I've had a M3 MacBook Pro for around three years now, and it's taken a while for it to really feel like home.

These days, using a Windows machine feels like dragging myself through mud and using a Linux machine makes me wonder why things don't "just work".

I was originally thrown off by the window management buttons, "close", "minimize", and "maximize" being - very obviously, might I add - on the wrong side. Turns out you will never click on any of those buttons ever, and there's no need to re-program your brain after all. The persistent header bar took some getting used to, also; but more on that later.

The whole point of this post is to - if I had to retrace my steps - provide some sterling advice that I wish I'd received earlier. What programs to install, what plugins make this computer a nicer place to be.

---

Rectangle.

This cheerful little app provides keyboard shortcuts to move windows around.

Yep, that's it...

Thankfully, I found this app right at the beginning of my macOS journey, while the regular keybinds were still feeling rather foreign to me. The result is that I'm a bit of a magician with multiple windows on multiple monitors; panes flying around at breakneck pace, clicking into place side-by-side, jumping between monitors and quadrants of monitors... All without raising my hands off of the keyboard.

I can relate it to how it feels to see someone using Vim for the first time. If old "windows-exclusive" me could see this, he'd be rather impressed.

TMUX

Multiple terminal instances, in the same terminal.

While this may seem like a bit of a no-brainer for anyone that's spent a little time in their terminal, the idea of needing multiple terminals was very new to me.

Coming from Windows, which has a 2 GB GUI client for every single terminal operation under the sun, the notion that the terminal could actually feel nicer to use was blasphemous. I'd messed around with Linux before, so I knew that a UNIX based system would definitely have a more comfortable terminal, but I was very impressed to find just how much stuff could be done just by typing.

I was using more terminals than I knew what to do with. I was juggling around six different windows on every side of the screen, kept losing track of which was which. Which directory this terminal was pointing at, which process was running in this other terminal.

TMUX solved all of that for me. I can run a server and perform git operations in the same terminal window just by using a horizontal split. I can have multiple projects open from different panes within the terminal. I can switch between them with hotkeys that I may, or may not, have mapped myself.

Maccy

A clipboard manager.

Maccy simply keeps track of the last 100 things you copied to your clipboard, amongst other things. This is fantastic for when you copied an API key 10 minutes ago and forgot to paste it anywhere.

Just go into the history and grab it again.

Accidentally CMD + C instead of CMD + V? You don't have to go back and copy a snippet again, you don't have to undo and cut it again just to paste something.

That's basically it.

Tot

Tiny notepads.

This is the only one of these recommendations that requires downloading something from the App Store.

I really didn't like the built-in Notes desktop shortcut. Having to scroll my mouse into the bottom-right corner of the screen and shake it around a little bit before clicking into a notepad popup. This popup may be a single pad, or it could be the whole Notes app. I didn't stick around to find out.

With Tot, you get exactly 6 little sticky notes. No fuss. You can open it up with a hotkey and start typing immediately. If you're mouse-clicking inclined, the icon is tucked out of the way in the top menu bar; a stark contrast to a bottom App-bar entry.

Monitor Control

Sync your laptop with the big monitor.

I got a nice big 32" monitor with a very bright screen. Every time it hits 5pm and the sun starts to go down, I get blinded until reach forward and fondle the monitor's little dongle that brings up the hardware settings menu.

If I want to avoid touching the mouse as much as I can, reaching over to the buttons on the monitor is definitely out of the question.

Monitor Control solves this for me. It lets me use my Mac's brightness buttons to change the settings per-monitor. It can try and plug into the hardware brightness, or it can simulate the brightness by overlaying a whole layer of black at varying opacities.

LocalSend

AirDrop for everyone, yep even Android-users.

Allegedly, this is redundant because the EU has enforced that Apple allows Android devices to interact with AirDrop. This is not quite rolled out to every single device yet, certainly not my S23+.

If I'm sending pictures or files to myself, I'm opening up LocalSend and getting it sorted with only 2 steps more than the usual AirDrop flow.

Hex

Speech to text, without bells and whistles.

I'm using Hex to write this very article. It just writes down what you say. It's not particularly AI powered or anything like that. It just writes down what you say.

I find this useful for brainstorming, I find this useful for writing long messages that I don't really need to think too hard about.

It has other useful features like keeping track of the audio file of your exact input, so you can go back and listen. It can be hotkey activated if you like, but this one is quite new to my repertoire, so I'm seeing how often I use it and whether it's going to change my workflow

---

That's all I can think of at the moment, might do a more terminal and alias-centric one of these in the future.