The Mac software I actually use
I've been on a Mac for over twenty years and I've accumulated an embarrassing number of apps. This is not that list. This is the much shorter one: nineteen tools I'd reinstall, grouped by what they're for and rated by how much I'd miss them.
How this list was actually made
I started by pulling launch counts off my own machine, assuming the numbers would just tell me the answer. They didn't.
Microsoft To Do came back with 355 launches — the second-highest count on the whole machine. It isn't on this list, because those launches are a failed experiment: a serious attempt last year to consolidate everything into the Microsoft universe, which didn't work, and which ended with me back in OmniFocus. Dropover launches automatically every time I boot, so it looked like a daily driver. I use it about once a year.
Meanwhile the tools I'd genuinely fight to keep barely register, because I launch them once at login and then they just run. Alfred shows twenty-two launches. It's probably the software I touch most on this machine.
So the numbers found the candidates, and then I had to talk my way through every one of them. Where a tool has a limitation I've made peace with, I've said so. Where the free version is enough, I've said that too.
Prices checked September 2026, and quoted in whichever currency the maker sells in — some price in dollars, some in pounds, some in euros. I buy from Germany, so your own store may well show something different. Every name links straight to the source.
Capture & input
CleanShot X
Pry it from my cold handsI tried the alternatives, including the one macOS gives you free. Four things keep me here: scrolling capture, numbered counter markers for documenting steps, redaction for anything confidential, and a capture history that lets me get back to something from last Tuesday.
Full write-up coming soon — one a week, and this will become a link.
Spokenly
Genuinely greatVoice to text everywhere, transcribed locally on my own machine — currently via Nvidia Parakeet. It switches between German and English without being asked, which is the thing free dictation never got right for me. I use it for short messages, for braindumps I'll sort out later, and increasingly for talking to Claude — whose own built-in transcription still struggles with my English.
Full write-up coming soon — one a week, and this will become a link.
Keyboard & window
Alfred 5
Pry it from my cold handsI use it as a launcher and a calculator. That's ninety-nine percent of it. I've dabbled with workflows and timers and Spotify control for years and none of it ever left novelty territory — which is exactly why I've no appetite for the newer launchers promising all that plus AI plus a subscription. I don't need more.
Full write-up coming soon — one a week, and this will become a link.
Rectangle Pro + Hyperkey
Pry it from my cold handsHyperkey turns caps lock into a modifier nothing else will ever claim; Rectangle turns that into nine screen positions — thirds and sixths — that my fingers now hit without consulting me. Free Rectangle does all of it. Pro buys the named layout that fires by itself when I plug in the external monitor, arranging my working day before I've sat down.
Full write-up coming soon — one a week, and this will become a link.
Writing & thinking
Bear
Pry it from my cold handsThe sheet of paper that's always there. Markdown means I can give something structure without stopping to format it, it autosaves, it syncs, and in years I have never lost a note. The honest limitation: everything lives in its database, so I can't point it at a folder of markdown files. The format isn't proprietary and I can always get my notes out — but it's a real constraint, and I'm watching what its makers do next.
Full write-up coming soon — one a week, and this will become a link.
BBEdit
Genuinely greatI've had a Bare Bones editor on every Mac I've owned, back through TextWrangler, which was folded into BBEdit in 2017. Its slogan is “It doesn't suck” and that remains exactly right: fast, reliable, opens anything I throw at it. The free tier is already more than I need. The paid alternative to BBEdit, for me, is the paid version of BBEdit.
Full write-up coming soon — one a week, and this will become a link.
Visual Studio Code
Genuinely greatHonestly, not an editor I chose on editing merits — it's where I develop with AI. Per-project dev containers that launch themselves when I open a project, plus the Claude plugin and a built-in terminal so I can pick the terminal or the GUI depending on the job. It's heavy, which is exactly why BBEdit still exists on this list.
Full write-up coming soon — one a week, and this will become a link.
Mail, calendar, tasks
HEY
Genuinely greatI left Gmail for a very European reason: the plugins that sorted my newsletters and junk stopped being available in Germany over GDPR. HEY fixed that on day one — the Screener means nothing reaches me until I've approved the sender once, and tracking pixels die at the door. It gets developed in bursts and it shows; collections, workflow and tags never quite connect, and I cannot get my head around the calendar.
Full write-up coming soon — one a week, and this will become a link.
Fantastical
Genuinely greatI might be the only person on earth who pays for Fantastical and doesn't use the natural language input — it never worked for me. What I pay for is overlaying calendars: my wife's shared one, personal, work, imported, in whatever combination I need. Plus a menu bar widget that keeps the date visible and every upcoming appointment one click away. The subscription stings. Nothing else is this easy, so I eat it.
Full write-up coming soon — one a week, and this will become a link.
OmniFocus
Pry it from my cold handsI've been oscillating between full GTD and falling off the wagon for twenty years — at my most committed I carried 43 physical folders, thirty-one days and twelve months, around with me as a consultant. Last year I made a serious attempt to move everything into Microsoft To Do. It did not work. Todoist and Things didn't click either. Everything personal and work-related is back in OmniFocus, because it's the only one that ever felt like home.
Full write-up coming soon — one a week, and this will become a link.
Files & network
Keka
Quietly usefulA silent helper. I don't need it often, but when something else fails to open a compressed file, Keka rescues the day. I never launch it — I right-click. Which is why, when I went looking at my own usage data, it showed up as never having been used at all.
Full write-up coming soon — one a week, and this will become a link.
Tailscale
Pry it from my cold handsConnects my own devices and the infrastructure I need to reach safely from anywhere. It didn't replace a previous solution; there wasn't one I could live with. Setup is seriously easy and for once the advertising doesn't lie — though once you get into rules and multiple users, you'd better understand what you're putting in the config.
Full write-up coming soon — one a week, and this will become a link.
Security
1Password
Pry it from my cold handsIt holds my SSH keys, and that's what moved it from useful to essential. As a non-coder, the way SSH credentials lived on my machine was always a small riddle; now they sit under the same oversight as everything else, and nothing reaches a server without my fingerprint. But: if you're entirely inside the Apple ecosystem and starting today, Apple Passwords is free and a no-brainer — start there. I've been on 1Password since long before it existed, my family's on it now, and I'll admit the switching cost is doing some of the work. On price alone, I've hesitated to push it at work.
Full write-up coming soon — one a week, and this will become a link.
Little Snitch
Quietly usefulAlways running, and it shows you which servers your software talks to. As I write this, PowerPoint alone is connected to fourteen of them — Cape Town, Seoul, Stockholm, Montreal, Kansas, San Francisco, Berlin. The moment that got me was the first install, seeing where everything was quietly phoning. I block things when I'm trying unfamiliar software, or when I spot an ad server. Alert fatigue is real, so a browser I trust gets a free pass.
Full write-up coming soon — one a week, and this will become a link.
AI
Claude
Pry it from my cold handsDesktop for everything that isn't development, terminal and VS Code when it is. The part that changed how I work is the integration layer: with access to my mail, calendar and task manager, most of what I'm tracking and planning now runs through one place. Some of that sits on locally running MCPs, so it holds together as long as my desktop is awake. What's still missing is real multi-person collaboration — right now you can work with your colleagues in real time, or with Claude, and not really both.
Full write-up coming soon — one a week, and this will become a link.
LM Studio
Genuinely greatLocal models on my own machine — qwen, gemma and llama variants. Two reasons. First, learning: running things locally taught me more about inference, context windows and chunking than any amount of reading. Second, it's genuinely useful — I point a local n8n instance at LM Studio's API endpoint and automate data processing with no privacy question to answer and no cost beyond the electricity.
Full write-up coming soon — one a week, and this will become a link.
Everything else
Ivory
Genuinely greatI came from Tweetbot, like most people here, and found Mastodon around the time Twitter started going downhill. Ivory was the most straightforward way in. Worth being clear: Ivory is good software, and Mastodon is not another Twitter. It's federated, the mental model is different, and finding people to follow works differently. I ran a server for my company for a while; two people signed up and I was the only one using it, so I moved to mastodon.social like everyone else.
Full write-up coming soon — one a week, and this will become a link.
Thaw
Genuinely greatMy menu bar manager, after Bartender. I left over the ownership change, but also because it stopped being reliable — and this is a job where I need something that just works every time. Thaw had its own rough patch, forgetting how I'd sorted things and occasionally giving up entirely. I stayed because I trialled Bartender again in parallel and didn't want to go back. Less frills, less drama. Worth knowing: Thaw is a fork of Ice, which looks alive — the repo isn't archived and the README still says active development — but hasn't had a stable release since October 2024.
Full write-up coming soon — one a week, and this will become a link.
Vivid
Quietly usefulOne trick: it gets the full brightness out of the display, using the same controls you already use. I need it when the sun is out and I'm outside, or inside without enough shade. One trick, done properly, no interface to learn. It's earned permanent residency.
Full write-up coming soon — one a week, and this will become a link.
How this was written. I put this collection together in collaboration with AI. Every tool on it is one I use personally, and every entry is based on extensive input from me — my own reasons, my own complaints, my own history with each one. The AI interviewed me tool by tool, checked facts I'd half-remembered (and corrected a few), and helped me shape the result into something readable. The opinions are entirely mine. So are the mistakes.
Two companion pages are coming: the iOS and iPad apps that didn't belong here, and the tools still proving their worth.