During the past 12+ years I’ve used a Mac, I’ve had dozens of little utilities that I swore by for a time, many of which came and went. Some were binkies of a sort, easing the discomfort of using a Mac for a long-time Windows user. Some were power toys – often to find things, run things, or sort things in ways that a Mac’s operating system couldn’t at a certain moment in time. Over the years, what would eventually become macOS has evolved, “sherlocking” popular utilities by glomming somewhat similar functionality into the OS. A few of my favorites early on have been Sherlocked along the way. Some of the utilities got lost over time – it takes dedication to try and keep up with Apple’s annual release cadence, and their fussiness – particularly when it comes to sandboxing, security, and UI tweaking over the years.

Another colleague recently came around to using the Mac, after tiring of dealing with his PC. I wanted to offer him a list of utilities that I find useful on my Mac, that he might want to try. Here’s the result.

With my regular traveling for work, when I switched to my Core m3 MacBook 3-ish years ago, I culled a bunch of utilities, to simplify everything and maximize battery life. I sidelined that device (due to a wine-related incident we shall not speak of), and replaced it with my 2018 MacBook Pro (with the Touch Bar… meh…) before the new MacBook Air was released. When I did that, I jettisoned a few more utilities, as a few more have died over the years as vendors either loudly or quietly gave up on their app.

So my net takeaway is that there aren’t a lot of utilities that I run on my Mac anymore. In terms of apps, I use Office 365 ProPlus for work, Pixelmator (which I actually prefer on the iPhone!) and Scrivener. Well, I have Scrivener. I haven’t convinced my brain that it’s worth the effort just yet. It’s a beautiful concept. But man… it’s complex. You have to understand, I’m all about removing distractions. I used to love the Night Panel button on my Saab that turned off all interior lighting and controls other than the speedometer at night unless they were needed. That’s why my Dock and Apple Menu are both autohide, and why there’s never anything on my desktop. At any moment in time, my desktop is just a background image, with potentially one drive attached for use by Time Machine

Of the handful of tools that remain on my Macs today, I do really tend to use most of them a lot:

• Bartender (US$15/perpetual license) – useful for people who are anal-retentive about their Apple Menu bar apps (the stuff that shows up on the right). I hide almost everything other than date/time, power, and notifications. 4 week standalone trial available.
• BetterTouchTool (US$7.50/annual or US$21/perpetual licensing available) – does Windows 7-style window snapping for desktops (apps not running full-screen, which have native snapping available built-in), but is most useful for automation/shortcuts. I use it to turn volume up/down, and I used to use it to enable a gesture-driven track changes in Word too. It’s $21 for perpetual – and well worth more to me. It’s being rewritten – it’s a crazy powerful tool. 45-day standalone trial install available.
• Brightness+ (Free) – A strange little free utility that does hardcore color inversions. I have to use Word a lot, and even with their new dark support, the “paper” is still white, which drives my eyes crazy. I use this to get a color inversion that might seem familiar to you if you cut your teeth on WordPerfect way back when.
• FormatMatch (US$.99) – Useful tool that is cheap, albeit… simple, and, arguably, abandoned. Has two OS-wide modes – paste and keep style, paste and match style to where you’re pasting.
• Lungo ($3) – Keeps your display awake – I use it for webinars and for our Microsoft enterprise licensing boot camp.
• Pomobaro (Free) – Tiny pomodoro timer. I’m still torn on this guy, but I do use it periodically.

Astonishingly, that’s it. There aren’t even many apps I run on the system anymore outside of Office. FWIW, I don’t use OneNote or Outlook, as I find both too cumbersome for me, even on the Mac. (I also don’t use OneDrive/OneDrive for Business.)