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Essentials For a New Mac

Of course these are essentials for my specific needs, but maybe they might be useful to you.

Apps

Work in progress. See my last list from 2010 in the meantime, but be warned that it is very, very out of date.

General

  • 1Password, which has become indispensable for not only password management, but for managing all sorts of sensitive information. In my experience, syncs flawlessly with a shared database file via Dropbox, iButt, or their own service. They've recently switched to a subscription model, but it's only $2.99/mo ($36/yr) vs. their old price of $40 for the app. There's also 1Password iOS.
  • iTerm 2 as a much more customizeable Terminal replacement. Install Oh My Zsh, themes (see main Readme), and the Yoncé iTerm colors for great justice.
  • Tweetbot for Twitter.
  • Alfred - Incredibly powerful app for searching, launching, text replacement, snippets, keyboard shortcuts to launch scripts, you name it. I think this does pretty much everything I used to use Keyboard Maestro for, so I may have replaced it.
  • Itsycal - Menu bar calendar that can show just a tiny date, or display the date/time in the format of your choice. When clicked, shows this month, plus any calendars’ items.

Programming

  • VS Code, the free code & text editor from Microsoft. Great jack of all trades with powerful plugins and a big community. I think I've replaced BBEdit with this.
  • PyCharm, for a full-blown Python IDE, which I use for Python and Django scripting.
  • Growl and/or Pushover for custom remote notifications — I cant quite decide which I like better. Best paired with Prowl or Pushover for iOS. They both have Python clients: gntp and python-pushover, so they can also work for sending message from a server.
  • Github Desktop for remote repositories of my code.

Fonts

  • Dank Mono is now my preferred coding font. The beautiful letter forms and nice coding ligatures really make it. £24 for personal use.
  • A free option is DejaVu Sans Mono as a wider-glyph replacement for Panic Sans.
  • You'll also want a Nerd Font patched font to show little icons in the terminal. Currently I'm using MesloLGS NF for non-ascii characters in iTerm and VS Code, but I should probably just patch Dank Mono with the Font Patcher tool (at the bottom of the page)

VPN

Secure communications, especially when using public WiFi. I use ProtonVPN.