Homebrew and mise-en-place are the only must have apps for me (both of which are not .app applications). Everything else is pretty well context-dependant and/or built in.

For Homebrew - having used Nix, Macports, and pkgsrc, I found Homebrew easier than everything else. I would like to get into Nix, but there is too much mucking around for it to be worth it to me.

mise-en-place has such a unique feature set that I can’t compare it to anything else. I started using it as a replacement for pyenv and sdkman, and found it so helpful. For me, the better-than-you-think built in apps are:

- Reminders - I haven’t gone all in on any other task management software, but I don’t bother because Reminders does everything I need

- Mail - it is fiddly and idiot proof to a fault, but provided you don’t have an exotic setup and can deal with only average search capabilities, it works well

- Calendar - it’s a calendar. Only thing I don’t particularly like is the date-picker interface for new events, and that’s mainly because I like my Sunday-Saturday format

- Terminal - it’s tidy and works well. Many swear by iTerm2; I find Terminal good

- Safari - does what it says on the tin and does it well, I like Safari

- Passwords - having been a medium-long term user (2-5 years) at various times of both Keepass and Password Store, I ended up transitioning to Passwords because of its good integration with Safari and its sync in iCloud, which is good for family. However the app itself has improved over time as well and I call it good

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

Whatever you decide it's useful to find things on Homebrew and record in a file. Then you can mass install next time around

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.

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.

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.

Raycast (also does window management, dictation), Chrome, Ghostty, Karabiner..

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.

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.

Malwarebytes, Microsoft Office. That's the software I'll install when I buy a new device.

Hammerspoon, Little snitch, iTerm2, Chezmoi, Orion

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