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List of recommended macOS software
This page is for good quality software on macOS, based on the contributions of /g/ users. This page is not for solidifying preferences or ideology; it is considered to be "value-free" and thus permitting of both reference to open source software and closed source software, for-profit and not-for-profit. This is not your soapbox, your ballot box, or pulpit. Stay constructive and avoid politics and arguments.
Package manager
- Homebrew, written in Ruby — Free
- Cakebrew is a free graphical client for managing Homebrew.
- MacPorts — Free
- Nix, the declarative package manager — Free
Terminal emulator
For a more complete collection of terminal applications, be sure to check the GNU/Linux applications page.
Internet
Web browser
For more detailed information see Web browsers.
Safari is the default web browser in macOS.
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 issue.
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.
Tor Browser is a package of a modified Firefox extended support release, NoScript, Tor, TorButton and TorLauncher. It automatically routes traffic through the Tor network and deletes history and cookies when closed.
E-mail client
- Mail.app - Comes default with Mac, supports iCloud mail drop for large attachments. Pretty neat.
- Thunderbird
- Airmail — $10, Cross platform with iDevices
Instant Messenger (IM)
- Beagle is a Jabber client with optional end-to-end encryption.
- Element is an open source, end-to-end encrypted, federated instant messaging client which uses the Matrix protocol.
Internet Relay Chat (IRC)
- 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.
- LimeChat is user friendly and free as in freedom.
- Textual –$9
BitTorrent (BT)
- Transmission is a lightweight torrent client with support for block lists.
- 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 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.
- Transmission-CLI is an ncurses interface for Transmission.
File Transfer Protocol (FTP)
Other
- Sharedrop is a peer-to-peer web app for file sharing.
- Kiwix Offline Wikipedia browser
- NetNewsWire FOSS RSS reader
Text
Word Processing
- Pages Part of the iWork suite (competitor to Microsoft Office), now free! Works seamlessly with iDevices and very intuitive, quite powerful for casual use.
- LibreOffice, the free and open source office suite.
- OnlyOffice is a FOSS Microsoft Office compatible document processing suite.
- Bean is a small, easy-to-use word processor designed to make writing convenient, efficient and comfortable.
Text editor
- Visual Studio Code
- Xcode. Apple's default IDE. Supports C, C++, Objective-C and Swift.
- BBEdit - $50
- TextMate - $55
- Sublime Text - $80
- Nova - $99
- Any of the JetBrains' IDEs - $200 per year (they have different IDEs for different languages, very expensive)
Terminal
Plaintext/richtext editor
- TextEdit, the default Mac text editor. Comprehensively featured and easy to use. Can edit in either rich text or plain text mode.
- Obsidian
- WriteRoom - $5
- Byword - $11
- Soulver - $12
- iA Writer - $30
To-do manager
- Reminders is the built-in to-do list managing app.
- TodoTxtMac is an open source to-do manager for mac using the todo.txt format.
Document Reader
Images and graphics
Viewing
- PhotoStickies can stick photos to your desktop.
Editing
- Preview is the default image and document viewer and editor. It is lightweight and functional.
- Photopea is a web image editor that runs locally on your machine. It has an interface similar to Photoshop CS6. Free with unobtrusive sidebar ads. There is also a vector image editor too
- Affinity Photo is another great alternative to Photoshop - $35
- Pixelmator Pro is so good, Apple bought the company - $50
- Acorn is similar to Pixelmator.
- Sketch is another alternative to Pixelmator.
- Camerabag is an easy-to-use photo editing tool.
- InkScape is a FOSS vector graphic editor.
- ImageOptim is software for compressing images.
Drawing/Painting
- Preview, believe it or not, also works as a basic paint application.
- Krita is a free and open source painting program.
- Pinta is a free, open source program for drawing and image editing.
- Procreate is a paid drawing application available for both iPad and Mac - $25
Animation
- Pencil2D
- Time Lapse Assembler allows you to create movies from a sequence of images.
- JAPNG Create animated PNGs (APNG).
3D Modeling
- Maya offers a comprehensive creative feature set for 3D computer animation, modeling, simulation, rendering, and compositing on a highly extensible production platform. Maya now has next-generation display technology, accelerated modeling workflows, and new tools for handling complex data.
- 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.
Video
Viewing
- QuickTime is the stock video player and also offers basic editing and screen recording functionality.
- mpv is a fork of MPlayer/Mplayer2 with cleaner code, less bloat, better video scaling, color management, and other high quality video rendering algorithms.
- IINA User friendly mpv front-end. FOSS.
- VLC. It's VLC!
- Macgo Blu-ray Player Pro/Standard Excellent program to watch Blu-ray and DVD discs. Paid, but offers free trials.
Editing
- Pikimov is a free, web app video and motion graphics editor. A good alternative to After Effects.
- Kdenlive is a free and open source video editing solution.
- iMovie is the free, proprietary video editor included with macOS. Easy to use and great for hobbyists and dilettantes.
- Final Cut Pro Expensive, but powerful and easy to use.
ScreenFlow Includes a capable video editor — $99
- Davinci Resolve is a professional grade colour grading tool and video editor. Free, with paid version available.
Conversion/Ripping
- 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.
- FFMPEG is the gold standard for video encoding and editing, command line based.
- yt-dlp is a command line program for downloading videos from YouTube and similar sites.
- 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.
Audio
Playing
- Music is the stock audio player. It railroads you to pay for their subscription service but is otherwise quite good.
- Cog is a lightweight, free and open source audio player.
- mpv is also a good audio player, too.
- foobar2000 is a venerable freeware audio player also available on Windows.
- Colibri is a proprietary lossless audio player with deep macOS integration - $20
Command line players
Editing
- Tenacity is an easy-to-use, multi-track audio editor and recorder made as a replacement to Audacity which now includes telemetry. It has support for LADSPA, Nyquist, VST, Audio Unit effect and VAMP analysis plug-ins.
- FFMPEG is also the gold standard for audio encoding and editing, command line based.
- Tagr Audio metadata tagger.
- Yate Audio metadata tagger (more advanced).
- 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.
Tools
- BackgroundMusic FOSS audio utility with features such as per-application volume control and recording system audio.
Utilities
Archiving
- Keka, a FOSS archiving tool.
- The Unarchiver or the CLI version
- p7zip can be installed via brew.
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
File management
- NameChanger
- Name Mangler
- A Better Find Rename
- Gemini is an intelligent duplicate remover.
- TidyUp
- Appcleaner is a free and good way to uninstall software.
- Disk Drill Recover deleted files.
- PhotoSweeper
- TinkerTool Access to additional preference settings.
Virtualization/Emulation
- UTM is a FOSS and user-friendly frontend for QEMU. Typically much faster than VirtualBox.
- VirtualBox is a free and open source virtual machine manager. It is owned by Oracle, though.
- Parallels is the easiest way to run Windows on ARM Macs — $80
- RetroArch, a FOSS emulation program which will emulate over 9000 platforms for you with little tinkering. It doesn't emulate anything itself but provides a big library of "cores" which do the job.
- OpenEmu does the same thing with less core and platform choices but comes with a sexy GUI instead.
- ares is the spiritual successor to bsnes, a multi-system emulator focusing on cycle accuracy. Many of the ares emulators are available as libretro cores.
Maps
- Marble
- Stellarium is a planetarium software that shows exactly what you see when you look up at the stars. It's easy to use, and free.
Ricing
- Bartender is a utility to clean up and manage your menu bar.
- Übersicht can add widgets to your desktop using CoffeeScript, bash, and CSS.
Window management
- Rectangle Better window snapping for macOS. FOSS.
- yabai FOSS tiling WM for Mac based on binary space partitioning.
Network Monitoring
- LuLu. The FOSS macOS firewall.
- Wireshark — Free
- Radio Silence - $9
- Little Snitch — $45
Password managers
- KeePassXC Cross-platform community fork of KeePassX "with the goal to extend and improve it with new features and bugfixes to provide a feature-rich, fully cross-platform and modern open-source password manager."
- Bitwarden is a free and open source, self-hostable cloud password manager with cross-device sync.
- Psono is a good alternative to Bitwarden.
- Strongbox is a free password manager for macOS and iOS. It supports the KeePass format and has a nice GUI. Additional features, like biometric authentication, are locked behind a paywall.
Desktop environment (DE) mods
- jitouch 2 trackpad modifications
- Karabiner can remap the keys on your keyboard and change the key repeat settings.
Clipboard manager/Virtual clipboard
- Maccy FOSS searchable clipboard manager.
- Pastebar FOSS, Cross-platform clipboard manager.
- Dropzone — $10
System monitoring
- Activity Monitor provides basic system resource analytics.
- coconutBattery is a utility for checking battery health.
- stats is a free, open source and highly configurable sensor readout utility.
Miscellanous
- Mactracker provides detailed information on every Apple Macintosh computer ever made.
- Sloth FOSS application that displays all open files and sockets in use by all running processes on your system.
- Macs Fan Control Free and readily updated fan controller for Mac.
External links
- PRISM Break — Lists software for different platforms that respect your freedom (and points out those which do not). Maintained by the EFF.