I spend most of my day in the terminal or an IDE, and over the years I've gotten allergic to anything that wastes screen real estate or breaks my flow. This month I stumbled on three small Mac utilities that actually stuck around in my dock. Sharing in case they help someone else.
1. TokenBar — Know What You're Spending on LLMs
If you use GPT-4, Claude, or any API-based model, you've probably been surprised by a bill at least once. TokenBar sits in your menu bar and gives you a real-time token count as you work. You can see input/output tokens, cost estimates, and cumulative usage without leaving your editor.
It's $5 lifetime (not a subscription), which is refreshing. I picked it up after a week where I accidentally burned through $40 in API calls debugging a prompt chain. Now I just glance up and know exactly where I stand.
2. Rectangle — Window Management That Just Works
This one's free and well-known, but I'm including it because I still meet devs who drag windows around manually. Rectangle gives you keyboard shortcuts for snapping windows to halves, thirds, quarters, whatever. If you came from Linux with tiling window managers, this is the closest Mac equivalent without going full yabai.
3. Monk Mode — Block the Feed, Not the Site
This is the one that surprised me. Instead of blocking entire domains (which never worked for me because I actually need YouTube and Twitter for work), Monk Mode blocks the algorithmic feed on those sites while keeping search and direct links functional.
So I can still look up a specific video or read a thread someone linked me, but I don't get sucked into the infinite scroll. It's $15 lifetime and it's genuinely changed how much deep work I get done in a day.
None of these are complex tools. That's the point. The best workflow improvements are the ones you set up once and forget about. What small utilities have made a difference for you lately?
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