Every App on My Mac, and Which Ones I Actually Open

Most "best Mac apps" articles are compiled from other articles. This one is the actual /Applications folder of the machine this company is built on, with the boring parts left in.

I make a time tracker, which you should weigh accordingly. It appears below in the section where it belongs, alongside the two competitors also installed.

The three time trackers

Start with the embarrassing part.

This machine has Cronus, Rize and Toggl Track installed simultaneously. I build one of them.

That is not a stunt, it is what happens when you work in a category: you install competitors to understand them and then never remove them. But it is also the most honest thing on this page, because it tells you the category is not settled. Nobody has installed three note apps.

What I actually keep open: ours, because the menu bar counters mean I do not have to open anything. What I open occasionally: Rize, to see what they have shipped. What I have not opened in months: Toggl, because it needs me to press start and I do not.

That last one is the whole reason Cronus exists, and it took installing Toggl to be sure of it.

Opened every single day

Raycast — launcher, clipboard history, window management, snippets. If I could keep one app on this list, it is this one. The clipboard history alone has saved more time than any productivity method I have tried.

Ghostty — terminal. Fast, native, sensible defaults. Hyper is also installed and I have not opened it since Ghostty landed, which is a review in itself.

Visual Studio Code — obvious.

CleanShot X — screenshots and screen recording. Worth paying for specifically because of scrolling capture and the annotation tools. Every screenshot in our blog posts came out of it.

1Password — no comment needed.

Google Chrome — reluctantly, for devtools and the browsers our users use.

Opened most days, quietly essential

Karabiner-Elements — keyboard remapping. Invisible when it works, which is the point. Caps Lock as a modifier is worth the setup on its own.

BetterDisplay — display management. Fixes scaling and brightness control for external monitors, which macOS still handles poorly.

BatFi — limits battery charge to preserve long-term battery health on a machine that lives plugged in.

OrbStack — Docker and Linux VMs, much faster and lighter than Docker Desktop.

Wispr Flow and Willow Voice — voice dictation. Two installed because I have not decided. Both are dramatically better than macOS dictation and both changed how much I write.

TRex — OCR anything on screen into the clipboard. Small, free, and one of those tools you use twice a week and would miss immediately.

Installed for a reason, opened rarely

Gifox — GIF recording, for documentation.

Loom and Grain — recording and meetings.

Port Menu — shows what is listening on which port. Ten seconds of usefulness, several times a month.

Beeper Desktop — every messaging network in one client.

Xcode — required for the desktop app build, otherwise avoided.

Coast Local — continuous screen recording with local search, which I wrote about at length. Well built, and I have not found a use for it. Left installed to keep testing that opinion.

What is conspicuously missing

More interesting than the list, probably.

No note-taking app. No Obsidian, no Notion, no Bear. Notes go in plain files and the terminal.

No task manager. No Things, no Todoist, no OmniFocus. Every one I have tried became a place tasks went to be organised rather than done.

No calendar app beyond the built-in one. Fantastical is good; I could not justify it.

No focus or blocking app. I have tried them. I climbed over them. See why we build nudges rather than blockers.

No window manager. macOS gained native tiling and it turned out to be enough, which surprised me. Rectangle was on here for years. More detail in Mac window management in 2026.

If you install three

Ignoring everything above, from this whole list, these three change the machine most:

Raycast — free, and it replaces four other apps.
CleanShot X — paid, and worth it if you take more than a few screenshots a week.
Karabiner-Elements — free, and you will forget it exists in the best way.

None of them are mine.

What ten years of this taught me

The apps you keep are the ones you stop noticing. Everything on the daily list is invisible in use. Everything abandoned demanded attention: check in here, categorise this, maintain that.

Installing is not adopting. This folder has forty apps. Six get opened daily. That ratio has been stable for years, and no amount of enthusiasm at install time changes it.

Judge by the bad week. The tools that survived are the ones that needed nothing from me on the days everything went wrong. That is not a coincidence and it is the entire design principle behind what we build.