I genuinely think that macOS is a bad operating system out of the box, and it doesn't include almost any quality of life feature provided by most Linux desktop environments (GNOME my beloved) or even Windows. This is mostly for my own reference to remember how I set up my work Macbook Pro to be more usable long-term.
Homebrew is an immediate install for any macOS device I use. It makes package management and installing open-source applications and utilities miles easier.
macOS didn't have window snapping for years, and it finally got it in Sequoia - but it's not fast or customizable at all. I installed Rectangle which is a solid utility that has great keyboard shortcut customization. There's also no native way to switch between all currently open windows, so AltTab was a necessity.
Spotlight is better than it used to be but it's still not useful or customizable enough (come on Apple, we need a half-decent clipboard manager). I use Vicinae on my personal machine, so Raycast was the immediate alternative for macOS. It can even fully replace Spotlight. I also use several Raycast extensions and configurations that make a lot of things faster:
- Alias the clipboard manager to
cl - Alias Google searches to
g - Install the Browser Tabs extension to search and navigate tabs across browsers (alias to
tab) - Install the Bitwarden extension to quickly access 2FA codes and passwords (alias to
2fandpwrespectively)
The Macbook I have has the ridiculous camera notch that I feel is fully useless and random. The only benefit is that you can utilize the notch with tools like BoringNotch which adds media controls, a file tray, and calendar to the notch space accessible by hovering inside it. Makes it a lot more useful.
The list of supported filesystems for removable devices on macOS is terribly short. Zero support for Linux filesystems as well as read-only support for NTFS makes working across devices very difficult. Thankfully the anylinuxfs project has fixed this using tiny Linux VM's to allow mounting any Linux-supported filesystem (which is pretty much any filesystem you can think of). There's also a convenient GUI for it, anylinuxfs-gui.
TextEdit is ugly and not a good default for editing plain text files (why on earth would autocorrect be turned on by default in a text editor???), but CotEditor is great. I was also able to set it as the default text editor by running brew install duti and then duti -s com.coteditor.CotEditor public.plain-text all.
Finder is genuinely one of the least-user friendly pieces of software I've ever used. Especially since Liquid Glass was forced into macOS, the interface is terrible, there's no way to display an editable path bar, sorting and organizing files is a mess, and I generally want to bang my head against a keyboard every time I use it. A few alternatives exist, but Bloom is the best one I've found. It has a very nice multi-pane design, native UI, and even though it's a paid app, it's pretty affordable and a worthy cost to have a half-decent file manager on the computer I'm going to use for 40 hours a week.
Safari was immediately removed from my dock. Though its UI has improved as of late, the engine lags even behind Firefox and as a developer that's not an option. Helium is my favorite browser as of late, with its focus on minimalism and privacy, as well as support for zen mode and sidebar tabs. It's a good replacement for the now unmaintained Arc if you're looking for a Chromium-based browser engine that doesn't have AI slop shoved into every corner.
Terminal emulators are terminal emulators - they're pretty much all the same. But I'm very used to Ghostty these days, which is very configurable and has hardware-accelerated rendering. It can be set as the default terminal too. Ghostty also has a quake-style quick terminal feature that can be configured in the standard config file. Mine looks like this:
keybind = global:cmd+grave_accent=toggle_quick_terminal
quick-terminal-position = left
quick-terminal-animation-duration = 0.15
quick-terminal-size = 35%
Then as long as Ghostty is running, you can do ⌘ + ` to open a little terminal window to the side that overlaps on top of any open windows.
99% of the time I don't use the dock, so I keep it on autohide and shrink it way down. I don't need to see a bunch of crap in my menubar either, so I turn off pretty much everything in the Menu Bar settings, and trim down the clock settings too so it only tells the time and not the date or day of the week. In appearance, dark theme on and Liquid Glass set to Tinted rather than Clear, which helps with visiblity. Siri and Apple Intelligence are turned off. Widgets on the desktop are turned off. Natural scrolling is also turned off.