Aditya Dhingra Every time I set up a new Mac, there’s a list of apps I install before I do anything else. Not because they’re flashy or trending — just because, at some point, each one solved something that was quietly annoying me, and I never looked back.
Here’s that list.
DockDoor
macOS has never shown you window previews when you hover over Dock icons. Windows has had this for years. I never thought about it much until I found DockDoor and realized how often I was clicking through apps just to find the right window.
DockDoor adds live window previews to your Dock — hover over any app and you see exactly what’s open inside it. It’s open source, free, and built natively in Swift. One heads-up: there’s a fake clone on the Mac App Store charging a monthly subscription for this. The real one is free at dockdoor.net.
Stats
brew install statsThat’s all it takes. Stats puts your CPU, memory, disk, and network usage right in the menu bar, always visible, always current. I know the instant something is eating my CPU without opening Activity Monitor.
It’s fully open source and highly configurable — you can show exactly the modules you care about and hide the rest. The one thing to know: the Sensors and Bluetooth modules are slightly more CPU-intensive than the others, so enable those selectively if you’re on an older machine.
Caffeine
A small coffee cup in your menu bar. Click it, and your Mac won’t go to sleep. Click it again, and normal behavior returns. That’s the whole app.
I use it during long deploys, when running a presentation, or anytime I need the screen to stay on without digging into System Settings. It’s free, open source, and has been doing exactly this one job reliably for years. Sometimes the best tools are the ones that don’t try to do more than they need to.
PearCleaner
When you drag an app to Trash on macOS, you’re usually leaving behind caches, preferences, and support files scattered across your Library. PearCleaner finds all of it and removes it properly.
What sets it apart from similar tools is the depth of features — it integrates with Homebrew, has an optional Finder extension for right-click uninstalling, and includes an “App Lipo” feature that strips unused CPU architectures from app bundles (handy if you’re on Apple silicon and want to shed Intel code). It’s free and open source.
Lightshot Screenshot
macOS’s built-in screenshot tool works. Lightshot just works faster for my workflow. Select an area, annotate with arrows or text on the spot, and copy it to clipboard — all before I would’ve finished pressing Cmd+Shift+4 and figuring out where the file landed.
I use it mostly for quick screenshares in Slack or when filing a bug report. It’s free, lightweight, and gets out of the way.
SteelSeries ExactMouse Tool
This one only matters if you use a mouse with higher DPI and have ever felt like the cursor movement on macOS feels slightly off — like there’s a delay or unpredictability to it. That’s mouse acceleration, and macOS applies it by default.
ExactMouse Tool disables it entirely, giving you direct 1:1 movement between your hand and the cursor. Despite the name, it works with any mouse and doesn’t require SteelSeries hardware. If you’ve never noticed mouse acceleration, you probably don’t need this. But if you have noticed it, you know.
iTerm2
I spend a lot of time in the terminal. The default Terminal app is functional, but iTerm2 is the kind of tool that genuinely adapts to how I work — split panes, shell integration that tracks commands and directories across sessions, per-host command history, and a hotkey window that I can pull up from anywhere with a keypress.
The shell integration alone is worth it. It gives iTerm2 context about what your shell is doing — not just what characters are on screen — which unlocks smarter history, better navigation, and a cleaner workflow overall. It’s free and open source, and I’ve never felt the need to look at alternatives.
Arc Browser
I switched to Arc a while back and found the sidebar-based tab organization genuinely better for how I work — grouping tabs into Spaces by context, collapsing what I don’t need, keeping research separate from work separate from personal browsing.
Worth noting: The Browser Company recently launched Dia, an AI-first browser that puts an AI chat interface at the center of the browsing experience — you can ask it about open tabs, summarize documents, and run custom shortcuts they call “Skills.” I haven’t made the switch yet, so I can’t speak to it firsthand, but Arc isn’t getting new features anymore as the team focuses on Dia. Worth keeping an eye on.
That’s the full list. Each of these has earned a permanent spot on my machine — not by being impressive, but by being useful in the quiet, consistent way that good tools tend to be.
If you’re setting up a new Mac, start here.