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Ask HN: New clean macOS install. Must-have apps? Best browser?
13 points by simonebrunozzi 7 hours ago | 13 comments
  • bl4kers
    Whatever you decide it's useful to find things on Homebrew and record in a file. Then you can mass install next time around
  • imagetic
    Firefox Nightly - https://www.firefox.com/en-US/channel/desktop uBlock Origin - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin Ghostty - ghostty.org Homebrew - https://brew.sh Oh-my-posh - https://github.com/JanDeDobbeleer/oh-my-posh Zed - https://zed.dev 1Password - https://1password.com Tailscale - https://tailscale.com iStats Menu - https://bjango.com/mac/istatmenus Little Snitch - https://obdev.at/products/littlesnitch/index.html Ice Toolbar Manager - https://icemenubar.app MarkEdit - https://github.com/MarkEdit-app Magnet - https://magnet.crowdcafe.co/ Pi - https://pi.dev
  • CobaltFire
    Heres my list:

    Transnomino (https://www.transnomino.com/)

    StillColor (https://github.com/aiaf/Stillcolor)

    SublimeText (https://www.sublimetext.com/)

    Homebrew (https://brew.sh/)

    VLC (https://www.videolan.org/)

    Macs Fan Control (https://crystalidea.com/macs-fan-control)

    Rectangle (https://rectangleapp.com/)

    NetBird (https://netbird.io/)

    Obsidian (https://obsidian.md/)

    Honestly its not huge and most are probably obvious, but those are what I immediately install on my machines. Looking forward to seeing alternatives or new must-haves.

    • simonebrunozzi
      pretty good. Which browser do you use?
      • CobaltFire
        Safari for most things, Chromium if I have to for something.

        I didn't toss those there because those (and IDEs and SSH/Terminal clients) are very opinionated and everyone has their favorites.

  • k310
    Ublock-origin with Firefox, Audacity, Batch Photo Resizer, calibre, cardflow, Diffraction, Ejimo and Ultra Character Map (try finding emojis without them), Libre Office, Paprika Recipe Manager, Samurai Safe, SeaMonkey (who else edits HTML?) GIMP, Darktable, RawTherapee, Super Photo Upscaler, Sublime Text, VLC, Clearview (and why isn't epub supported natively?), PhotoSync (share photos with all platforms), GhostText for editing browser text areas with Sublime Text or other. (life-saver)

    Ones I actually use.

  • al_borland
    I always come back to Safari.

    I’d install apps based on your needs. If you install other people’s must-have apps, you’re not going to have such a clean install anymore.

  • swah
    Raycast (also does window management, dictation), Chrome, Ghostty, Karabiner..
  • smcleod
    Handy, Cotypist, Markedit, Ghostty Tip, BetterTouchTool, GoodLinks, Pixelmator Pro, Handbrake, Zed, Onyx, LittleSnitch (or LuLu), Chezmoi, Stats, Shottr, llama.cpp, oMLX, LM Studio, Parcel, Things, OrbStack, Msty Studio.
  • bobbiechen
    Magnet app (for window splitting) is usually one of my first installs. I think I paid like $7 for it years ago and it's well worth it.
  • mankhb2k
    Malwarebytes, Microsoft Office. That's the software I'll install when I buy a new device.
  • mortar
    Hammerspoon, Little snitch, iTerm2, Chezmoi, Orion
  • unmanageduck
    Package manager: Nix(alternative to homebrew) https://nixos.org/download/#nix-install-macos

    Package management: Nix-darwin https://github.com/nix-darwin/nix-darwin

    Browsers: - Librewolf https://librewolf.net - Tor https://www.torproject.org - Orion https://orionbrowser.com

    Video downloader: Yt-dlp https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp

    Video/audio player: Mpv https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv

    Video editor: LosslessCut https://github.com/mifi/lossless-cut

    Video encoding: Ffmpeg https://search.nixos.org/packages?&query=ffmpeg

    Office suite: LibreOffice https://www.libreoffice.org

    IDE: Zed https://github.com/zed-industries/zed

    Window management: Rectangle https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle

    Menubar system monitor: Stats https://github.com/exelban/stats

    Screen tweaks: MonitorControl https://github.com/MonitorControl/MonitorControl

    Autorun checker: KnockKnock https://github.com/objective-see/KnockKnock

    Video streaming platforms: Grayjay https://grayjay.app/desktop

    Communication: Signal https://signal.org/download/macos

    Torrenting: Transmission https://github.com/transmission/transmission

    VPN: Mullvad https://mullvad.net/en/download/vpn/macos

    DNS: NextDNS https://nextdns.io

    Add the following in denylist to block the constant communication with apple servers:

    aaplimg.com

    apple-cloudkit.com

    apple.com

    apple.com.akadns.net

    apple.com.edgekey.net

    apple-dns.net

    apple.news

    cdn-apple.com

    icloud-content.com

    icloud.com

    me.com

    mzstatic.com

    push-apple.com.akadns.net

    safebrowsing.apple

    Connect to the mac from anywhere: Tailscale https://tailscale.com/download/mac

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