly extended by charging them to no more than 80% on a daily basis). https://apphousekitchen.com/ or “brew install --cask aldente”
amethyst	Free	✅	Tiling Window Manager for macOS - handy if you prefer this a tiling workflow, like I do. https://github.com/ianyh/Amethyst or “brew install --cask amethyst”
Amphetamine	Free	✅	Powerful keep-awake utility. Prevents the Mac from going into sleep mode. Useful if you want to keep an app visible (filming a clock for camera sync or watching movies with e.g. iPad apps) or if you just want the Mac to keep computing your R scripts when you are on your lunch break. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/amphetamine/id937984704 or “mas install 937984704”
Bartender 4	Trial/ 18€	❌	Menu Bar Manager. The Bartender Bar is a way solution to not lose access to status bar icons that disappear behind the notch. See iBar for a less feature rich but free alternative. https://www.macbartender.com/ or “brew install bartender”
blackhole-2ch	Free	✅	❗ OBS has native support for sound recording on macOS 13 “Ventura” or later ❗ Enables sound recording from output devices with software like OBS. https://github.com/ExistentialAudio/BlackHole or “brew install blackhole-2ch”
Celluloid	Free	✅	IINA alternative for linux https://github.com/celluloid-player/celluloid/
cyberduck	Free	❌	SFTP Client. https://cyberduck.io/ or “brew install --cask cyberduck”
disk-inventory-x	Free	✅	WinDirStat Style hard disk space usage analysis tool “brew install --cask disk-inventory-x”
Dropover	Free	❌	Create a temporary floating and shareable space to collect files, links, clipboards, and more with a simple drag and drop. https://dropoverapp.com/
handbrake	Free	✅	Free and open source video converter “brew install --cask handbrake”
hiddenbar	Free	❌	Menu Bar Manager. Hide elements from the menu bar - otherwise, some icons might disappear behind the notch. Who thought that this is a good behavior apple? “brew install --cask hiddenbar”
iBar	Free	✅	Menu Bar Manager. Provides the ability to add icons to an overflow menu that would otherwise be hidden by the notch. I can’t believe this is necessary when macOS should have handled this natively. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ibar-menubar-icon-control-tool/id6443843900 or “mas install 6443843900”
IINA	Free	✅	MPV video player front-end for macOS - MPV is in my opinion the best video player available. “brew install --cask IINA”; https://github.com/IINA/IINA
iterm2	Free	✅	I’m a Powerline10k user, and macOS’s default terminal can’t display my font/themes correctly. 😕 “brew install --cask iterm2”
keka	Free	✅	Free tool for compressing files. “brew install --cask keka”
krita	Free	✅	Free and open source image editor (Supports Photoshop files) “brew install --cask krita”
Later	Free	❌	Manually safe a current session of open programs and reopen them later. Useful for example if you need a clean desktop for a presentation. https://getlater.app/
maccy	Free	✅	Clipboard history manager. Paste without formatting (WIN/LINUX SHIFT+CMD+V) is apparently missing in OSX. Maccy allows removing formatting from the clipboard and also provides a very handy history for it. “brew install --cask maccy”
macfuse	Free	✅	Mount SSHFS, NTFS and EXT (Windows/Linux External hard disks and USB sticks) file systems on MAC. Requires the installation of kernel modules.
MacTeX	Free	✅	Easiest way to install a working LaTeX runtime on your Mac, since it comes with all necessary dependencies. Make sure to open the bundled “TeX Live Utility” before first use and every once in a while to “Update all packages” to their newest version. This may avoid issues with incompatibilities, bugs or other annoyances. https://www.tug.org/mactex/ or “brew install --cask mactex”
Magnet	Free	✅	Must-have for most people, adds window management similar to what you find windows (drag windows to screen edges to make the full screen or use the right/left side of your screen). Alternative: Rectangle ⬇️ https://magnet.crowdcafe.com/index.html or “mas install 441258766”
mpv.net	Free	✅	IINA alternative for windows https://github.com/mpvnet-player/mpv.net
obs	Free	✅	The Go-To Tool for Screen Recordings
onlyoffice	Free	✅	Great MS Office alternative
Orion Browser	Free	✅	Orion Browser by Kagi- a Safari clone, that supports Firefox and Chrome Extensions!
Rectangle	Free/ 9.99€	❔	Must-have for most people, adds window management similar to what you find windows (drag widows to screen edges to make the full screen or use the right/left side of your screen). Easier to use alternative to amethyst, highly recommended. Another alternative: Magnet ⬆️ https://rectangleapp.com/
skim	Free	❌	PDF Viewer with focus on annotating work
stats	Free	✅	Displays system information in the top menu bar.
synergy	29€/ 59€	✅	Software KVM tool to control multiple PCs with a single mouse/keyboard combination. https://symless.com/synergy / Like Universal Control, but works with Windows/Linux too
tigervnc-viewer	Free	❌	VNC Remote desktop tool
Velja	Free	❌	By service browser/app selector. For example: open YouTube links in Firefox, Netflix in Safari, and any other link in something else; and more.
visual-studio-code	Free	✅	Very good text and code editor.
zotero	Free	✅	Great citation tool

Recommended resource for more:

• Awesome Mac (https://github.com/jaywcjlove/awesome-mac)

CLI Software

Name	Price	in use by me	Description
aria2	Free	✅	Very powerful download manager
brew	Free	✅	Package manager for MAC. You don’t have to search the web for Software anymore!!! Just type e.g. “brew install firefox” into your terminal, and you are ready to go! Also works with almost every recommended software in this document. Highly recommended! See https://brew.sh/
btop	Free	✅	A powerful and good-looking activity monitor for use in the terminal
docker	Free	✅	Running Linux Docker container under in Mac
ffmpeg	Free	✅	FFmpeg is a free and open source software for processing video, audio and other multimedia files and streams.
ImageMagick	Free	✅	Very powerful tool for converting files (e.g. “convert image.png image.jpg” or mp4, PDF, mp3, etc.)
Mac App Store CLI	Free	✅	A simple command line interface for the Mac App Store. Designed for scripting and automation. https://github.com/mas-cli/mas or “brew install mas”
neofetch	Free	✅	Display information about your system in a fancy way within your terminal
pv	Free	✅	Measure terminal “pipe” speeds
scrcpy	Free	✅	View and remotely control Android devices on Mac
speedtest-cli	Free	✅	Test internet speed
tree	Free	✅	Display directory structures in the terminal

Quick look extensions

Name	Price	in use by me	Description
QLMarkdown	Free	✅	Renders Markdown files - https://github.com/sbarex/QLMarkdown
QLVideo	Free	✅	Previews more video types - https://github.com/Marginal/QLVideo
SourceCodeSyntaxHighlighting	Free	✅	Colors source code - https://github.com/sbarex/SourceCodeSyntaxHighlight

Recommended resource for more:

• Quick Look plugins (https://github.com/sindresorhus/quick-look-plugins)

Browser extensions (Firefox/Chrome/Orion Browser)

Name	Price	in use by me	Description
ClearURLs	Free	✅	Removes trackers from URLs, hence makes them shorter and easier to share.
Decentraleyes	Free	✅	Intelligent local (offline) caching of shared website content to reduce tracking and speed up website loading times.
SponsorBlock for YouTube	Free	✅	Automatically skips intros and things.
uBlock Origin	Free	✅	THE one and only best ad blocker, please don’t use anything else. (It’s important to note that not all ads are malicious. If you want to ensure that the websites you like continue to exist, consider adding them to your ad-blocker’s whitelist.)
uMatrix	Free	✅	Advanced script and content blocker, for those for whom uBlock Origin is not enough. Warning: Can be confusing to new users!

Visual Studio Code extensions

Name	Price	in use by me	Description
Code Spell Checker	Free	✅	Useful especially if you use VS Code for latex and other documents.
Format in context menus	Free	✅	If you want to batch process multiple files to run a formatter.
GitLens	Free	✅	The one best UI-Tool for git.
LaTeX Workshop	Free	✅	Visual Studio Code extension for creating and editing latex documents. In my opinion, the best way to use latex.
LTeX	Free	✅	Very highly recommended spellchecker that is more specific for Latex, Markdown and others. It also catches grammar and other high level mistakes
PlatformIO IDE	Free	✅	Makes Visual Studio Code one of the best development environments for any microcontroller I’ve encountered so far.
Rainbow CSV	Free	✅	Handy if you want to edit CSV files. It can align columns, search with SQL queries and color individual columns to better distinguish them.
Remote (- SSH)	Free	✅	Allows you to work on projects on other computers, environments, or in containers from your personal machine remotely via SSH.
Sort lines	Free	✅	Very useful for Markdown tables like this one. In fact, I used it to sort all the tables in this document!
todo Tree	Free	✅	Leave To do tags in code comments and come back to them later.
Trailing Spaces	Free	✅	I personally hate it when files have trailing spaces. At worst, they can cause problems and at best they are just ugly. Use this to keep your files clean.
vscode-mwel	Free	✅	This extension adds language support for mWorks Experiment Language (MWEL) to Visual Studio Code. It’s maintained by me 😃

Worth mentioning

Name	Price	in use by me	Description
Bitwarden	Free	✅	A password manager I use. I highly recommend using a password manager in general! However, there are some security implications to storing all your passwords in one place. I would like you to do your own research, therefore this is not a recommendation for Bitwarden!
Ventoy	Free	✅	Creates USB sticks from which you can boot any ISO you have previously copied to it (very handy if you regularly install different operating systems)