What are your hidden gem MacOS apps

Bartender is what I install on every Mac. So many apps fight for real estate on my top bar. Few of them are granted the privilege.

https://github.com/Mortennn/Dozer is a free, open source version of this
- Unfortunately Dozer isn't great for Macs with a notch as it only folds out horizontally, whereas Bartender can fold out a menu below
Something I dislike about Bartender is that you have to upgrade your license every macOS upgrade, but I understand the devs need to eat
- I use HIdden Bar. It's free and does the same thing
- There were no subscriptions allowed, but it’s also in SetApp, an “App Store” with a subscription and it includes bartender and around 100 other Mac apps.
- I don’t think so. Two paid upgrades in eight years.
  
  Bartender 2 - September 2015
  
  Bartender 3 - September 2017 (Free upgrade)
  
  Bartender 4 - April 2021
  
  Bartender 5 - Sept 2023
Fascinating. I can see how useful it is. It is a surprisingly maclike third party app.

Rectangle - It presets window sizes and assigns them to keystrokes. It’s great to quickly be able to move 2 apps to half a screen each, move them between monitors etc. Shortcat - allows you to basically do anything that you would with the mouse by the keyboard. It’s hard to explain so look it up! It also has a brilliant emoji picker that works so much quicker than the native one.

Quicksilver.

Maybe elaborate a teensy, just to give people an idea as to whether its relevant
- For anyone wondering, Quicksilver is basically Spotlight on steroids.
To say that Quicksilver completely changed the way I use computers is no exaggeration, but the crazy thing is: I'm not even a Mac user. It's easy for people to forget what an influential app this was back in the mid-2000s, and it spawned a small handful of clones over on the Linux side: Gnome Do, Kupfer, Synapse. (None on Windows, to my knowledge.) I'm really thankful to Quicksilver because this is such a sensible and powerful way to do so many things on a desktop, and Ctrl+Space has become my deep-seated muscle memory for "I need to do something..."
- Quicksilver changed how I use the Mac when I transition over from a PC. Quicksilver made everything make sense. I think my favorite thing at the time was the customizable global shortcuts, and being able to just start typing the name of some thing and launch it. Instead of having 1 million icons in shortcuts on the on the dock just the few that I always used.
  
  On PC in the early 2000s I started customizing the windows xp shell because it was so basic. I used something few people have probably used: Geoshell.
  
  It was a skinnable replacement for the windows UI with various plug-ins to customize functionality. I guess it was similar to what was available in Linux at the time as far as the window manager. It was also more stable since explorer wasn’t also handling all of the UI tasks.
  
  I think my record for uptime was like 47 days on Windows XP without having to reboot. Granted, things got kind of funky and it wasn’t perfect.
  
  I even learned how to make my own skins, which at the time was pretty difficult to do in windows xp.
How does it compare to Raycast?

Bettertouchtool is basically the best app ever made, bar none. It’s a major reason why I’m a macOS user. It’s basically a shortcut maker using any peripheral or any trigger and works nearly flawlessly.

It’s incredible that some of the trackpad gestures are actually linear rather than clunky

What sort of things do you use BTT for? I use it too on my MacBook with Apple silicon. Although I view it as a consolation prize. Most everything I use it for I can do with a bash script + hotkey in Linux on my desktop.

Then again, maybe I'm just not creative enough. I understand BTT has a wide range of options to allow for complex shortcuts. But practically speaking, I don't know if I can use 95% of those options.
- 3 finger swipe up - go to “home” (top of page)
  
  4 finger swipe down - close window
  
  4 finger swipe up - zoom
- @kava
It truly is incredible!

AppleScript. Amazing little language that comes with the OS. Can be used to to automate any app, send keystrokes, etc. Completely ignored by Apple and very underrated.

Monodraw

It's an ASCII graph/graphic/art/etc editor. I use it to make portable diagrams for work often. Best of all, there's no subscriptions, just a $10 one-time license (and free demo)

I'm not affiliated in any way, I just think it's a great tool.

This looks awesome! I spend a lot of my time making diagrams and writing markdown docs. The idea of adding diagrams as plaintext sounds pretty cool :)
Thank you for sharing!

I know you said hidden gems, but I’m fairly new, so I admittedly use more popular apps.

arc browser changed my relationship with the web
hand mirror for checking that I’m not a hot mess before my next meeting
karabiner for keyboard tweaking
tot - dead simple quick note app
fucking keyboard maestro!!

+1 for Arc Browser.

I wanted to have Nix, a tiling window manager (Amethyst…meh compared to the beloved xmonad) and the latest MacOs on my 2013 MacBook Pro. So, I installed OpenCore Liberty Bootloader, Nix (w/ flakes and content addressed derivations), home-manager, and all the other goodies you macOS people are missing out on.

fish, alacritty, amethyst, codium, declarative brew files, and dev overlays. https://github.com/harryprayiv/nix-darwin-config

MacWhisper (free but recommended upgrade 25 euro) - High quality, customizable and reliable audio transcription software using OpenAI Whisper
Recordia ($4) - Voice memos if it was lighter, more reliable, and one click in your menu bar
Orion (free) - Web browser developed by the folks at Kagi that brings the best of Safari and enhances it with QoL improvements, like performance, chrome and Firefox extension support, custom search engines, ad blocking, vertical tabs, etc.
Raycast (free) - Spotlight for developers. Get quick conversions, calculations, and file searches or extend its powers with the huge extension library that me and many others have contributed to

HiddenBar replaced my beloved Bartender. And it’s free!

Graphic Converter - simple do-everything image editor. Cheap, shareware try-before-you-buy, powerful, swiss army knife of image editors

PopClip

Select text anywhere and a menu bar of tools pops up. Worth every penny.

This is a continuation of my iOS hidden gems thread and part of an unfolding series on the theme.

Edit: if you contribute, please upvote to shake off the douschebag(s) who always give me an obligatory 1-2 downvotes immediately

Shortery is a great elaboration on Shortcuts, where it "listens" for various triggers to launch various shortcuts automagically.

Spectacle, it adds shortcuts to snap windows to half of the screen and stuff like that. I really like it. Also, DaisyDisk helps me a lot when looking for stuff taking much storage.

There's a FOSS app called Rectangle that does the same thing. I just saw that spectacle is no longer being maintained.
- I rate Rectangle - I bought Pro as well to support the developer and get the hot key to snap multiple apps to a specific layout.
- Thanks, sad that they gave up though
Shortery is sick too

OmniGraffle used to be really useful. I still regularly use it on an old Mac for logic flow diagrams and to-scale construction plans. I can only assume it's still is a gem because I'm too frugal to update.

"OmniGraffle is a powerful tool for diagramming, rapid-prototyping, and designing on Mac, iPad, and iPhone. It allows you to create beautiful, precise graphics and communicate complexity with stunning visuals."

Yabai: Being able to have zero delay switching is a must for me now. BetterTouchTools: So much stuff

I use BTT! What’s zero delay switching?
- Normally if you switch to a different space you get this fancy animation which takes something between 1-2 seconds. With yabai I can switch between spaces instantly without animation and without any delay. Oh and you can do infinite rotation in spaces. So if you are at the end of your spaces and go to the next one you are at the beginning again.

I don’t think I’ve seen iStat menus listed yet! Looooongtime favorite of mine. I have network throughput listed on my work machine (+bartender hiding everything else) and that + temp + fan speed on my old old home server

SleepControlCenter is excellent upper-menu bar app that lets you tweak various sleep settings and easily toggling off sleep for various times and triggers.

a lot of free command line utilities run well on unix (like macos, linux). Things like ssh, ftp,...

Boot camp.