This maintained list supports the software engineering guide with tools that fit a developer-oriented macOS workflow.
This is a collection of helpful macOS programs that I use every day. There are free, premium, and freemium options available. I’ll do my best to maintain this list current.
Terms
FOSS: Software that is both free (as in freedom) and open-source
Freemium: Business model and software licensing scheme in which the basic form of a product is free of charge, and access to additional features requires payment
Productivity
Alfred: (£59) Alfred is an award-winning app for macOS which boosts your efficiency with hotkeys, keywords, text expansion and more.
DropOver: ($6.99) Dropover is a macOS utility that makes Drag and Drop easier.
HazeOver: ($5.99) Turn distractions down and focus on your current task.
Rectangle Pro: ($9.99) Superior window management on macOS.
Stretchly: (FOSS) The break time reminder app.
Shottr: ($12) Shottr is a tiny and fast mac screenshot tool with annotations, beautiful backgrounds, scrolling screenshots and cloud upload capabilities.
Clop: ($15) Image, video, PDF and clipboard optimiser. Copy large, paste small, send fast.
Privacy & Security
LuLu: (FOSS) LuLu is the free open-source macOS firewall.
OverSight: (FOSS) OverSight monitors a mac’s mic and webcam, alerting the user when the internal mic is activated, or whenever a process accesses the webcam.
KnockKnock: (FOSS) Like AutoRuns …but for macOS!
Development
Podman: (FOSS) A tool for managing OCI containers and pods.
xh: (FOSS) Friendly and fast tool for sending HTTP requests.
Ghostty: (FOSS) 👻 Ghostty is a fast, feature-rich, and cross-platform terminal emulator that uses platform-native UI and GPU acceleration.
Visual Studio Code: (FOSS) Your code editor. Redefined with AI.
Cursor: (Freemium) AI-powered coding assistant.
SnippetLab: ($0) Keep Your Code At Your Fingertips.
Utilities
1Password: ($2.99/month) 1Password is so much more than a password manager.
OpenKey: (FOSS) Vietnamese Input for macOS, Windows and Linux - Bộ gõ Tiếng Việt nguồn mở đa nền tảng.
Keka: (FOSS) The macOS file archiver.
KeyboardCleanTool: ($0) KeyboardCleanTool is a super simple little tool which blocks all Keyboard and TouchBar input.
Mac Mouse Fix: ($2.99) Make Your $10 Mouse Better Than an Apple Trackpad!
AppCleaner: (Free) AppCleaner is a small application which allows you to thoroughly uninstall unwanted apps.
Ice: (FOSS) Ice is a powerful menu bar management tool.
Signal: (FOSS) Say “hello” to a different messaging experience.
Stremio: (FOSS) Stremio offers a secure, modern and seamless entertainment experience.
Casks
biome: A toolchain for web projects, aimed to provide functionalities to maintain them. Biome offers formatter and linter, usable via CLI and LSP.
btop: A monitor of resources
bun: A fast, all-in-one JavaScript runtime.
dotenv-linter:⚡️Lightning-fast linter for .env files. Written in Rust 🦀
eza: A modern alternative to ls
fastfetch: A maintained, feature-rich and performance oriented, neofetch like system information tool
fd: A simple, fast and user-friendly alternative to ‘find’
fnm: 🚀 Fast and simple Node.js version manager, built in Rust
folderify: A tool to convert a flat folder structure into a nested folder structure.
fzf: A command-line fuzzy finder written in Go
git: A free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.
git-delta: A syntax-highlighting pager for git, diff, grep, and blame output
git-toolbelt: A suite of useful Git commands that aid with scripting or every day command line usage
git-extras: GIT utilities – repo summary, repl, changelog population, author commit percentages and more
hugo: A fast and flexible static site generator that’s perfect for personal, organization, or business sites.
hyperfine: A command-line benchmarking tool.
jq: Command-line JSON processor
just: 🤖 Just a command runner
lazydocker: The lazier way to manage everything docker
markdownlint-cli: MarkdownLint Command Line Interface
minify: Go minifiers for web formats
neovim: Vim-fork focused on extensibility and usability
pandoc: A universal document converter
rclone: Rclone is a command-line program to manage files on cloud storage.
ripgrep: ripgrep recursively searches directories for a regex pattern while respecting your gitignore.
ruff: An extremely fast Python linter and code formatter, written in Rust.
shellcheck: ShellCheck, a static analysis tool for shell scripts
GNU Stow: GNU Stow is a symlink farm manager which takes distinct sets of software and/or data located in separate directories on the filesystem, and makes them all appear to be installed in a single directory tree.
taplo: A TOML toolkit written in Rust
tlrc: A tldr client written in Rust
zellij: A terminal workspace with batteries included
tree-sitter: An incremental parsing system for programming tools
uutils-coreutils: Cross-platform Rust rewrite of the GNU coreutils
uv: An extremely fast Python package and project manager, written in Rust.
yt-dlp: A feature-rich command-line audio/video downloader
zadark: ZaDark is an extension that helps you enable Dark Mode for Zalo PC and Web. ZaDark is available on Windows, macOS, Chrome, Safari, Edge and Firefox.
zoxide: A smarter cd command. Supports all major shells.
Visual Studio Code Extensions
These are the extensions I keep coming back to in day-to-day work.
Javascript & Typescript
xabikos.JavaScriptSnippets: Code snippets for JavaScript in ES6 syntax.
wix.vscode-import-cost: Display import/require package size in the editor
biomejs.biome: Toolchain of the web