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Ken Harrison
Ken Harrison

Posted on • Originally published at ktreharrison.Medium on

MacBook Apps to Supercharge Your Productivity

#mac #programming #developer #productivity


Photo by Geometric Photography on Unsplash

This article contains a list of useful application for macOS to help supercharge your productivity and keep building fun! The apps/tools are primarily open source, which means they are free!! You can use the CLI commands below or go to the website to learn more about the apps prior to installation.

The ⭐️ denotes my personal favorites.

Prerequisite

🧑‍💻 The assumption is that Homebrew is installed on your local machine. If not, please install before you continue.

💡 Tip: BrewMyMac allows you to choose from a wide range of apps and tweaks, and install them with a single command. It saves you enormous time searching and downloading apps separately.

Terminal

Warp is an amazingly fast terminal reimagined from the ground up to work like a modern app. ⭐️

brew install --cask warp
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iTerm2 is a replacement for Terminal and the successor to iTerm. It works on Macs with macOS 10.14 or newer. iTerm2 brings the terminal into the modern age with features you never knew you always wanted.

brew install --cask iterm2
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Customizations

Oh My Zsh is an open source, community-driven framework for managing your zsh configuration.⭐️

  • CLI Command: 
sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/master/tools/install.sh)"
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Powerlevel10k is a theme for Zsh. It emphasizes speed, flexibility and out-of-the-box experience.

Oh-My-Bash is an open source, community-driven framework for managing your BASH configuration

  • CLI Command: 
bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ohmybash/oh-my-bash/master/tools/install.sh)"
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Starship is a cross-platform prompt. The minimal, blazing-fast, and infinitely customizable prompt for any shell!

brew install starship
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Productivity Tools

Raycast is a blazingly fast, totally extendable launcher. It lets you complete tasks, calculate, share common links, and much more.⭐️

brew install --cask raycast
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Pieces is the world’s first micro-repo for developers. 100% free! Save useful code in less than a second. Instantly save snippets from your browser or IDE.

DevToys helps in daily tasks like formatting JSON, comparing text, testing RegExp. No need to use many untruthful websites to do simple tasks with your data.⭐️

brew install --cask devtoys
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API Tools

Insomnia is a leading Open Source API Client, and Collaborative API Design Platform for REST, SOAP, GraphQL, and GRPC. Build and test APIs quickly with our streamlined API client and collaborative API design tool. ⭐️

brew install --cask insomnia
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Postman is an API platform for building and using APIs. Postman simplifies each step of the API lifecycle and streamlines collaboration so you can create better APIs — faster.

brew install --cask postman
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Text Editor

TextMate is a text editor for macOS. Powerful and customizable text editor with support for a huge list of programming languages and developed as open source. ⭐️

brew install --cask textmate
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CotEditor is a light-weight, neat, yet powerful text editor designed for editing plain-text files such as web pages (HTML, CSS), program source codes (Python, Ruby, Perl, etc.), structured texts (Markdown, Textile, TeX, etc.), or any other kind of plain-text

brew install --cask coteditor
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Markdown Editor

Zettlr : With Zettlr, writing professional texts is easy and motivating: Whether you are a college student, a researcher, a journalist, or an author — Zettlr has the right tools for you. Watch the video or continue reading to see what they are! ⭐️

brew install --cask zettlr
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Obsidian : A knowledge base that works on local Markdown files.⭐️

brew install --cask obsidian
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Logseq is a privacy-first, open-source knowledge base that works on top of local plain-text Markdown and Org-mode files. Logseq is a privacy-first, open-source knowledge base that works on top of local plain-text Markdown and Org- files.

brew install --cask logseq
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Desktop Apps

AltTab brings the power of Windows’s “alt-tab” window switcher to macOS. ⭐️

brew install --cask alt-tab
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Amethyst is a tiling window manager for macOS along the lines of xmonad.

brew install --cask amethyst
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NightOwl is a utility to toggle dark mode. ⭐️

brew install --cask nightowl
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Top comments (2)

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annabrown1 profile image
Anna Brown • • Edited

Useful post! Thank you for sharing this great list of apps for macOS. I really appreciate the fact that most of them are open source and free. I have been looking for such tools to boost my productivity and creativity, and this article has given me some great ideas. As a Macbook user, I will definitely try out some of these apps and see how they improve my workflow. As well as luckily I have also found another effective article on the Setapp site here- setapp.com/how-to/best-daily-plann... with some of the best daily planner apps that help us to stay organized, prioritize tasks, manage time effectively, track progress, overcome procrastination, keep motivated, and even improve our mental health. Also, I got a helpful guide there about how to choose the right daily planner. So I highly recommend both of these articles to anyone searching such apps that can help to make their daily habits and boost productivity in work. Good Luck!

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markohenry profile image
Marko Henry •

Wow! I am very delighted to see these awesome recommendation for macbook apps. I will definitely try these apps. Thank you so much, Author.

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