The Mac tools I run, compared honestly, plus the parts of the clipboard nobody explains.
Most of this blog is about other people's software. I use a lot of small Mac utilities, and writing down which ones earned a slot is more useful than another pitch for my own app.
Where a free tool beats a paid one, the post says so. Several of these end by recommending something I do not make.
My bar reaches the notch, so every one of these had to earn its slot.
Open ›The Mac has a whole world of one-person tools that do one thing and vanish. These are the ones I use.
Open ›Every app here is free from its own repository, not a trial that expires.
Open ›Each of these solved something that irritated me every single day.
Open ›Raycast ate half my utilities. These are the extensions that made that happen.
Open ›One is the polish benchmark, the other is a speed obsession. I keep both, and here is why.
Open ›Rectangle is the first thing I install on any Mac. That does not make it the right answer for everyone.
Open ›Switching to on-device dictation was a privacy decision first and a money decision second.
Open ›I pay once and own it. That decision has held for real work, with two exceptions.
Open ›Three plugins and one habit that keeps a shared file from grinding to a halt.
Open ›Dragging across windows was the one Finder habit I never got comfortable with.
Open ›The plain version, including the part where macOS 26 does some of this already.
Open ›On a Mac, yes, and nothing asks your permission first.
Open ›A short list of things worth changing, and one class of malware most people have never heard of.
Open ›The polling itself is cheap. The things built on top of it are where cost hides.
Open ›The answer depends entirely on whether the app is always running.
Open ›