List of recommended macOS software

For a more complete collection of terminal applications, be sure to check the GNU/Linux applications page.

Package Managers

• Homebrew — Free
• Cakebrew is a graphical client for managing Homebrew.
• MacPorts — Free
• Portage — Free

Terminal Applications

• iTerm 2 — Free
• TotalTerminal — Free

File Management

• TotalFinder — $18

FTP Clients

Transmit for OS X.

• Transmit — $34
• Cyberduck — $24
• FileZilla

Online Storage

• Dropbox

Network Monitoring

• Little Snitch — $35
• Wireshark — Free

System Monitoring

• MenuMeters — Free
• iStat Menus — $16

Productivity

nvALT has a customizable interface.

• Dropzone — $10
• CloudApp — Free
• imguru and imgurBar — Free
• nvALT is a modified version of the lightweight note taking app Notational Velocity. It has the option to save notes as plain text files.
• TodoTxtMac is an open source to-do manager for mac using the todo.txt format.

Audio Players

While expensive, Fidelia offers a lot of extra options and features for audiophiles.

• iTunes is the default audio player. While not very customizable, it features good sorting options and integration. It can't play FLAC files.
• Cog is a minimalistic but utilitarian playlist-centric audio player (similar to DeadBeeF on GNU/Linux or Foobar on Windows). It is GPL-licensed, with support for an enormous amount of formats. The original developer is MIA, but there are two very active forks: kode54's version, and mamburu's version.
• Fidelia is $20 and a pretty harsh price for a music player. Unless you really need those advanced features, stick to a cheaper player.
• Swinsian is also $20, but made by a /g/ user.
• Sonora has been abandoned by its original developers. It has seemingly no Github activity.
• Ecoute
• Enqueue — $10
• Vox is a minimalistic alternative to iTunes that also has the ability to play FLAC.

Command line players

• moc
• cmus
• ncmpcpp + mpd (+ mpdas for last.fm scrobbling.)

Video Players

mpv

mpv is a fork of MPlayer/Mplayer2 with cleaner code, less bloat, better video scaling, color management, and other high quality video rendering algorithms.

• MPlayerX

• VLC

Media Center and HTPC

Kodi

Kodi (former XBMC) is a free and open source GPL software media center featuring a 10-foot user interface for use with televisions and remote controls. It is highly customizable via skins and addons. There are even addons available for streaming from internet services like YouTube and Twitch.tv. It plays nearly every video and music format out of the box. The built in scrapers can pull data from sites like IMDB and thetvdb to allow sorting media by actor, genre, rating, etc. It can export this data to local files for offline use.

Plex

Plex is a fork of the former XBMC (now Kodi). It has separate front-end (player) and back-end (server) components. Plex Media Server, unlike the free frontend, is a combination of free and proprietary software, with the majority of the code being proprietary. It has many of the same features as Kodi, but focuses more on its web interface. It also excels at on the fly video transcoding to allow playback over slow connections.

Media Converters and Rippers

HandBrake

Handbrake is a free and open source video transcoder with an easy to use GUI. It can rip and convert a variety of video formats, but can not break DVD or Blu-ray copyright protection.

• MakeMKV can convert video from proprietary (and usually encrypted) discs into a set of MKV files, preserving most information but not changing it in any way. It can instantly stream decrypt video without intermediate conversion and decrypt Blu-rays and protected DVDs.
• ProjectX can resync DVB (Digital TV broadcasts) ready for encoding.
• Youtube-dl is a command line program for downloading videos from Youtube and similar sites.

Audacity

Audacity is an easy-to-use, multi-track audio editor and recorder. It has support for LADSPA, Nyquist, VST, Audio Unit effect and VAMP analysis plug-ins.

XLD

XLD is the preferred Mac audio disc ripper of what.cd. It can output cue sheets and log files via a plugin. It also supports tagging with MusicBrainz and FreeDB.

Web Browsers

For more detailed information see Web browsers.

Safari

Safari is the default web browser in Apple's Mac OS X. It is based on Apple's Webkit layout engine, a KHTML fork.

• Webkit Nightly

Firefox

Firefox is free software developed by Mozilla. It is highly extensible via addons and included as the default browser in many Linux distributions. It is often criticized on /g/ and /tech/ as "SJWfox" because of some Mozilla developers outspoken campaigns on social and political issues.

• Firefox Beta
• Firefox Aurora
• Firefox Nightly

QupZilla

QupZilla is a FOSS web browser, built on the Qt and QtWebEngine (based on Chromium's rendering engine) frameworks. It supports extensions, ships out of the box with AdBlock, Mouse Gestures, GreaseMonkey, Speed Dial, Click2Flash, and more. It provides seamless integration with most desktop environments, and has several other distinguishing features. QupZilla is licensed under GPLv3.

Opera

Opera is a proprietary web browser that has pioneered open web standards for over two decades. It is notable for being the first web browser to sport a tabbed interface. It is developed and maintained by Opera Software.

Chromium

Chromium is the developer version of Google Chrome. Its tracking features can be easily disabled. Although it is free and open source software, its code is not as well audited as Firefox.

• Google Chrome
• Google Chrome Canary

Otter Browser

Otter Browser is a FOSS web browser that aims to recreate the best aspects of the classic Opera (12.x) UI using Qt5.

SeaMonkey

SeaMonkey is a continuation of the Mozilla suite. Unlike most modern web browsers, it is an Internet suite, complete with bundled programs for email, IRC, and web design. It is compatible with most Firefox add-ons.

Tor Browser

Tor Browser (formerly known as Tor Browser Bundle) is a package of a modified Firefox extended support release, NoScript, HTTPS-Everywhere, Tor, TorButton and TorLauncher. It automatically routes traffic through the Tor network and deletes history and cookies when closed.

Chat clients

• Adium is a customizable chat client with loads of themes, sound packs and other plugins.
• Ricochet IM is and end-to-end encrypted instant messages which uses Tor hidden services.
• Skype

RetroShare

RetroShare is an open source decentralized communication platform. It provides secure chat, photo and video sharing using OpenPGP to authenticate peers and OpenSSL to encrypt all communication.

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) Clients

HexChat

• HexChat is a popular replacement for the XChat IRC client, a client which offered a free binary for Linux but charges money for the Windows version. HexChat is a continuation of XChat and makes both its source code and binaries available to users of all platforms it's created for. Like its parent software, HexChat is licensed under the GNU GPL. It includes all the basic features one would need, and can be ideal both for new users and IRC veterans.

• Textual

Mail

Airmail for OS X.

• Thunderbird
• Airmail — $2
• Opera Mail

Utilities

Application Launchers

• Alfred is a simple but efficient application launcher. It is best in combination with the Powerpack.
• Launchbar is a little more complicated than Alfred, but has a few convenient features that Alfred lacks.
• Quicksilver

Ricing

• Obsidian Menu Bar can change the color of the menu bar to black.
• Bartender is a utility to clean up and manage your menu bar.
• Geektool can add shell scripts and images to your desktop.
• Übersicht can add widgets to your desktop using coffee script, bash, and CSS.
• Bowtie is a customizable display for the music you're listening to.

Window Management

• Spectacle is an Open Source window managment tool.
• BetterSnapTool
• Right Zoom for Mac changes the behavior of the zoom button.
• Moom

Password Managers

KeePassX

KeePassX is a light interface and cross platform password manager published under the GNU GPL.

• 1Password can safely store all your passwords.

Other

Growl allows for many different types of notifications.

• BetterTouchTool

• PCKeyboardHack can change the functionality of the "Caps Lock" key.
• KeyRemap4MacBook can remap the keys on your keyboard and change the key repeat settings.
• jitouch 2
• Growl is an alternative notification system with good customization features. It is best in combination with HardwareGrowler. It costs $4 or can be built from source.
• f.lux is a utility for changing the color tone of your display.
• Automator
• EiskaltDC++ is a direct connect client for file sharing.

System Maintenance

Misc.

• coconutBattery is a utility for checking battery health.
• Appcleaner is a free and good way to uninstall software.
• Onyx Additional system utilities.
• TinkerTool Access to additional preference settings.
• IceClean System maintenance and optimization tool.
• Disk Drill Recover deleted files.

Disk tools

DaisyDisk gives you a graphical overview over used disk space.

• DaisyDisk gives you a graphical overview of your file system.
• Disk Inventory X is a free alternative to DaisyDisk.
• OmniDiskSweeper shows you files on the disk in descending order of size.
• Gemini is an intelligent duplicate remover.

BitTorrent Clients

Transmission

Transmission is a lightweight torrent client with support for blocklists.

qBittorrent

qBittorrent is a libtorrent-based BitTorrent client. According to its developers, the aim of the client is to provide a free software alternative to µTorrent. There's also a daemon version called Qbittorrent-nox.

Deluge

Deluge is a libtorrent-based BitTorrent client. It is highly extensible via its plug-ins system. Deluge is notable for having originated the particular method of protocol encryption that is currently in use by every major BitTorrent client.

Terminal

• qBittorrent-nox is an advanced command-line Bittorrent client written in C++ / Qt4, using the libtorrent-rasterbar library by Arvid Norberg. qBittorrent-nox aims to be a good alternative to other command line bittorrent clients and provides features similar to popular graphical clients. qBittorrent-nox is fast, stable, light and it supports unicode. It also comes with UPnP port forwarding / NAT-PMP, encryption (Vuze compatible), FAST extension (mainline) and PeX support (uTorrent compatible).

• Deluge-Console is an ncurses interface for Deluge that generally comes bundled with the main GUI client.

• rTorrent is a client with an ncurses interface brought to you by the people who make libtorrent.

• Transmission-CLI is an ncurses interface for Transmission.

Archiving Tools

• The Unarchiver or the CLI version
• The Archive Browser — $4

7zip Archiver

7zip is a free and open source file archiver developed in C++ by Igor Pavlov. Its primary feature is lossless compression in the 7z format, based upon the Lempel–Ziv–Markov chain algorithm. In addition to the handful of formats it is capable of creating new archives in, 7zip can retrieve files from archives in virtually any format that one is likely to encounter. Only Windows binaries are provided on the site, but OS X and Linux binaries are available.

• Keka
• Entropy
• BetterZip 3

Coding

• BBEdit
• TextWrangler
• TextMate
• MacVim
• Coda
• Sublime Text
• Any of JetBrains' IDEs (they have different IDEs for different languages)
• Atom

3D Modeling

Blender

Blender is a 3D animation suite. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline—modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, even video editing and game creation.

Images & Graphics

Compression

• ImageAlpha is a program for reducing the file size of PNG files.
• ImageOptim is software for reducing the size of JPG and PNG files.

Editing

Pixelmator in action.

• Preview is the default image viewing and editing app. It is a lightweight and functional alternative for simple edits.
• Skitch is a simple editing program for adding anotations to images.
• Pixelmator is a good and affordable ($30) alternative to photoshop.
• Acorn is similar to Pixelmator.
• Sketch is another alternative to Pixelmator.
• GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a free and open source image editing program.
• Camerabag is an easy-to-use photo editing tool.
• InkScape is a FOSS vector graphic editor.
• Fotor
• iMage Tools

Viewing

• Xee (v2.2) open-source, lightweight, highly customisable.
• EXIF Viewer view image meta-data.
• PhotoStickies can stick photos to your desktop.

Virtualization

VirtualBox

VirtualBox is free and open source GPL software. It was first developed by Innotek GmbH, then bought by Sun Microsystems and now continually developed by Oracle.

• Qemu

Gaming

• OpenEmu is a free video game emulation program.
• KiGB Gameboy/Gameboy Colour emulator.
• Boycott Advance Gameboy Advance emulator.
• BSNES SNES emulator.
• Dolphin GameCube/Wii emulator. Open-source.
• Joystick Mapper Not free to purchase.
• Steam

Other Platforms

• List of recommended Windows software
• List of recommended GNU/Linux software
• List of recommended Android software

See Also

• Prism Break — Lists software for different platforms that respect your freedom (and points out those which do not). Maintained by the EFF.