This is a slightly-opinionated personal favorite list of software. In the future this may include other resources, but will always be tailored to developers and power users.
Prerequisites
I've included the short snippets to install most of these using Homebrew. The installation instructions for Homebrew and Homebrew Cask are also included. If you would prefer not to use either, you can click on the titles for their respective project pages.
1Password gives you the security you need in today's online world without slowing you down. 1Password makes you more productive while simultaneously increasing your security with strong, unique passwords for all your accounts.
brew cask install onepassword
Pricing: $35 (single license)
Alternatives: LastPass, mSecure
Adium is a free and open source instant messaging application for Mac OS X, written using Mac OS X's Cocoa API, released under the GNU GPL and developed by the Adium team. Based on the libpurple protocol library, Adium can connect you to any number of messaging accounts on any combination of supported messaging services (see further down for the list) and then chat with other people using those services.
brew cask install adium
Pricing: Free (open source)
Alternatives: Pidgin, Trillian
Alfred is an award-winning productivity application for Mac OS X. Alfred saves you time when you search for files online or on your Mac. Be more productive with hotkeys, keywords and file actions at your fingertips.
brew cask install alfred
Pricing: Free Basic Version (Upgrade £17)
Alternatives: Found, Quicksilver, LaunchBar, Launchy
Lightning fast mail client for OS X
brew cask install airmail-beta
Pricing: Free beta channel, $2 (single license)
Alternatives: Sparrow, Postbox, Thunderbird
Bartender lets you organize your menu bar apps, by hiding them, rearranging them, or moving them to Bartender's Bar.You can display the full menu bar, set options to have menu bar items show in the menu bar when they have updated, or have them always visible in Bartender's Bar.
brew cask install bartender
Pricing: Free Trial (4 Weeks), $15 (single license)
Alternatives: Broomstick
BetterTouchTool is an awesome tool for customizing your touchpad/trackpad/Magic Mouse/Magic Trackpad devices, allowing complex gestures, custom keyboard shortcuts, window snapping and much, much more.
brew cask install bettertouchtool
Pricing: Free (proprietary)
Pricing: Free (open source)
Caffeine is a tiny program that puts an icon in the right side of your menu bar. Click it to prevent your Mac from automatically going to sleep, dimming the screen or starting screen savers. Click it again to go back. Right-click (or ⌘-click) the icon to show the menu.
brew cask install caffeine
Pricing: Free (proprietary)
Alternatives: Should I Sleep
Process Less, Sass, Stylus, Jade, Haml, Slim, CoffeeScript, Javascript and Compass files automatically each time you save. Easily set options for each language.
Note: I would highly recommend using existing command-line tools (eg. grunt) over companion apps like CodeKit. However, if that's not your idea of fun, then enjoy CodeKit.
brew cask install codekit
Pricing: Free Trial (10 days), $28 (single license)
Alternatives: Prepros, Livereload, Crunch
Edit and run code in any programming language with just a single click.
Pricing: $10 (single license)
While working on your Mac you create and download a lot of files, but rarely delete anything. As time goes by you have less and less room for your data. Install a larger disk if you have a few hundred dollars to spare or pay monthly fee for cloud storage. Or get DaisyDisk at a fraction of the price and get room for your data by removing old junk you unlikely even thought you had.
brew cask install daisydisk
Pricing: Free test drive mode, $10 (single license)
Alternatives: GrandPerspective, WhatSize
Dash is an API Documentation Browser and Code Snippet Manager. Dash stores snippets of code and instantly searches offline documentation sets for 130+ APIs (for a full list, see below). You can even generate your own docsets or request docsets to be included.
brew cask install dash
Pricing: Free test drive mode, $20 (single license)
Evernote makes it easy to remember things big and small from your everyday life using your computer, phone, tablet and the web.
brew cask install evernote
Pricing: Free, $5/mo or $45/yr (premium features)
Alternatives: Tomboy, Springpad
Fantastical's natural language event/reminder creation, beautiful calendar, and gorgeous list make it the best calendar you'll ever use. Stay on top of your schedule with features like native CalDAV support, automatic alarms for new events, OS X and iOS reminder support, and instant search.
brew cask install fantastical
Pricing: Free Trial (14 days), $10 (single license)
Alternatives: Qbix Calendar
f.lux makes your computer screen look like the room you're in, all the time. When the sun sets, it makes your computer look like your indoor lights. In the morning, it makes things look like sunlight again.
brew cask install f-lux
Pricing: Free (proprietary)
Alternatives: Nocturne
The missing package manager for OS X.
ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/go/install)"
brew doctor
Pricing: Free (open source)
Alternatives: MacPorts
A friendly homebrew-style CLI workflow for the administration of Mac applications distributed as binaries.
brew tap phinze/homebrew-cask
brew install brew-cask
Pricing: Free (open source)
HyperDock adds long awaited features to your Dock: Select individual application windows just by moving the mouse on a dock item, use mouse clicks to quickly open new windows and many more.
brew cask install hyperdock
Pricing: Free Trial (15 days), $10 (single license)
Alternatives: DockView
ImageOptim optimizes images — so they take up less disk space and load faster — by finding best compression parameters and by removing unnecessary comments and color profiles. It handles PNG, JPEG and GIF animations.
brew cask install imageoptim
Pricing: Free (open source)
Alternatives: ImageMagick
iStat Menus is an advanced Mac system monitor, covering an enormous range of stats. It lives right in your Mac’s menubar, so detailed information is only ever a glance or single click away.
brew cask install istat-menus
Pricing: Free Trial (14 days), $16 (single license)
Alternatives: atMonitor, MenuMeters
iTerm2 is a replacement for Terminal and the successor to iTerm. It works on Macs with OS 10.5 (Leopard) or newer. Its focus is on performance, internationalization, and supporting innovative features that make your life better.
brew cask install iterm2
Pricing: Free (open source)
Alternatives: TotalTerminal, MacTerm
Vim is an almost compatible version of the UNIX editor Vi. Many new features have been added: multi-level undo, syntax highlighting, command line history, on-line help, spell checking, filename completion, block operations, etc. There is also a Graphical User Interface (GUI) available. MacVim is the text editor Vim for Mac OS X.
brew cask install macvim
.files, including ~/.osx — sensible hacker defaults for OS X
Pricing: Free (open source)
Alternatives: Zach Holman's dotfiles, Yan Pritzker's dotfiles
When current available Markdown editors are almost all for general writers, Mou is different: It's for web developers. Syntax highlighting, live preview, sync scroll, fullscreen mode, auto save, powerful actions, auto pair, custom themes and CSS, HTML and PDF export, enhanced CJK support.
brew cask install mou
Pricing: Free (proprietary)
A community-driven framework for managing your zsh configuration. Includes 120+ optional plugins (rails, git, OSX, hub, capistrano, brew, ant, macports, etc), over 120 themes to spice up your morning, and an auto-update tool so that makes it easy to keep up with the latest updates from the community.
curl -L https://raw.github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/master/tools/install.sh | sh
Pricing: Free (open source)
Pixelmator 3.0 FX brings even more powerful ways to enhance your images. With the new Layer Styles, a complete set of Liquify Tools, and support for the new OS X Mavericks features — creating advanced and polished compositions — is now so much simpler, faster, and more enjoyable. And the new state-of-the-art image editing engine gives you the speed you need to keep the creative process smoothly flowing.
Pricing: Free Trial (30 days), $30 (single license)
Alternatives: Photoshop, Sketch, Gimp
List of useful Quick Look plugins for developers.
brew cask install qlcolorcode qlstephen qlmarkdown quicklook-json qlprettypatch quicklook-csv betterzipql webpquicklook suspicious-package && qlmanage -r
Pricing: Free (open source)
Sequel Pro is a fast, easy-to-use Mac database management application for working with MySQL databases.
brew cask install sequel-pro
Pricing: Free (open source)
Alternatives: MySQL Workbench, Navicat
Say goodbye to the command line – use the full capability of Git and Mercurial in the SourceTree desktop app. Manage all your repositories, hosted or local, through SourceTree's simple interface.
brew cask install sourcetree
Pricing: Free (proprietary)
Alternatives: Tower, Sprout, Gitbox
Move and resize windows with ease. Window control with simple, customizable keyboard shortcuts.
brew cask install spectacle
Pricing: Free (open source)
Alternatives: SizeUp, Divvy, Cinch, Slate
A sophisticated text editor for code, markup and prose. You'll love the slick user interface, extraordinary features and amazing performance.
brew cask install sublime-text
Pricing: Free Trial (unlimited w/ prompts), $70 (single license)
Alternatives: Brackets, TextMate, Coda, TextWrangler, Espresso
The Unarchiver is a small and easy to use program that can unarchive many different kinds of archive files. It will open common formats such as Zip, RAR, 7-zip, Tar, Gzip and Bzip2. It will also open many older formats, such as StuffIt, DiskDoubler, LZH, ARJ and ARC. It will even open other kinds of files, like ISO and BIN disc images, some Windows .EXE installers. The list is actually much longer - see the program homepage for the full list.
brew cask install the-unarchiver
Pricing: Free (open source)
Alternatives: BetterZip, WinZip
Development environments made easy. Create and configure lightweight, reproducible, and portable development environments.
brew cask install vagrant
Pricing: Free (open source)
VirtualBox is a powerful x86 and AMD64/Intel64 virtualization product for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2.
brew cask install virtualbox
Pricing: Free (open source)
Alternatives: Parallels Desktop, VMware Fusion
VLC is a free and open source cross-platform multimedia player and framework that plays most multimedia files as well as DVD, Audio CD, VCD, and various streaming protocols.
brew cask install vlc
Pricing: Free (open source)
Alternatives: MPlayerX
Xcode (& Command Line Tools)
Xcode is Apple's powerful integrated development environment for creating apps for Mac, iPhone, and iPad. Xcode includes the Instruments analysis tool, iOS Simulator, and the latest SDKs for iOS and OS X.
Pricing: Free (proprietary)
Work in Progress
GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages.
Pricing: Free (open source)
LibreOffice is a comprehensive, professional-quality productivity suite that you can download and install for free, with no fear of copyright infringement. There is a large base of satisfied LibreOffice users worldwide, and it is available in more than 30 languages and for all major operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and GNU/Linux.
Pricing: Free (open source)
PeaZip is a free Zip files utility, providing an unified, natively portable, cross-platform file and archive manager GUI for many Open Source technologies like 7-Zip, FreeArc, PAQ, UPX.
Pricing: Free (open source)
Shutter is a feature-rich screenshot program. You can take a screenshot of a specific area, window, your whole screen, or even of a website – apply different effects to it, draw on it to highlight points, and then upload to an image hosting site, all within one window.
Pricing: Free (open source)
A sophisticated text editor for code, markup and prose. You'll love the slick user interface, extraordinary features and amazing performance.
Pricing: Free Trial (unlimited w/ prompts), $70 (single license)
Synapse is a semantic launcher written in Vala that you can use to start applications as well as find and access relevant documents and files by making use of the Zeitgeist engine.
Pricing: Free (open source)
Terminator, multiple terminals in one window. The goal of this project is to produce a useful tool for arranging terminals. It is inspired by programs such as gnome-multi-term, quadkonsole, etc. in that the main focus is arranging terminals in grids (tabs is the most common default method, which Terminator also supports).
Pricing: Free (open source)
Thunderbird is a free email application that's easy to set up and customize - and it's loaded with great features!
Pricing: Free (open source)
Tomboy is a desktop note-taking application for Linux, Unix, Windows, and Mac OS X. Simple and easy to use, but with potential to help you organize the ideas and information you deal with every day.
Pricing: Free (open source)
Trillian is modern instant messaging for home and work that prioritizes chat interoperability and security.
Pricing: Free Trial (unlimited w/ ads), $12/yr (single license), or $48 lifetime (single license)
Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing. It is an improved version of the vi editor distributed with most UNIX systems. Vim is distributed free as charityware.
Pricing: Free (open source)
VirtualBox is a powerful x86 and AMD64/Intel64 virtualization product for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2.
Pricing: Free (open source)
VLC is a free and open source cross-platform multimedia player and framework that plays most multimedia files as well as DVD, Audio CD, VCD, and various streaming protocols.
Pricing: Free (open source)
Run Windows applications on Linux, BSD, Solaris and Mac OS X.
Pricing: Free (open source)
Adblock Plus blocks annoying ads on the web. It can block other things, like tracking, as well. With more than 50 million users, it is the world's most popular browser extension. Adblock Plus is an open source project created by Wladimir Palant in 2006. Eyeo was founded in 2011 by Wladimir Palant and Till Faida to make its development sustainable.
Pricing: Free (open source)
With Chromecast, you can easily enjoy your favorite online entertainment on your HDTV—movies, TV shows, music, and more from Netflix, YouTube, Hulu Plus, Google Play Movies and Music, and Chrome. No more huddling around small screens and tiny speakers. Chromecast automatically updates to work with a growing number of apps.
Download in Chrome Web Store | Purchase Device
Pricing: $35 Hardware, Free Software
From interests to research, save anything you see online—including text, links and images—into your Evernote account with a single click.
Pricing: Free (proprietary)
Open your GitHub notifications using shift + g, or with a "Visit Thread on Github" button in mail view.
Pricing: Free (open source)
Create new documents, spreadsheets, and presentations on your own or share and collaborate with others in real time. All your changes are saved automatically in Drive. There isn't even a save button.
Pricing: Free (proprietary)
Alternatives: Zoho Docs
With Keep you can quickly jot ideas down when you think of them and even include checklists and photos to keep track of what’s important to you. Your notes are safely stored in Google Drive and synced to all your devices so you can always have them at hand.
Pricing: Free (proprietary)
Postman is a powerful HTTP client to help test web services easily and efficiently. Postman let's you craft simple as well as complex HTTP requests quickly. It also saves requests for future use so that you never have to repeat your keystrokes ever again. Postman is designed to save you and your team tons of time.
Download in Chrome Web Store | Download Packaged App in Chrome Web Store
Pricing: Free (proprietary)
Change the appearance of websites instantly. Preview and install styles created by other users on stylebot.me. You pick an element and choose any changes you want to make from the editor. You can change the font, color, margins, visibility and a lot more. You can also write CSS manually.
VNC Viewer for Google Chrome displays the desktop of a remote computer within your web browser window, and lets you take control. You can run applications, change settings, access data, and use the keyboard and mouse exactly as you could were you sitting in front of that computer.
Pricing: Free (proprietary)
Have a question or need help? Tweet @thejameskyle.
As an open-source project, contributions are more than welcome, they're extremely helpful and actively encouraged. If you see any room for improvement, open an issue or submit a pull request. Also make sure to take a look at the contributing doc.
This project is provided under the terms of the MIT License.
React
Typescript
Django
Laravel
Facebook
Microsoft
Google
Alibaba
D3
Tencent