Mine is abit of a cheat since its for iOS/Mac/iPad but MoneyStats. It does balance forecasting and unlike Kualto/Dollarbird/other balance forecasting apps, you can actually buy it. No subscriptions please.
Bartender is what I install on every Mac. So many apps fight for real estate on my top bar. Few of them are granted the privilege.
Something I dislike about Bartender is that you have to upgrade your license every macOS upgrade, but I understand the devs need to eat
Rectangle - It presets window sizes and assigns them to keystrokes. It’s great to quickly be able to move 2 apps to half a screen each, move them between monitors etc. Shortcat - allows you to basically do anything that you would with the mouse by the keyboard. It’s hard to explain so look it up! It also has a brilliant emoji picker that works so much quicker than the native one.
Quicksilver.
Maybe elaborate a teensy, just to give people an idea as to whether its relevant
To say that Quicksilver completely changed the way I use computers is no exaggeration, but the crazy thing is: I’m not even a Mac user. It’s easy for people to forget what an influential app this was back in the mid-2000s, and it spawned a small handful of clones over on the Linux side: Gnome Do, Kupfer, Synapse. (None on Windows, to my knowledge.) I’m really thankful to Quicksilver because this is such a sensible and powerful way to do so many things on a desktop, and Ctrl+Space has become my deep-seated muscle memory for “I need to do something…”
Quicksilver changed how I use the Mac when I transition over from a PC. Quicksilver made everything make sense. I think my favorite thing at the time was the customizable global shortcuts, and being able to just start typing the name of some thing and launch it. Instead of having 1 million icons in shortcuts on the on the dock just the few that I always used.
On PC in the early 2000s I started customizing the windows xp shell because it was so basic. I used something few people have probably used: Geoshell.
It was a skinnable replacement for the windows UI with various plug-ins to customize functionality. I guess it was similar to what was available in Linux at the time as far as the window manager. It was also more stable since explorer wasn’t also handling all of the UI tasks.
I think my record for uptime was like 47 days on Windows XP without having to reboot. Granted, things got kind of funky and it wasn’t perfect.
I even learned how to make my own skins, which at the time was pretty difficult to do in windows xp.
I had a similar sort of late-Windows phase before moving to Linux. While I don’t think I knew about GeoShell, I would use shell replacements like LiteStep and various Blackbox clones. Customizing Windows and learning/comparing different UIs on the same system taught me concepts that made it an actual “light step” towards *nix. Sadly I don’t have many screenshots from that time, and I’ve combed through boxshots to see if I posted any, but it looks like probably not. I did manage to find this one locally (probably from bbLean or bb4win):
AppleScript. Amazing little language that comes with the OS. Can be used to to automate any app, send keystrokes, etc. Completely ignored by Apple and very underrated.
Bettertouchtool is basically the best app ever made, bar none. It’s a major reason why I’m a macOS user. It’s basically a shortcut maker using any peripheral or any trigger and works nearly flawlessly.
It’s incredible that some of the trackpad gestures are actually linear rather than clunky
What sort of things do you use BTT for? I use it too on my MacBook with Apple silicon. Although I view it as a consolation prize. Most everything I use it for I can do with a bash script + hotkey in Linux on my desktop.
Then again, maybe I’m just not creative enough. I understand BTT has a wide range of options to allow for complex shortcuts. But practically speaking, I don’t know if I can use 95% of those options.
