I am currently on a company trip with my brand new MacBook and here are the things I always install first to get started:
- Homebrew - makes installing of low level stuff a breeze (free)
- Node/NPM - many things rely on it (free)
- Dropbox - still be best way to store and share content amongst machines, both Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive drive me nuts with their file permission nonsense (paid)
- VLC - plays everything, has excellent keyboard shortcuts and can in a pinch even record screens for you (free)
- VS Code - coders gotta edit (free)
- GitHub Desktop - much, much easier than installing and setting up Git yourself (free)
- ImageOptim - file resizing and optimising images, even on the command line (free)
- FFMPEG - converts anything to anything on the command line (free)
- Handbrake - batch conversion of videos made easy (free)
- Screenflow - my go-to screen recording and video editing tool (paid)
Other essentials are a VPN (I use Mullvad and ProtonVPN), but that's about it.
Photo by iMattSmart on Unsplash
Top comments (11)
Don't you use something like Alfred or Raycast?
No, I'm OK with spotlight
I'm a fan of Raycast! :)
And also Script Kit. You can do a lot of really cool stuff with it if you can write typescript code.
Raycast is so great! I love having such quick and convenient access to ChatGPT (as well as other plugins).
Saved 👌
My 2 cents (maybe you use some alternatives to these?)
spotify is on my TV and running in the background or on my phone :)
Add docker desktop to it
As I don't use it, I won't :)
OrbStack is the one if you feel Docker is too slow and heavy on local env.
Thanks great tools! I've bookmarked this to remind myself to add some of these to devpages.io, a directory I built for finding developer tools and resources 🙂
Some comments may only be visible to logged-in visitors. Sign in to view all comments.