Introduction

A guide on what app's I use in case I ever need to set a Mac up from scratch again. My recommendations for Windows or Linux are very similar except for Windows swap out the macOS dev environment recommendations for WSL and swap the app Raycast for Microsoft PowerToys (for now until Raycast comes out with a windows app).

Everyday tools

• Notion Calendar - Syncs with my Google Calendar and it can run in the background to make sure I don’t miss any events.
• Affinity Photo - Photoshop replacement, only needs a one time purchase.
• Figma - For designs.
• Steam - For games.
• Moonlight - For streaming my desktop pc to my Mac.
• Proton - For password manager, also includes browser extensions.
• Google Chrome - No explanation needed.
• Google Messages - Web shortcut for messages on my Android phone.
• Modrinth - Best Minecraft launcher for macOS or linux (I use it on Windows too).
• Discord - For chats and games.
• Signal - For private chats.

Developer tools

• Ghostty - My preferred terminal emulator for platform-native Ui and GPU acceleration. See my config file here.
• Homebrew - Can be managed through the homebrew raycast extension.
• Zed - My preferred editor. Built in Rust so it's super fast. Managing extensions isn't needed with this editor as much compared to Vscode. See my Zed settings here.
• Expo Orbit - One-click build, launch, and simulate application for Expo React Native. Follow the docs for installation. Requires Android studio or Xcode as dependencies to emulate Android or iOS applications.
• Open Code AI - CLI application for agentic code editing with a really clean UI and easy to understand (I prefer to use this over Cursor and other Vscode clones, also try Gemini CLI and Claude Code).
• GNU Stow - Symlink your files so that you can track changes with git. This repo uses GNU Stow to symlink to the home directory of my macOS user.
• Git Config - Shown in this repo.
• ZSH Config - My default zsh config for my Mac. Includes ascii art and hints on startup. One of the startup hints assumes that you are using my Ghostty with my config. Also shown in this repo. See the README.md.
• TablePlus - Great if you need to run a PostgreSQL, Mysql, or other relational DB locally without docker (macOS only).

Mac specific tools

• Raycast - Replaces spotlight and great for extensions and shortcuts. For my Raycast setup and preferences click here.
• Mac Mouse Fix - Paid but affordable. Fixes problems with macOS not supporting 3rd party mice. Adds all OS features to your mouse and lets you separate normal scrolling and natural scrolling behaviors for mouses and track pads (IDK why macOS doesn't have an option for this by default but it's dumb).
• AltTab - Window management for alt-tab on macOS.
• Screen Studio - Paid but great for recording product demo's. I don't recommend unless you really need this because it is pricy.
• Cleanshot X - Paid but affordable. Not a necessary app but really great for taking clean screenshots or recording video as gif's. I use it every day.
• Window Management - I used to use Rectangle for window management and it's still great but now I just use the built in macOS window management. Be sure to just turn off the gaps if you don't like them. Raycast also has window management but I haven't tried it because most of the good features are in the paid tier.

JS Stuff

JavaScript runtimes and dependencies can be crazy to manage. See how I keep everything organized and what I use here.

Fonts

I use a couple of different fonts for my setup. See which fonts I add to my fontbook here.