Ask HN: New clean macOS install. Must-have apps? Best browser?

18 points by simonebrunozzi 22 hours ago|19 comments

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imagetic 18 hours ago

Firefox Nightly - https://www.firefox.com/en-US/channel/desktop uBlock Origin - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin Ghostty - ghostty.org Homebrew - https://brew.sh Oh-my-posh - https://github.com/JanDeDobbeleer/oh-my-posh Zed - https://zed.dev 1Password - https://1password.com Tailscale - https://tailscale.com iStats Menu - https://bjango.com/mac/istatmenus Little Snitch - https://obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html Ice Toolbar Manager - https://icemenubar.app MarkEdit - https://github.com/MarkEdit-app Magnet - https://magnet.crowdcafe.co/ Pi - https://pi.dev

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FergusArgyll 15 hours ago

https://magnet.crowdcafe.co/ needs an `m` at the end, https://magnet.crowdcafe.com/

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kdtsh 15 hours ago

Homebrew and mise-en-place are the only must have apps for me (both of which are not .app applications). Everything else is pretty well context-dependant and/or built in. For Homebrew - having used Nix, Macports, and pkgsrc, I found Homebrew easier than everything else. I would like to get into Nix, but there is too much mucking around for it to be worth it to me.

mise-en-place has such a unique feature set that I can’t compare it to anything else. I started using it as a replacement for pyenv and sdkman, and found it so helpful.

For me, the better-than-you-think built in apps are:

- Reminders - I haven’t gone all in on any other task management software, but I don’t bother because Reminders does everything I need

- Mail - it is fiddly and idiot proof to a fault, but provided you don’t have an exotic setup and can deal with only average search capabilities, it works well

- Calendar - it’s a calendar. Only thing I don’t particularly like is the date-picker interface for new events, and that’s mainly because I like my Sunday-Saturday format

- Terminal - it’s tidy and works well. Many swear by iTerm2; I find Terminal good

- Safari - does what it says on the tin and does it well, I like Safari. (Edit: I use Wipr2 for Adblock which is necessary)

- Passwords - having been a medium-long term user (2-5 years) at various times of both Keepass and Password Store, I ended up transitioning to Passwords because of its good integration with Safari and its sync in iCloud, which is good for family. However the app itself has improved over time as well and I call it good

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soraminazuki 3 hours ago

FYI uBlock Origin Lite is officially available for Safari now.

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treetalker 14 hours ago

- Alfred (launch bar extraordinaire)

- Keyboard Maestro (automation)

- TextSoap (clean text with various cleaners [regex etc] that can be saved and invoked on selected text, entire files, or batches of files throughout the system)

- Klack is fun to add typing sounds (helps me stay in the zone)

- Dark Noise for background noise (stay in the zone) — although MacOS has some background noise generation built in now

- 1Blocker (ad and tracker blocking; also for iOS)

- Voice Dream Reader (read articles / any text aloud)

- Default Folder X (set defaults for how files get saved — e.g., which directory to default to for a given file extension)

- Rectangle

- Fantastical (calendar with lots of thoughtful additional features)

- Karabiner Elements (to turn Caps Lock into a hyper key; right Command key + hjkl into arrow keys; sky's the limit)

- TextExpander

- Homerow or Shortcat

- HoudahSpot (great file search utility; can save searches, save templates, and export Smart Folders)

- OmniFocus (to-do / task management; GTD-centric)

- TaskPaper

- Good outliners: OmniOutliner, Bike

- nvALT (barely alive; Brett Terpstra's nvUltra has been on the cusp of release for like 7 years now …)

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CobaltFire 22 hours ago

Heres my list:

Transnomino (https://www.transnomino.com/)

StillColor (https://github.com/aiaf/Stillcolor)

SublimeText (https://www.sublimetext.com/)

Homebrew (https://brew.sh/)

VLC (https://www.videolan.org/)

Macs Fan Control (https://crystalidea.com/macs-fan-control)

Rectangle (https://rectangleapp.com/)

NetBird (https://netbird.io/)

Obsidian (https://obsidian.md/)

Honestly its not huge and most are probably obvious, but those are what I immediately install on my machines. Looking forward to seeing alternatives or new must-haves.

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simonebrunozzi 22 hours ago

pretty good. Which browser do you use?

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CobaltFire 22 hours ago

Safari for most things, Chromium if I have to for something.

I didn't toss those there because those (and IDEs and SSH/Terminal clients) are very opinionated and everyone has their favorites.

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speedgoose 13 hours ago

Homebrew to get a package manager that is not managed by Apple and its many restrictions and high fees.

AltTab and Rectangle to have more features to manage windows.

Ghostty can replace Terminal.app though I think it leaks memory.

Zen Browser is Firefox with an Arc inspired interface. It's slow and heavy but it blocks ads and trackers a bit better than Chromium based browsers, or Safari.

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k310 19 hours ago

Ublock-origin with Firefox, Audacity, Batch Photo Resizer, calibre, cardflow, Diffraction, Ejimo and Ultra Character Map (try finding emojis without them), Libre Office, Paprika Recipe Manager, Samurai Safe, SeaMonkey (who else edits HTML?) GIMP, Darktable, RawTherapee, Super Photo Upscaler, Sublime Text, VLC, Clearview (and why isn't epub supported natively?), PhotoSync (share photos with all platforms), GhostText for editing browser text areas with Sublime Text or other. (life-saver)

Ones I actually use.

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gsch1 10 hours ago

Firefox or Safari for Browser, and just install the apps you need (you should know your must-have)

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swah 19 hours ago

Raycast (also does window management, dictation), Chrome, Ghostty, Karabiner..

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smcleod 22 hours ago

Handy, Cotypist, Markedit, Ghostty Tip, BetterTouchTool, GoodLinks, Pixelmator Pro, Handbrake, Zed, Onyx, LittleSnitch (or LuLu), Chezmoi, Stats, Shottr, llama.cpp, oMLX, LM Studio, Parcel, Things, OrbStack, Msty Studio.

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