Link: https://github.com/nikitavoloboev/my-mac-os
I use a lot of applications on my mac. Here is a list of the ones that I love and use the most in my day to day life, sorted by their importance :
this is by far my favourite application that I have. It saved mea lot of timein my life and has a really greatcommunityandvery powerful workflowsthat you can use
I have attached the ones I use the most tothis repo
feel free to use any that you like
an application which allowed me to create all of the mind maps fromLearn Anything
it is an incredible joy to make mind maps in this app and I use it to visualize everything :
my notes, my projects, my plans, my thoughts
I also try to completely bridge the gap between my mind maps and my mind withthis alfred workflow
one of the applications I cannot live without, allows me to bind any key that I want. You can take a look at the config files I use for itherealongside more information of how I use it in the description
Karabiner is the only reason I cannot upgrade my mac to Sierra asKarabiner Elementsstill does not have the features I need
I loveGTD methodology, this application is phenomenal with helping me organisemy tasksand things I want to do and achieve
it hasglobal quick addwith a hotkey, lists, priorities, powerful search and a lot more
recently moved completely to using the command line for all my development needs, this is probably the best terminal emulator out there that exists, have it assigned tow + jand can open it on demand at any time that I want
hereare all thehomebrewpackages I like and use
I also really love usingthis workflowto quicklyswitch between iTerm tabs
My favourite editor that I use to write code in
most notably I really like itsvim plugin
my config for it can be foundhere
a very powerful code snippet manager that I have intergrated very heaviliy in my workflow, withrecent additionof its own alfred workflow,retrieving the snippetsthat you need it staggeringly fast
I use it as myown personal programmer's notepadwith code and lots and lots of comments
probably the best journal writing application there is, use itevery dayto write myDay Evaluationsand many other small little tidbits of text with thoughts, plans and experiences that I have had
if you don't journal, I really suggest you to start, it really is a very powerful mind cleanser and acts as a wonderful history record of your life
moved to it fromTextexpanderas I am not fond of subscription models for software but also because typinator is really just better
it expands text and moves the pointer caret faster and has a really powerfulquick searchavailable globally right at my fingertips
my password manager of choice, recently started to generate all of my passwords with it and keep everything in a secured and encrypted vault kept secure by my one master password
no longer need to remember passwords and I now have a unique password for every website that I am signed up on whilist activating two factor authentication wherever possible
all your writing in one place is the motto and the underlying design of the app.
verypowerful search, freedom of structure, great themes and export to markdown / PDF
really promotes you to write with its great design and features
moved to it fromBywordandiaWriterthat I used before, having a one place database for all my writing for me was the selling point of the app)
always wanted to organise the mess that my media files were, movingall of my photographs, gifs that I have saved over the years to one place that is easiliy searchabe and is again just a joy to use was very valuable for me
probably the best application there exists for storing and organising all of your photographic media content
a staggeringly powerful mac automation tool that I am only beginning to scratch the surface of
has awonderful communitythat is happy to help with whatever you are trying to achieve
I go over all my favourite macros I use and how I use them inthis GitHub repo
another amazing application that allows me to quickly map and remap any hotkeys that I use bothgloballyandapp specific
what more it allows me to also customisemy trackpad gesturesto do any actions that I want, this is very powerful
I love scrolling through my tabs in Safari with three finger swipes left and right as well as opening and closing tabs with swiping up and down respectively.
hereare all the different gestures I have setup to use with the app
I read a lot of PDFs like books, uni assignments and the like
this app is a huge upgrade overPreviewapp that I used before
multiple tabs, sepia mode, very nice annotation tools, great search, performance
very powerful API documentation browser that allows you to download any docset that you might want to use, search for any method, class or anything that you need very quickly, comes with the amazingAlfred Worfklowto simplify the process ofsearching for the right things
I moved completely to Timing 2 from Toggl for both passive and active tracking
the fact that I can combine active and passive tracking together is quite powerful and allows me to be more aware of where I spend my time
by far the most well designed and feature rich mail application that I have used so far, really love all of its simple design, support for multiple accounts and a multitude of nice shortcuts that you can use
found alot of great musicwith this application and the phenomenalAlfred Workflowmakes using the application an absolute joy
quickly finding artists, songs I want to listen, instantly adding the song playing to my 'likes' playlist or any other playlist I want,seeing what other songs the artist hasand more
the tool I use to write this readme
a really great tool that I use to quickly edit any single markdown file that I have on the system
just a straight up best application there is for organising and creating events in your life
global quick add with a hotkey, natural language input and its great design is what made me switch from an already great Calendar app which comes natively with macOS
I also added some of my owntext expansionsto help with natural text input
allows me to fuzzy search throughall the currenly active windowsthat I have
makes jumping to the right window I need effortless as I often may have many VS Code instances with different projects
comes natively with macOS and I started to love using it for exploring and searching through wikipedia
it is incredibly fast to make the searches and it also givesquick autosuggestionsfor any query I type that I can then select with up and down arrows
a great utility app that allows you to customise and hide the contents of your menu bar, really does improve the aesthetics of your OS but also is quite beneficial for me as I customised it to have themost important informationthat I need to show in it
I can then activate Bartender andstart searchingfor the menu bar item I need all from the keyboard
a really awesome native app that lets me manage my GitHub issues
can schedule certain issuesas 'up next'and complete them one by one
recently started to grow a big liking of various cool IRC channels that exist out there, this app is a really wonderful client for all things IRC
it also has an awesomechannel searchfeature that I use a lot
I have hckrnews, reddit, twitter on the black list and have a schedule where I can only use these websites two times in my day, 30 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes in the evening, this acts as my own version ofinformation diet. Really does make a difference andhelps me focuson what I need to be working on.
twitter and tweetbot are blocked for me for the majority of the day due to them being a big cause of distraction but the times I do use Twitter, it would be done through this wonderful client that features a timeline without advertisements and one that is synced with the iOS app
use it to track and overview all of my finances, the most important part of this app is theideologybehind it. The whole app is built around this methodology and I really recommend you take a look at it even if you are not planning to use the app, I find it really freeing and powerful
wasn't a big user of RSS but with me finding a lot of great blogs out there, I needed a place to keep myself updated on the great content that they will be posting.
Reeder is the best RSS reeder out there that I found
I often use this app to quickly send files from my local file system to the cloud (either S3 or dropbox) and get a shareable link I can send to people
I usethis alfred workflowtoquickly openthe cloud storage I need
a torrent client that I use, very minimal in its UI but is very powerful and has all the features that I need without the bloat thatuTorrentand other clients have
have all my torrents downloaded into their specific folders
I also want to set up a seedbox with my raspberry pie in the future as I have a bad tendency of not seeding the torrents that I downloaded
not very fond of subscription based business models but this app is probably the de facto standard in doing any kind of design work on Mac
probably the best image editor out there on Mac, is packed with very powerful features and is very simple in its UI
a simple utility that makes the screen have nice and warm non blue light emitting colour in the evening
as of macOS Sierra, you can use thebuilt-in featureby Apple instead
a quick utility that pops up when I drag some file into it or open it with a hotkey, use it to upload images toImgur, dropping files into apreset number of foldersthat I made quickly as well as going to them in an instant) (a great little utility)
another great utility I cannot live without, brings up a quick menu whenever some text is selected on which I can do a number of quick actions, like searching on DuckDuckGo, Youtube, Dictionary, Reddit, Images or it can translate text selected, copy it or say it aloud, here is howit looksfor me
a great menu bar tool that shows me how much time is left until the next event in my calendar
it has been quite a big addition to my workflow as I know can quickly know how much time is left until my next class or some other event starts
if I ever need to preview a readme or any other markdown file that I wrote or just want to read, this app is the best application for that I found
it also features live updating and quite a lot of very powerful customisation features
big fan ofTrelloas a tool for managing tasks within a team, this app is essentially a web wrapper over online Trello boards
a great tool to quickly get a visual glance over what is taking up your disk space and where)
a great little utility to find duplicate files in the system. Didn't get much use of it so far but it may be quite useful on occasions where I do want to clean up my system from useless files and junk
a really greatvisual representation of my monthin form of a notification center widget that allows me to see any day I want at a glance as well as what day of month it is and how many events I have in this week
great system monitoring tools of which I use CPU and storage tracking, I find it very valuable to know if my CPU is being abused by some application and if so by which
best annotation tool I found to exist. After you make a screenshot, it allows for quick edits (arrows, adding some text, blurring parts of the image) as well as ability to quickly save it or drag it to upload to Imgur to share quickly and send the link to anyone I want
enhance play/pause as well as previous/next playback keys to not only work in iTunes and Spotify but work forSoundcloud,Youtubeand many other services
an amazing networking tool that gives you a clear picture of what connections are incoming to your computer and what are outgoing
takes a bit of time to set it up correctly and is quite an insightful experience first turning it on and having it notify every couple of seconds that some app is trying to send data to some server and whether you want to allow that
this is essential if you want to take control of what information gets sent out from your computer and what connections have right to connect to your data
had to write some LaTeX files for some of my university assignments and in search of a great editor for writing LaTeX I found this and have really enjoyed using it for that task
has phenomenal suggestions, a great UI interface and live previewing the LaTeX code that you write.)
find it to be quite a slow application, given the fact that it is essentially a chrome web application wrapped up withelectron, it is not much surprise but still it does have some really great features for working and communicating within a team
really dislikewhatsappand I quite like Telegram
it has a very clean interface, a native client for macOS and stickers, privacy is questionable as data is still being sent through Telegram servers but it is still a great chat application)
still not fully utilising the full power ofspaced repetition learningbut it was one of my goals this year to really start to use this to my advantage. Essentially all this software does is provide you the means to write your own digital flashcards that you can then test yourself on. It also has a lot ofamazing addonsthat you can get to add more functionality to the app.
quickly remove all the unneeded metadata from the image as well as compress images without losing any visual quality and saving a lot of bandwidth when uploading these images on your website or blog
quickly get subtitles that I want by dragging the file with the movie/series I want to watch to the app
allows me to create some great GIFs from video clips as well as converting the entire video clip into a GIF if need be
rain, whale noises, coffee shop noises right from my menu bar, when I am tired of listening to music and just want to focus
a really great colour picker that is quite often getting updated
a really great tool for working with API's, only recently started to use it but the features it has are really handy and the design is intuitive and great
open source alternative to VLC built specifically for macOS
is based onmpvand has a more modern and native look than VLC
really powerul automation engine, wanted to use it for window management at first but found BetterTouchTool to be more performant
right now I use it show the task I am currenly working on in a little window in themiddle of the screenfor a brief moment
can see my config for ithere
an open source screen recorder I use to record GIFs
has keyboard support so I can quickly start and end recording of the GIF in one hotkey
allows you to listen and control playback of podcasts fromOvercastright from your menu bar
allows me to completely remove the animation of switching between spaces/full screen apps
now Irun most applications as full screenand switch between them withKarabiner
neat little utility I mostly use toquickly go to various foldersfrom file save windows
use it to fully automate my filing process
I use prefixes for everything, bookmarks, notes, ulysses entries and even files
this allows me to write some great rules for my Downloads folder that will file the files where I want them to be
hereis one example of such rule
I also recursively lowercase files and hide extensions for all files on my system
My browser of choice isSafari. Chrome just kills the battery and Safari is really well optimised for macOS plus I have tried both and I really do find Safari a lot more 'snappier' to use. One powerful plus that chrome does have over safari is the amount of chrome extensions that you can get. Fortunately the ones most needed for me do exist on Safari.
I keep a list of my favourite Safari extensions and why I love them in a GitHub repositoryhere. Feel free to contribute to it if you wish.
Homebrewis a really wonderful and user friendly package manager for macOS.
Hereare all the packages I use from it.
And here are some more command line tools I use and love :
thefuck: corrects your previous console command
coreutils: various useful GNU utils that don’t come with macOS
ripgrep: search text for patterns really fast
m-cli: useful utils for macOS
mas: cli for mac app store
youtube-dl: download videos from youtube and other video sites
tmux: terminal multiplexer
pandoc: universal markup converter
trash: move files and folders to the trash
vtop: graphical activity monitor
curl: transfer data, supports various protocols
howdoi: instant coding answers
asciinema: terminal session recorder
tldr: simplified and community-driven man pages
screenfetch: fetches system/theme information in terminal
hugo: fast and flexible static site generator
coala: linting and fixing of code
reflex: run a command when files change
create-react-app: create React apps with no build configuration
now: realtime global deployments served over HTTP/2
yarn: fast, reliable, and secure dependency management
iStats: system stats from the command-line
alfred: symlinks your go project to alfred directory and builds your workflow
license up: create a license quickly for your project
fzf: command-line fuzzy finder
exa: replacement for ls written in rust
I findAlfredwith its ability to create custom workflows for it to bring me the most value.
I keep a list of my favourite workflows and why I love them in a GitHub repositoryhere. Feel free to contribute to it if you wish.
If you found this interesting, I also havesimilar repositorygoing over what applications I use on iOS as well as how and why I use them.
You can support what I do onPatreonor lookinto other repositoriesI shared. Thank you.💛
