Louis's software recommendations (macOS, Windows & Linux)

Battery charge limiter. Li-Ion cells last significantly longer when you cap the daily charge at ~80%.

Tiling window manager for macOS — handy if you like a keyboard-driven tiling workflow, as I do.

Powerful keep-awake utility. Stops the Mac from sleeping — useful for long computations, filming a screen, or watching something.

Menu-bar manager that keeps status icons reachable when they would otherwise vanish behind the notch. See iBar for a free, less feature-rich alternative.

Virtual audio driver for capturing system output (e.g. into OBS). Note: OBS has native output capture on macOS 13 "Ventura" and later.

Clean GTK front-end for mpv — my IINA equivalent on Linux.

SFTP / cloud storage client with a friendly UI.

WinDirStat-style disk-space usage analyser (treemap).

A temporary floating "shelf" to collect files, links and clipboard items via drag-and-drop.

Free and open-source video converter / transcoder.

Minimal menu-bar manager to hide icons that would otherwise disappear behind the notch.

Menu-bar manager that moves overflow icons into a second row so the notch stops hiding them.

Native macOS front-end for mpv — in my opinion the best video player available.

Feature-rich terminal replacement. I run Powerlevel10k, and the default Terminal.app cannot render my fonts/themes correctly.

Lightweight archiver for compressing/extracting a wide range of formats.

Free and open-source raster image editor (also opens Photoshop files).

Save the current session of open apps and reopen it later — handy for getting a clean desktop before a presentation.

Clipboard-history manager. Also strips formatting on paste, which macOS oddly makes hard by default.

Mount SSHFS, NTFS and EXT (Windows/Linux external disks and USB sticks) on macOS. Requires loading a kernel extension.

Easiest way to get a complete LaTeX runtime on macOS. Open the bundled "TeX Live Utility" occasionally and "Update all packages" to avoid incompatibilities.

Window management via screen-edge snapping, like Windows Snap. See Rectangle for a free alternative.

Cross-platform mpv front-end with a lightweight ImGui interface — what I currently use as video player on Windows.

Free and open-source vector graphics editor — figures, diagrams, logos and SVG clean-up.

Free and open-source EDA suite for schematics and PCB layout. Has become genuinely excellent in recent versions.

KDE’s universal document viewer — PDF, EPUB, DjVu and more, with proper annotations. A good Skim/Preview substitute outside macOS.

Replaces the Explorer copy dialog: queueing, pause/resume, verification hashes and a proper error list instead of one-by-one prompts.

Control the brightness of external monitors from the system tray (via DDC/CI) — no more fiddling with monitor buttons.

Brings macOS-style Quick Look to Windows: select a file in Explorer, press Space, see a preview. Plugins add Markdown, Office and more.

Fast, minimal VPN. I use the official client for the tunnel to my home server; Tailscale for the zero-config mesh in between.

The go-to tool for screen recording and streaming.

WebKit browser by Kagi — a Safari-like feel that also runs Firefox and Chrome extensions.

Window management via edge snapping. An easier-to-use alternative to Amethyst, and a free alternative to Magnet.

PDF viewer focused on annotating and reviewing.

Shows system information (CPU, RAM, network, temps) in the menu bar.

Software KVM: drive several computers with one keyboard/mouse. Like Universal Control, but across macOS, Windows and Linux.

Cross-platform VNC remote-desktop client.

Per-service browser/app router — e.g. open YouTube in Firefox, Netflix in Safari, everything else somewhere else.

My primary text and code editor. See the extension list further down.

Excellent reference/citation manager for academic writing.

A polished GUI over winget, Scoop and Chocolatey — browse, install and bulk-update Windows packages in one place. The closest thing Windows has to a friendly app store for CLI package managers.

Zero-config mesh VPN built on WireGuard. Reach all my machines securely from anywhere, no port-forwarding.

Bridges phone and desktop: shared clipboard, notifications, file transfer and remote input over the local network.

My 3D-printing slicer — fast, feature-rich and supports a huge range of printers.

Open-source parametric 3D CAD modeller for mechanical design.

Open-source medical image computing platform — my go-to for viewing, segmenting and processing CT/MRI volumes.

Classic open-source multi-track audio recorder and editor.

The open-source powerhouse for 3D modelling, sculpting, animation and rendering.

Microsoft’s power-user toolkit: FancyZones window tiling, PowerToys Run launcher, Keyboard Manager, image resizer and much more. Essential on Windows.

Instant filename search for Windows by indexing the NTFS MFT. Finds any file in milliseconds — nothing else comes close.

The definitive Windows archiver — high compression, wide format support, and it just works.

Feature-packed screenshot and screen-recording tool with capture regions, annotations, and configurable upload/after-capture workflows.

Very powerful multi-connection download utility (HTTP/FTP/BitTorrent/Metalink).

The package manager for macOS (and Linux). No more hunting the web for installers — "brew install firefox" and you are done. It installs most of the GUI apps in this post too.

A powerful, good-looking resource monitor for the terminal. On Windows the btop4win port does the job.

Run Linux containers anywhere. On Windows it runs on top of WSL2. Docker Desktop needs a licence for larger companies, which is why I switched to Podman.

Daemonless, rootless drop-in replacement for the Docker CLI ("alias docker=podman" mostly just works). Podman Desktop adds a GUI if you want one.

Fast parallel disk-usage analyzer. The interactive mode ("dua i") is the quickest way I know to find what is eating a full disk.

The Swiss-army knife for processing video, audio and other multimedia files and streams.

Powerful image conversion/manipulation, e.g. "magick image.png image.jpg" (also PDF, mp4, etc.).

Command-line interface for the Mac App Store — great for scripting and automating installs.

Prints system info next to your OS logo — the classic terminal flex.

Pipe Viewer — measure throughput of data moving through a shell pipe.

View and control Android devices from the desktop over USB or Wi-Fi.

Test internet bandwidth from the terminal.

Print directory structures as an indented tree.

Download video/audio from YouTube and hundreds of other sites. The actively maintained youtube-dl fork; pairs with FFmpeg.

Modern typesetting system — LaTeX quality with a sane syntax and instant compiles. I use it for presentations and reports (see Tinymist below).

Windows Subsystem for Linux — a real Linux userland integrated with the Windows file system, VS Code and Windows Terminal. The main reason Windows is bearable as a daily driver.

Share USB devices with WSL over USB/IP — flash microcontrollers or talk to serial adapters from Linux tooling inside WSL.

My AUR helper on Arch — a pacman wrapper that also builds and updates packages from the Arch User Repository in one command (e.g. "yay -S <name>").

Self-hosted cloud: files, sync, calendars, contacts and photos on your own hardware — my Dropbox/Google-Drive replacement for years, running on a Raspberry Pi.

LibreOffice-based office suite that runs in the browser, integrated into my Nextcloud — documents, spreadsheets and slides get edited right where they are stored, no desktop office install needed.

Lightweight self-hosted git forge (the Codeberg-backed Gitea fork): private repos, issues, PRs and CI via Forgejo Actions. This site deploys through it.

Turns YouTube and Vimeo channels into podcast RSS feeds — subscribe to creators in your podcast app instead of fighting the YouTube algorithm.

Render Markdown files in Quick Look.

Preview many more video types in Quick Look.

Syntax-highlighted Quick Look previews for source code.

Strips tracking parameters from URLs, making them shorter and cleaner to share.

Serves common CDN libraries locally to cut third-party tracking and speed up page loads.

Crowd-sourced skipping of sponsor segments, intros and other filler on YouTube.

The one and only best content blocker — please don’t use anything else. Consider whitelisting sites you want to support; not every ad is malicious.

Advanced per-site script/content firewall for when uBlock Origin is not enough. Warning: can overwhelm new users.

Collects TODO/FIXME tags from your code comments into a browsable tree. Maintained fork of the original Todo Tree, which is no longer updated.

Microsoft’s C/C++ language support plus CMake Tools for configuring, building, debugging and testing CMake projects from the editor. My daily C++ setup at work.

Spell-check your prose in code — especially useful for LaTeX and other documents. Additional dictionaries (e.g. German) are separate extensions.

Run a formatter across multiple files from the right-click menu.

The best in-editor git UI: blame, history, comparisons and more.

Turns VS Code into a great LaTeX authoring environment — in my opinion the best way to write LaTeX.

Highly recommended grammar/spell checker (LanguageTool) tuned for LaTeX, Markdown, Typst and more. Catches higher-level mistakes, not just typos. Maintained fork of the abandoned LTeX.

Style and consistency linting for Markdown — keeps READMEs and notes tidy.

Makes VS Code one of the best development environments for microcontrollers I have used.

Microsoft’s Python support with the Pylance language server: fast type-aware completions, refactorings, debugging and environment management.

Edit CSVs comfortably: colourises columns, aligns them, and runs SQL-like queries over the data.

Work on remote machines, containers or a WSL distro over SSH as if the files were local. On Windows, Remote - WSL is how I do most Linux-y work.

Sort selected lines — I used it to keep the original tables in this post tidy.

Language server and live preview for Typst — the modern LaTeX alternative I now use for presentations and reports.

Highlights and removes trailing whitespace — at worst it causes bugs, at best it is just ugly.

Language support for the MWorks Experiment Language (MWEL). Maintained by me. :)

The password manager I use. I strongly recommend using a password manager in general — but do your own research on the security trade-offs of storing everything in one place. This is not a specific endorsement of Bitwarden.

Turn a USB stick into a multi-boot drive: just copy ISOs onto it and boot any of them. Perfect if you install operating systems often.