Productivity tools on MacOS
Hi all,
Recently came into possession of a Macbook Pro as a work laptop and since I've never used them in a professional capacity I'm at a loss on what tools are available for Mac.
I was wondering if anyone has any must have tools for Mac that I shouldn't miss out on that makes the experience overall better. While the title says "productivity" I don't mean just things like Notion or Obsidian, I'm looking for stuff that contributes to a professional environment in more ways than one.
Think calendar, folder structure/navigation, automation/macros, configuration enablers, must have settings, all that jazz. I'm mainly looking for stuff that helps me work with the machine, but hey I wouldn't mind knowing what makes MacOS in general more agreeable to use for someone that wants more settings.
In short: What are your must have thangs for MacOS?
Ooh, Keeping you awake is nice. I snagged that one. I'll have a look at Rectangle.
You don't need neither of them, if your usage is basic.
macOS introduced windows management a few years ago. You can move a window to the screen's borders or use keyboard shortcuts — they are listed in the Window menu. Note that if you use a non-Apple external keyboard, they probably won't work, since they depend on the globe key, which is rare on third-party keyboards.
For keeping your computer awake, macOS has a little CLI app called caffeinate. Just type caffeinate -d on the terminal emulator to keep the computer awake indefinitely. There are other flags.
Seconding Rectangle. Its essential.
It’s been a while since I have used a Mac, but when I was doing corpus linguistics research with tens of thousands of text files, Publicspace apps were a godsend, specifically A Better Finder Rename and Big Mean Folder Machine. Worth every penny.
https://www.publicspace.net/index.html
Those may work well combined with Raycast! I'm still figuring out how that works but it looks to be useful when I have a search bar able to find things I sorted using Rename tools.
By the by, if anyone has any tips for setting up Raycast or BetterTouchBar, I'm all ears.
Macs come with a lot of pretty decent apps, so I wouldn’t say there’s anything that’s a must-have. I install Chrome first thing because it’s what I’m used to, but Safari is decent.
Since there’s more horizontal than vertical space, I move the dock to the right side.
Moving the dock may not be a bad idea. I did enable the Stage Manager so part of the screen's edges have been filled already. Though while some of the Stage Manager features are nice, I'm not entirely sold on how it works.
Another option (and what I do) is hide the dock so that it doesn't show up unless my mouse is down at the bottom of the screen. If I need to check what's open, I tend to cmd+tab, and if I need to open something, I use Alfred, so the dock doesn't get that much use.
Congrats on your new Mac, it's great.
Homebrew: It’s a package manager for Terminal and it’s great. Easy installs and updates. Also you can save your configurations for easy reinstalls
Onyx: Helps clean your mac and gives easier access to certain system commands
Bear: It’s a note-taking app and it’s great. The Notes app that Macs come with is solid too
Spotlight: Press cmd + space to bring up spotlight search. This comes with macos and is a powerful search and apple launcher
Apple Reminders: It’s another Apple app that is secretly powerful. You can make location and time based reminders. I rarely use it, but on the
Hazel: It’s an autmation app for finder. It monitors folders and does actions based on conditions. For instance, I use hazel to move pictures from my downloads folder if they’re older than a week
Stuff that comes with macOS:
Apps I don’t use but hear great things about:
There’s a ton of other stuff and i might add to this as I think of things.
Reminders should be one I take a look at. Though it does seem it may cause a loss of sentence structure when
Hazel sounds nice but I doubt I'll use it much. I tend to keep file management to a minimum on work laptops as you're usually better off working in some shared environment. Nevertheless, saved.
A colleague of mine also mentioned Hot Corners and while I will likely check it out I have a visceral response to the name.
Thanks for the suggestions!
Things that I have installed, use regularly, and haven't been mentioned yet