macOS Recommendations

General Utilities

• Rectangle — a free option for window snapping/arrangement stuff.
• AltTab — an improved window switcher with some decent customizability
• Shifty — a macOS "night shift" slider
• Raycast — Spotlight replacement, somewhat like Alfred, but free and more customizable
• Better Touch Tool — not free, but worth every penny. Pretty awesome window snapping/arrangement capabilties (like Rectangle but MOAR), and lets you create shortcuts for keyboard/mouse/touchpad/touchbar/etc.
• Keka — compression utility that handles 7zip, rar, and some other archive formats that don't work natively in macOS.
• NameChanger — batch file-renamer with a handy intuitive UI
• Choosy — not free, but if you have more than one browser or if you plan to juggle multiple browser profiles on a work machine, this can be configured to do things like "always open twitter in my personal profile" and "always open mycompany.com in the work profile"
• Caffeine — prevents the screensaver. Depending on your company's policies, this may come in handy on occasion.
• GrandPerspective — visually inspect your HDD to see what's taking up all the space.
• TinkerTool — tweak a lot of under-the-hood settings in macOS
• RCDefaultApp — change the default app for opening various types of links
• Tailscale — dead simple VPN solution. Allows you to connect between your devices with pretty close to no configuration needed. Not just for macOS.
• Syncthing — P2P continuous file synchronization program. Like Dropbox, but without the middleman.
• iTerm2 — wayyy better than the built in Terminal. A must have if you do a fair bit of command line activity.
• LaunchControl — handy GUI for managing launchd services. (launchd is the service manager for macOS.)
• Hammerspoon — automate macOS with lua scripts, because Applescript is annoying.

Security

I'm not a fan of traditional anti-virus software, but these 2 utilities make it fairly painless to avoid most bad stuff.

• LuLu — firewall that aims to block unknown outgoing connections
• KnockKnock — shows persistently installed software (a.k.a. what runs on startup)

Messaging

• Signal — free, fully encrypted open source messenger service. Not just for macOS.

Media Players / Readers

• Hermes — super minimal menubar Pandora music client. Mysteriously removes ads even if you only have a free account. :mind-blown:
• IINA — slick media player that plays just about every file type (mkv, mp4, mp3, flac, ogg, etc)
• YACReader — Yet Another Comic Reader (reads .cbr and .cbz formats)

Graphics Editors

• Pixelmator Pro — a damn fine Photoshop alternative for about 1/10th the price. This is my go-to these days, as I'm not big on the new Adobe subscription model. :\
• Vectornator — free vector graphics app. An Adobe Illustrator competitor.
• LICECap — screen capture to a GIF. Good for simple "click here then here" type stuff.

Video Utilities

• OpenShot — free/open source video editor
• Handbrake — video compressor. Basically an FFMpeg GUI.
• mkvtoolnix — mux and tag mkv files
• Subler — mux and tag mp4 files

Audio

• Audacity — best free/open source audio editor
• Audiobook Binder — combine multiple mp3/m4a files into one .m4b file
• Musicbrainz Picard — audio file metadata editor/tagger

Ebooks

• Sigil — .epub (ebook) editor
• Calibre - ebook utility for converting formats, editing, organizing, etc.

Markdown Editors / Local Notes

Huh? Don't know what Markdown is?

• Obsidian
• Typora
• MacDown

Command Line things

All these apps can be installed via Homebrew.

• bat - an improved cat
• choose - human-friendly alternative to cut and awk
• croc - share files between computers easily
• dc3dd - an improved dd with progress bars, etc
• dockutil - manipulate the macOS dock from the CLI
• duf - an improved df
• dust - an improved du
• fd - a simple, fast and user-friendly alternative to find
• ffmpeg - a very fast video and audio converter
• fzy - a fuzzy text selector menu
• git-delta - syntax-highlighting pager for git and diff output
• git-interactive-rebase-tool - does what it says on the tin
• gron - converts JSON to a grep-able format (and back)
• ijq - interactive jq, like jqplay, but in your terminal
• jq - a lightweight and flexible command-line JSON processor
• jless - a CLI JSON viewer (though I think I like ijq more)
• lazydocker - a terminal UI for managing Docker
• lazygit - simple terminal UI for git commands
• mcfly - improved ctrl-r shell history search
• mtr - traceroute and ping in a single tool
• navi - Interactive cheatsheet tool for the command-line
• ncdu - ncurses du replacement/improvement
• pipenv - Python dependency management tool
• pipx - execute binaries from Python packages in isolated environments
• procs - modern replacement for ps
• progress - progress viewer for cp, mv, and more
• pv - monitor data's progress through a pipe
• ripgrep - blazingly fast replacement for grep
• sd - an intuitive find & replace utility. sed for humans.
• shellcheck - static analysis and lint tool for bash scripts
• tealdeer - fast implementation of tldr in Rust
• tfenv - much like pyenv or rbenv, lets you manage terraform versions
• thefuck - programmatically correct mistyped console commands
• tig - Text interface for Git repositories
• tmux - Terminal multiplexer like screen but better
• tree - Display directories as trees (with optional color/HTML output)
• xh - Friendly and fast tool for sending HTTP requests (HTTPie alternative)
• yt-dlp - download youtube videos or audio. Also works on many other sites.
• yq - like jq but for YAML
• z - Tracks most-used directories to make cd smarter
• zenith - a top replacement with fancier output. Also see bottom.

Non-Homebrew CLI things

• bottom (not available via brew)
• marker (not available via brew)