Mike

Posted on Aug 30 AI-assisted

Best Apps for macOS 27: 8 Mac Tools Worth Installing

#productivity #software #tools

I Rebuilt My Mac Setup This Summer. These 8 Apps Made the Cut

I did the clean-Mac thing again.

You know the drill: new macOS install, swear you're going to keep it minimal this time, install Homebrew, clone your dotfiles, and then somehow there are 19 things living in the menu bar by Friday.

This time I tried not to do that.

I installed the obvious stuff I need for work and left everything else out until I actually missed it.

A month or so later, these are the apps that came back.

Some are boring. That's probably a good sign.

1. Ghostty

I used iTerm2 forever.

Nothing wrong with it. I just realized my iTerm setup had become this archaeological site of settings I'd copied from old Macs and barely understood anymore.

So I tried Ghostty.

It feels very Mac-y, which is harder to find in terminal apps than it should be. Native tabs, native splits, Quick Look support, proper macOS behavior. The project is pretty serious about making the terminal feel like it belongs on whatever OS it's running on instead of shipping one generic UI everywhere.

Mostly, though, it's fast and I don't mess with it.

I have a small config file, a font I like, zsh, and that's about it.

I tried Warp too. Cool app. Lots of clever stuff.

Turns out I don't want my terminal to be clever.

I want to type git status.

2. Raycast

Yeah, obviously.

Raycast is one of those apps that has slowly eaten half the little utilities I used to install separately.

I use it for:

opening apps
dumb calculations I could absolutely do in my head
searching files
quick links
snippets
occasionally killing a process when something decides 140% CPU is a reasonable amount of CPU

I don't use half the features it has.

Possibly one quarter.

Still worth having.

I tried using Spotlight only for a few days after reinstalling macOS. It wasn't even terrible. Apple has made Spotlight better.

But there were too many tiny moments where my hands already expected Raycast to do something.

That's usually how I decide whether software is worth keeping now. If I uninstall it and my muscle memory gets annoyed, it probably stays.

3. Brow

This is the weird one.

Brow is basically trying to combine a bunch of the apps on this list into one Mac utility.

Launcher, clipboard history, window management, system stats, menu bar stuff, plus a bunch of features built around the MacBook notch.

That description normally makes me uninstall an app immediately.

I don't like "everything apps."

But I found a two-week Brow review on DevsReview where they replaced Raycast, Maccy, Rectangle and Stats with it, and that was nerd bait specifically engineered for me.

So I tried it.

I'm not deleting Raycast yet.

But Brow is way less bloated than I expected, and having some of this stuff accessible from the notch actually makes sense after a day or two.

The system monitor also replaced Stats for me, which means it technically removed one icon from my menu bar instead of adding another one.

A productivity app that results in fewer menu bar icons.

Nature is healing.

I'm still figuring out whether I want it as the center of my setup or just for a few modules, but it's probably the newest Mac utility I've tried that didn't get deleted after 48 hours.

4. Maccy

Yes, Raycast has clipboard history.

Yes, Brow has clipboard history too.

Yes, I still installed Maccy.

I wish I had a more interesting explanation.

Maccy is just insanely fast at being a clipboard manager.

⌘ + Shift + V, type two letters, hit enter.

Done.

No dashboard. No workflow. No "knowledge base for your clipboard."

I copied a JSON blob 20 minutes ago and now I want it back.

That's the job.

I spent a night looking at other clipboard managers because this is apparently what being 25 looks like when you don't go outside. DevsReview has a pretty big collection of Mac utility comparisons, and that sent me down a rabbit hole of apps with pinned collections, OCR, sync, previews, AI, etc.

Came out of the rabbit hole still using Maccy.

So that went well.

5. Rectangle

Rectangle might be the least exciting recommendation in this post.

Install it anyway.

It's open source, written in Swift, and lets you throw windows around with keyboard shortcuts.

My actual workflow is basically:

editor    | browser
terminal  | browser
editor    | simulator

Very advanced stuff.

I've had the same Rectangle shortcuts for years, so I don't even consciously think about them anymore.

macOS has gotten better at window management lately, but I still find keyboard snapping faster when I'm coding.

Also: Rectangle's GitHub repo is still actively maintained, which I appreciate because there are a depressing number of "essential Mac apps" lists linking to software that hasn't seen a release since three macOS versions ago.

6. OrbStack

This one made a bigger difference than I expected.

OrbStack replaced Docker Desktop on my personal machine.

It's a Docker-compatible container environment plus Linux VMs, but the whole thing feels much lighter than what I was used to.

The official docs call it a Docker Desktop alternative, which is exactly how I use it. My existing Docker commands work, Compose works, and I didn't have to invent a new mental model just to run a Postgres container.

It also starts stupidly fast.

That's maybe the nicest part.

I don't need a container app to become part of my personality. I need Redis to run so I can work on something else.

One caveat: if you're at a company with a very specific Docker Desktop setup, networking weirdness, enterprise policies, or some ancient local-dev ritual everyone is afraid to touch, don't migrate because some guy named Mike wrote a DEV post.

For my own projects, though?

OrbStack.

7. Proxyman

This one is mostly here because I do enough API/mobile work that I've stopped trusting console logs.

Proxyman is an HTTP debugging proxy.

Basically, when the frontend says:

backend is broken

and backend says:

works on my machine

you open Proxyman and look at what was actually sent over the wire.

Headers, request body, response body, redirects, status codes, timings.

No guessing.

It's especially nice when something works perfectly in Postman and then your actual app sends one slightly cursed header that nobody noticed.

You don't need this running every minute of the day.

But every few weeks it saves me from an extremely stupid debugging session.

That's enough.

8. CleanShot X

I avoided paying for a screenshot app for a surprisingly long time.

macOS has screenshots.

Why would I buy… more screenshots?

Then I started using CleanShot X for work and immediately became the exact person I used to make fun of.

The annotations are nice. Screen recording is good. Scrolling capture occasionally saves me.

But the feature I use constantly is much dumber:

pinning a screenshot above everything else.

Grab part of a Figma file.

Pin it.

Move it next to Xcode.

Build the thing.

It's such a tiny feature and I use it constantly.

Shottr is also great, by the way. If I were starting from zero and didn't already own CleanShot, I'd probably try Shottr first.

The menu bar situation is kind of broken right now

Speaking of menu bar icons.

If you're already on macOS 27, don't blindly install whatever menu bar manager some three-year-old Reddit thread recommends.

Apple changed how the menu bar is rendered in macOS 27, and that broke a bunch of the existing managers.

I ran into this while looking at Ice.

There's a recent DevsReview test of the macOS 27 menu bar managers that goes pretty deep into what happened.

As of late August, their testing has Bartender 6, Brow and Thaw working again in different states, while Ice is still broken.

The weird technical bit is actually interesting: older managers depended on individual menu bar items being exposed as separate windows. macOS 27 changed that behavior, so the entire category basically got rug-pulled at once.

Classic macOS developer experience.

Apple also added a native overflow button now, so depending on how messy your menu bar is, you might not need another app at all.

I'd try that first.

Stuff I didn't reinstall

This list is probably more useful:

a dedicated RAM cleaner
a dedicated CPU cleaner
CleanMyMac
three different AI menu bar apps
a second terminal
a second launcher
a giant menu bar system monitor with 14 graphs
whatever app I installed solely because someone on Reddit had a cool dotfiles screenshot

None of these apps are necessarily bad.

I just didn't miss them.

That's become my new filter.

Not:

"Is this app useful?"

Almost every app is useful if you stare at the landing page long enough.

Instead:

"Would I notice if this disappeared tomorrow?"

That's a much harder test.

Ghostty passes.

Raycast passes.

Brow is getting there.

Maccy definitely passes.

Rectangle passes because my fingers stop working without it.

OrbStack passes.

The rest have earned their spot for now.

Ask me again after the next clean install.

Stuff I checked while writing this

I didn't want this to turn into one of those Mac app lists where half the information came from other Mac app lists, so these are the main things I checked:

Anyway, that's my current setup.

I'm curious what the weird one is on yours — not VS Code or Homebrew, but the tiny Mac app you install immediately and then forget isn't part of macOS.

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