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
Shottr
Lightshot did the job for years, but Shottr does it better and it’s built for macOS rather than ported to it. Same instinct — select an area, annotate it, copy it — except everything happens in a native, Apple silicon app that opens instantly and never phones home.
What made me switch and stay: scrolling capture for full-page screenshots, OCR that pulls selectable text straight out of an image, a pixel-accurate measurement tool, and a colorpicker. I use the OCR more than I expected — grabbing an error message out of a screenshot someone pasted in Slack beats retyping it. It’s free for personal use, with a one-time paid tier if you want the extras.
SteelSeries ExactMouse Tool
LinearMouse
Same problem, much better solution. If you use a mouse and have ever felt like the cursor moves in a way that’s subtly unpredictable, that’s macOS applying acceleration by default — and unlike Windows, there’s no setting to turn it off.
LinearMouse disables it and gives you direct 1:1 movement, but it goes well past the one trick ExactMouse did. You can set pointer speed and scrolling behavior per device, so your trackpad keeps its natural scrolling and inertia while your mouse gets linear movement and reversed scroll direction. It also lets you remap buttons and set per-app overrides. It’s free, open source, and actively maintained — which is what finally pushed me off ExactMouse.
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
Dia
I held out on Arc longer than I should have. The Browser Company has moved its attention entirely to Dia, and Arc stopped getting new features a while ago — so eventually staying meant using a browser that was quietly frozen in time.
Dia keeps the parts of Arc I actually relied on and puts an AI chat interface at the center of the browsing experience. You can ask it about your open tabs, have it summarize a document you’re reading, and build custom shortcuts the team calls “Skills.” In practice, the tab-aware chat is the thing I use constantly — asking a question about five open tabs without copy-pasting any of them into a separate window is a small change that adds up fast.
One honest caveat: it’s a newer browser and it shows in places, so keep another browser installed for the sites that don’t cooperate. But the migration from Arc is painless, and I haven’t wanted to go back.
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.