Friday FOSS fest There are some idiosyncrasies about macOS that long term Mac users may never notice, but cause frustration in people more used to how Windows does things – or the much more customizable Linux desktop experience. Here are a few of The Reg FOSS desk's favorite tools we routinely install on new machines to make life a little more comfortable or convenient.
Some love tiling window management and edge snapping; others hate it. This vulture is in the former camp, and for years used Spectacle. Sadly, it was discontinued a few years ago, but Rectangle fills the gap nicely and optionally supports the same keystrokes. Since macOS 15 "Sequoia," the basic functionality is built-in and not only do we prefer Rectangle's keyboard shortcuts, they work on non-Apple keyboards with no Fn key, too. It's open source, but there's also a paid Pro version if you want to reward the developers.
Alternatives include Yabai and Divvy. The latter also works on Windows, and amusingly enough, there's a Windows version of Rectangle, too.
The native macOS keystroke to switch apps is Cmd + Tab, which switches between open programs. For habitual Microsoft drivers who are more used to switching between open windows, AltTab brings that style of switching to the Mac – and as it uses the Opt key instead, you can use both side-by-side if you wish. It's open source as well.
If, on the other hand, you're old school and miss the MultiFinder app switcher in the menu bar, an alternative is Witch, which offers that among many other options – but it's only free for an initial demo period. From the same author and totally gratis is Displaperture, which has no practical use, but restores the rounded corners that Macs used to have years ago.
This vulture is a heavy user of the middle mouse button, as we have described before. The buttonless trackpad of modern MacBooks seems more aimed towards multi-finger gestures than plain ol' right-click, and by default, there's no way to middle-click at all. The developer of Rectangle, Ryan Hanson, offers an inexpensive app that lets you define multi-finger taps to do the same job, but we find the FOSS MiddleClick does the job just fine.
There's a very capable resource monitor built into macOS in the form of Activity Monitor, and it can even animate its dock icon to show some things. If your dock is already overcrowded enough, though, MenuMeters puts this info in the menu bar, like some Linux tools. It hasn't been updated for a while yet it still works fine for us, and the project's GitHub page lists a number of more modern offshoots with additional bells and whistles.
We've mentioned the very handy Homebrew for macOS before. Several of these apps can be installed and updated this way. There are alternatives to Homebrew as well, including Fink and MacPorts, if you miss Linux-style command-line package management.
Although macOS comes with the very capable TextEdit, it is a complex tool that does markup and reads and writes multiple rich-text formats. There is an abundance of Mac text editors, but our go-to tool is the tiny, simple, and very fast TextEd by Jeena. It's a dead simple plain-text editor and nothing else. Not only is that often all we want, it also snaps open in a blink.
For advanced keyboard customization, Karabiner-Elements is very capable, but despite considerable experimentation we've yet to induce it to provide the classic Compose key functionality. If anyone has, do let us know in the comments.
We tend to use Macs as if they were Linux machines with a shinier desktop – we don't use most of Apple's apps and services. So, Firefox instead of Safari, Thunderbird instead of Apple Mail, Ferdium instead of Messages, and so on. Some things are not so straightforward to replace, though, such as Apple's Music app, formerly known as iTunes. Step forward, the Mac edition of Foobar2000. It's not FOSS, but it is freeware, and it can play both local files and network streams.
The built-in tool to decompress archives is usually all we need, though occasionally we do come across exotic formats it can't handle. The venerable StuffIt Expander is still around, and even more capable is The Unarchiver.
We know that some old school Macintosh users still miss Classic MacOS – because we're one of them. Classic's very limited (and somewhat bolted-on) multitasking worked in an unusual way. When you clicked on any window belonging to any app, the OS brought all that app's windows to the front. Today, this only happens if you click on an app's dock icon. If you still hanker for the old way, Front and Center has you covered. It's not free, but if you want it, it's only five bucks. Author and former Mac OS X reviewer extraordinaire John Siracusa explains the rationale behind the app and its price.
We do sometimes encounter Mac users who are under the impression that the only way to install software is via the App Store, and that you have no choice but to use Apple's recommended apps. That's not true and it never was. This article just lists some of this vulture's familiar friends, and there are a lot more out there. Enough that there are multiple curated lists out there, such as the Awesome macOS Software list. ®