MacManual

Installation and Setup Guide for Mac

Requirements

Before getting started, make sure you have a 🍎💻. If you don't have one yet, you could buy from Apple Shop or awesome eBay (for a better price).

Must-have Applications

Productivity

Price	App	Intro
🆓*	Alfred	An application launcher and productivity application, which boosts your efficiency with hotkeys, keywords and text expansion.
🆓	Hammerspoon	A tool for powerful automation of OS X.
💶	Bartender	Lets you organize your menu bar apps, by hiding them, rearranging them, or moving them to the Bartender Bar.
🆓	Dozer	Lets you hide menu bar items to give your Mac a cleaner look.
💶	ForkLift	The most advanced dual pane file manager and file transfer client.
🆓	muCommander	A cross-platform, lightweight, open-source file manager.
🆓	The Unarchiver	A small and easy to use program that can unarchive many different kinds of archive files.
🆓 / 💶	Keka	A macOS file archiver, stores more, shares with privacy.
🆓	Spectacle	Window control with simple and customizable keyboard shortcuts.
💶	Divvy	A utility to quickly resize and position your windows.
💶	Magnet	Declutters your screen by snapping windows into organized tiles.
💶	Paste	Keeps track of everything you've ever copied and lets you access your clipboard history anytime across.
🆓	Clipy	A Clipboard extension app for macOS.
💶	Unclutter	A new handy place on your desktop for storing notes, files and pasteboard clips.
💶	Fantastical	A calendar app let you quickly create new events and reminders with natural language input and more.
🆓	Itsycal	A tiny menu bar calendar.
🆓*	Evernote	Collect, nurture, and share ideas across desktop and mobile platforms with it.
🆓*	Wunderlist	A simple todo list and task manager app that helps you get stuff done.
💶	OmniFocus	A personal task manager designed to quickly capture your thoughts and allow you to store, manage, and process them into actionable to-do items.
💶	OmniGraffle	A diagramming and digital illustration application for creating beautiful, precise graphics.
💶	iA Writer	A text editor removes distractions, giving you a calm, focused writing space.
🆓*	Obsidian	A private and flexible writing app that adapts to the way you think.
🆓*	Instapaper	Syncs the articles and videos you save so that you can read them anywhere and anytime you want, even offline.
🆓	Simplenote	An easy way to keep notes, lists, ideas and more. Light, clean, and free.
💶	Texifier	An editor and a productivity tool for academic and professional writing in LaTeX.
🆓	Buttercup	The Password Manager You Deserve.
🆓*	1Password	Put Passwords In Their Place.
💶	1Keyboard	Type on your iPhone, iPad or Apple TV using your Mac's keyboard.
🆓*	Dropbox	Bring your photos, docs, and videos anywhere and keep your files safe.
💶*	PDF Expert	Read, annotate and edit PDFs, change text and images. Fill forms and sign contracts like never before.
🆓	CheatSheet	Just hold the ⌘-Key a bit longer to get a list of all active short cuts of the current application.
🆓*	Anki	A friendly and intelligent flash cards program which makes remembering things easy.
🆓	Amphetamine	The most awesome keep-awake utility ever created.
🆓	KeepingYouAwake	A Caffeine clone, prevent your Mac from entering sleep mode.
🆓*	Memory Clean	The ultimate app for optimizing your Mac's memory.
💶	SwitchResX	The most advanced tool lets you easily change your display resolution and adjust other monitor settings directly from your menu bar or by using the Contextual Menu.
💶	Duet	Lets you use your iPad or iPhone as an external monitor.

Utilities

Price	App	Intro
💶	ToothFairy	Connect AirPods (or other Bluetooth headphones) to your Mac with a single click or keypress.
🆓	Munki	A collection of open-source tools used to manage installation of software packages on macOS client machines.
🆓	Mounty for NTFS	A tiny tool to re-mount write-protected NTFS volumes.

Design Tools

Price	App	Intro
💶	Sketch	The ultimate tool for designing user interfaces, websites, and icons.
💶	Affinity Photo	The fastest, smoothest, most precise professional image editing software.
💶	IconJar	Stores all your icons in one place, just a click away, leaves digging through your design asset folders behind and lets you access your icons without the hassle.
🆓	GIF Brewery	Gives everyone the power to create stunning GIFs from video files.

Media

Price	App	Intro
💶	Xee	An streamlined and convenient image viewer and browser.
🆓	VLC	A free and open source cross-platform multimedia player and framework that plays most multimedia files.
🆓	IINA	The modern video player.
🆓	Kodi	A free media player that is designed to look great on your big screen TV but is just as home on a small screen.
🆓*	Spotify	A digital music service that gives you access to millions of songs.
💶	Permute	The easiest to use media converter with it's easy to use, no configuration, drag and drop interface, it will meet the needs to convert all your media files.

Internet

Price	App	Intro
🆓	Chrome	A fast, secure, and free web browser built for the modern web.
🆓	Firefox	A fast, private, secure, and compatible web browser.

Social Networking

Price	App	Intro
💶	Airmail	A lightning Fast Mail Client for Mac.
🆓*	Sparrow	An email client, had been acquired by Google and was ceasing continued development.
💶	Tweetbot	An award-winning Twitter client.
🆓	YoruFukurou	A powerful native Twitter client.
🆓*	Skype	An instant messaging app that provides online text message and video chat services.

Developer Tools

Price	App	Intro
🆓	Homebrew	The missing package manager.
🆓	RVM	Ruby Version Manager.
🆓	JDK	Includes a complete JRE plus tools for developing, debugging, and monitoring Java applications.
🆓	iTerm2	A replacement for Terminal and the successor to iTerm.
🆓	Oh My Zsh	An open source, community-driven framework for managing your zsh configuration.
🆓	Powerlevel10k	The most awesome Powerline theme for ZSH around.
🆓	Alacritty	A cross-platform, GPU-accelerated terminal emulator (the fastest in existence).
🆓	Hyper	A terminal built on web technologies.
🆓	TextMate	A graphical text editor.
🆓	Atom	A free and open-source text and source code editor.
💶	Sublime Text	A sophisticated text editor for code, markup and prose.
🆓	Fork	A fast and friendly git client for Mac and Windows.
🆓	SourceTree	A free Mercurial and Git Client.
💶	Tower	A beautiful, efficient, and powerful Git version control app.
💶	Kaleidoscope	The world's most advanced Mac diff tool.
💶	Monodraw	An ASCII art editor.
💶	Quiver	A notebook built for programmers.
🆓	Docker	An open platform for developers and sysadmins to build, ship, and run distributed applications.
🆓*	Dash	Gives your Mac instant offline access to 150+ API documentation sets.
💶	Charles Proxy	A proxy / monitor enables a developer to view all traffic between their machine and the Internet.
🆓	Postman	The complete toolchain for API developers.
🆓	Cocoa Rest Client	A free open source, native Apple OS X app for testing HTTP/REST endpoints.
🆓*	Insomnia	A powerful REST API Client with cookie management, environment variables, code generation, and authentication.
🆓	Xcode	An IDE containing a suite of software development tools for macOS, iOS, watchOS and tvOS.
🆓	Network Link Conditioner	A tool to simulate various kinds of network environments.
💶	Reveal	Advanced visualisations, comprehensive inspectors and the ability to modify applications on the fly.
🆓	Android Studio	The Official IDE for Android.
🆓*	Genymotion	The most powerful Android emulation platform for app developers & testers.
🆓	VirtualBox	A free and open-source hypervisor for x86 virtualization.
🆓*	IntelliJ IDEA	A Java IDE.
🆓	Visual Studio Code	A code editor redefined and optimized for building and debugging modern web and cloud applications.
🆓	CCMenu	Displays the build status of projects on a continuous integration server as an item in the Mac's menu bar.
🆓	Etcher	Burn images to SD cards & USB drives, safely and easily.

Other Goodies

Price	App	Intro
🆓	Aerial	Apple TV Aerial Screensaver for Mac.
🆓	Reeder 3	A RSS reader client.
🆓	calibre	A powerful and easy to use e-book manager.

Note:

• 🆓 - free app
• 💶 - paid app
• 🆓* - free app but with paid features

Homebrew Packages

• tree
• wget
• node
• jq
• webp
• monitorcontrol
• axel
• imagemagick

dotfiles

• My dotfiles
• Your unofficial guide to dotfiles on GitHub
• Mathias’s dotfiles
• thoughtbot dotfiles
• Paul's dotfiles

Collection of Commands

• Disable screenshot shadow

  defaults write com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool true; killall SystemUIServer

• Set Preview's sidebar display default to Thumbnails

  defaults write com.apple.Preview PVPDFSuppressSidebarOnOpening -bool false

• Converting SVG to PNG:

  qlmanage -t -s WIDTH_IN_PIXEL -o . IMAGE_TO_BE_CONVERTED.SVG

• Joining pages from a a collection of PDF files into a single PDF file:

  /System/Library/Automator/Combine\ PDF\ Pages.action/Contents/Resources/join.py -o PATH/TO/YOUR/MERGED/FILE.pdf /PATH/TO/ORIGINAL/1.pdf /PATH/TO/ANOTHER/2.pdf /PATH/TO/A/WHOLE/DIR/*.pdf

• Downloading m3u8 playlist with a bunch of ts files, and combining them into a single video file:

  ffmpeg -headers "ANY_NECESSARY_HEADER" -i "M3U8_URL" -bsf:a aac_adtstoasc -vcodec copy -c copy -crf 50 OUTPUT_FILE.MP4

How-To

• Hiding Spotlight inside Bartender (on macOS Sierra)

  • Reboot into Recovery Mode (hold ⌘+R when hearing the startup chime);
  • Go to Utilities -> Terminal, run command csrutil disable, then reboot;
  • Hide Spotlight inside Bartender app;
  • Reboot into Recovery Mode again;
  • Go to Utilities -> Terminal, run command csrutil enable, then reboot.

• I don't wanna have the Music app from Apple. Well, you can't delete or disable it, but try noTunes.

• Missing app icon on Dock, and failing to "Check for updates" (due to Gatekeeper Path Randomization on macOS Sierra)

  • Run command: xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Your.app;
  • Drag app back onto Dock;
  • Reboot Mac.

• Authorized Restart (to bypass FileVault 2 pre-boot login screen)

  sudo fdesetup authrestart