My list of must-have utilities for Mac OS X:

• Flycut (General Arcade) — stores your last n clipboards and allows you to easily choose one to paste. Saves a surprising amount of effort (for example, copying username / password? No more switching back and forth — just copy twice, switch to the terminal application, and paste twice).

Note: Emacs 24 appears to have a bug in their event handling that prevents Flycut from working properly. If you want to patch your version of Flycut to work properly with Emacs, you can see hacky fix here.

• Window Magnet (CrowdCafe) — makes it easy to snap windows to half or quarter screens. I bound the Ctrl-Alt-arrow keys to snap the window to half the screen.
• Iterm2 (George Nachman) — really nice terminal emulator with many features that I don’t use. Also has a fair number of profiles based on popular color schemes (i.e., Zenburn, Solarized, whatnot).
• Homebrew (also called Brew) — amazing replacement for MacPorts and Fink. Constantly being updated with new recipes for the latest stuff, and it’s easy to create your own recipes as well.
• Witch (Many Tricks) — nice window switcher that allows you to alt-tab to the right window, not just the right application. Lots of configuration options.
• Alfred (Running With Crayons, Ltd.) — spiritual successor to Quicksilver. Allows quick access to files and programs on your Mac. I use it to really reduce the size of my Dock Bar — anything I want to run is just a few keystrokes away.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 11th, 2012 at 10:34 pm and is filed under coding, reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.