macOS Essentials

Apps and sets that are nice to use on our beatiful system of choice.

Contents

• Applications
  • Productivity
  • Code
  • Social
  • Music
  • Video
  • Images
  • Browsers
    • Safari Extensions
  • Utilities
  • Interesting, but not essential
• Command Line tools
  • Packages
• Quick Tips

Applications

Most of them are the newest and most convenient applications, replacing the already outdated ones.

Productivity

Maccy - clipboard manager

• Keeps the history of what you copy and lets you easily navigate, search and use previous clipboard contents.

• It has wonderful ⌘+⇧+C shortcut, but I changed it to ⌥+⇧+C because the initial option is used in many other applications.

Folx - Torrent Client

• An excellent minimalistic torrent downloader. Makes downloading torrent files and creating torrents for various trackers extremely easy.

Lungo - A menu bar app that keeps your Mac awake.

Modern alternative to Caffeine

• Many various preferences.
• Scriptable.
• Not so heavy like Amphetamine.

LocalSwitch - Menu bar interface for apachectl

• Allows you to quickly stop, run or restart native macOS server.
• I'm just getting annoyed of running sudo apachectl stop and sudo apachectl start every time I need to manage my local server.

Code

VS Code — Main code editor

• Easy-to-use with large projects.
• The best editor with many extensions that I use to write code in.
• I like to use VSC SynthWave '84 theme. Here is how it looks:

Sublime Text - Additional Text Editor

• Use this editor in addition to VSC for its blazing fast speed of opening files.
• I use it just to quickly edit configs and markdown files.
• Built-in Monokai theme (dark, yea).

GitHub Desktop - Git client

• Convenient version control.
• Has a wonderful dark theme.

Social

Telegram - Fastest Messenger

All other messengers just suck.

• Native and clean interface.
• Stickers.
• ???

Spark - Email client

• Cool categorizaton of emails.
• Just. looks. nice. (And is extremely fast)

Flume - Instagram client

• Allows us to do everything we do in Instagram on mobiles.

Music

Shazam - Menu bar that discovers music, video & lyrics

Siri already has built-in Shazam, but it sucks.

• Old known app now on desktop.
• One click shazaming.
• Configurable keyboard shortcut.

NepTunes - iTunes and Spotify controller

• All media actions from beautiful artwork on your Desktop.
• It can replace default track changing notfication.

Video

Beamer - Stream to Apple TV and Chromecast

• Super-minimalistic UI.
• Fast connection.
• All common video formats. Never had any troubles.
• All popular subtitle formats are also supported.

IINA - Video player

• Based on mpv.
• It's like VLC, but fast, modern and native.

Images

Photoshop - Edit photos

My second hobby.

• Doesn't need to be present, yea?

Aerate - better Save for Web

• Reduces image file sizes.
• Removes invisible junk (comments, thumbnails and other metadata).

Browsers

Safari

• It's just native to macOS, which means incredible speed and the lowest battery waste.

Safari Extensions

• OverPicture - Allows you to play any web video in Picture-In-Picture mode. It also has a nice P shortcut and the custom button in popular players like YouTube.
• AdGuard - Ad content blocker based on Safari native content blocking API's.
• Cascadea - Custom styles. Allows importing of themes from Stylish, which has really wide community. I use it to create or install dark themes for websites without a dark mode option.
  • GitHub Dark
• Dark Reader - For websites that don't have a nice Stylish theme, I use Dark Reader to let my eyes enjoy the dark mode.
• Ghounter - Displays the downloads count on any public Releases page in GitHub.
• AutoPagerize - Auto-loads paginated websites (e.g. Google Search).

Google Chrome

• Indispensably good Dev tools for web development.
• Overtakes Safari in the number of extensions.

Utilities

AppCleaner - Fully uninstall unwanted apps

• Finds all the files using space of your Hard Drive unnecessarily after deleting the app to which these files belong.
• Auto-asks to remove residual files when you delete app from Applications folder.

Interesting, but not essential

WebToLayers and ScreenToLayers - Convert screens and web pages to layered Photoshop documents

Command Line tools

Homebrew

Essential package manager for macOS.

Allows you to run brew install <package> and brew cask install <app> to install nearly everything you need.

Install Homebrew

/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

Packages

Remember, just brew install <package> — 3 seconds for the magic to appear!

• youtube-dl - Download media from YouTube and other video sites.

• thefuck - Corrects errors in previous console commands.

  $ puthon
  No command 'puthon' found
  $ fuck
  Python 3.4.2 (default, Oct  8 2014, 13:08:17)

  • I also use russian keyboard layout so added alias агсл='fuck' to my .bash_profile

• qrencode - Accepts a string or a list of data chunks then encodes in a QR Code symbol as a bitmap array.

• wifi-pass - QR encode, copy or just get the password of current Wi-Fi connection

  $ wifi-pass
    Keychain prompt --> Get password for "fqtr_iPhoneSE"
  bigBlackCharge129
  $ wifi-pass -c Bobrokot
    Keychain prompt --> Copy password for "Bobrokot"
  Password copied to clipboard

  • With qrencode package installed, you can extend the wifi-pass tool to make a QR code that can be scanned using a mobile phone to join your network

• lyrics-cli - Search song lyrics on command line

• mackup - Wonderful configuration and preferences backuper

• barhide - Hide unwanted icons from your menu bar I already have hidden:

  • Spotlight Search — because it has a shortcut and needs keyboard anyway
  • Magnet — don't need to use it often, so it's comfortable to drag windows to the corners for Magnet to stick them
  • Notification Center (SystemUIServer) — prefer swiping left from the right edge with two fingers

Profiling functions

Use this to quickly enable new settings you get on the web

profile() {
    open .bash_profile
}
reload() {
    . .bash_profile
}

Printing

Clear Print Queue

cancel -a -

Quit Printer App After Print Jobs Complete

defaults write com.apple.print.PrintingPrefs "Quit When Finished" -bool true

System

Use sudo with Touch ID

edit /etc/pam.d/sudo and add the following line to the top:

auth sufficient pam_tid.so

you may also use the following command to do so:

sudo sh -c -- 'filename="sudo" && file="/etc/pam.d/$filename" && echo "auth sufficient pam_tid.so" | cat - $file > /tmp/$filename.tmp && mv /tmp/$filename.tmp $file'

Set Login Window text

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow LoginwindowText "Can't touch this..."

What I've done with Dock

Highlight Effect to Stacks View in macOS

defaults write com.apple.dock mouse-over-hilite-stack -int 1 && killall Dock

Dock autohiding

defaults write com.apple.dock autohide -int 1 && killall Dock

Dock on the left side

defaults write com.apple.dock orientation left && killall Dock

Dock scroll-to-open

defaults write com.apple.dock scroll-to-open -int 1 && killall Dock

Speeding up Dock showing & hiding

defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-time-modifier -float 0.7 && killall Dock

defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-delay -float 0.05 && killall Dock

Speeding up playback when resizing windows (Apple applications)

defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSWindowResizeTime -float 0.05

Speeding up Quick Look animation

defaults write -g QLPanelAnimationDuration -float 0.1

Safari

Disable default page rendering delay

dfq is that supposed to mean? Entered this just in case.

defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitInitialTimedLayoutDelay 0.25

Faster keyboard actuation

Still not sure about the way it's working (and if it's even working)

defaults write NSGlobalDomain KeyRepeat -int 0

To return initial settings:

just replace defaults write by defaults delete

Quick Tips

Shorthand searching in Spotlight

Abbreviations

• If you have an app called e.g. Visual Studio Code, typing its abbreviation — "vsc" — is sufficient for Spotlight to direct you to it. Same with camelCased app names.

Allow last installed app from unidentified developer

sudo spctl --add /Applications/$(ls -lt /Applications/ | head -2 | grep .app | cut -d':' -f2 | sed 's/[0-9]*//g' | sed -e 's/^[ \t]*//')

---

If you're still wondering dfq for I created this repo — I want to be able to fuck my MacBook on the floor right now, buy a new one and return all my settings, a little remembering how and why they are needed.