Mac

I switched from Windows to Mac in 2021 for personal use, then for work in 2022. The transition improved my development workflow significantly.

Mac includes many features I don’t use regularly. Hot corners occasionally interrupt my workflow when triggered accidentally.

Apps

Alfred

Tomatobar

A toolbar app for Pomodoro technique sessions.

Rectangle

Window management tool. I use it with Karabiner for keyboard-driven window resizing and positioning. I have four hotkey combinations configured.

Bear

Markdown editor with a clean interface. I used it as an alternative to Obsidian for focused writing sessions. The freemium model limits PDF export quality.

I switched to using only Obsidian for consistency. The Hemingway App offers similar focused writing features.

Karabiner

Obsidian

Links

• Mac Command Line Tools
• ShortCat - Keyboard navigation for Mac apps
• HN: Setting Up a New Mac
• Mac Automation Course - Paid course for Mac automation. I used this to automate repetitive tasks.

Thoughts

M-series chips provide sufficient performance for most tasks. MacBook Air performance matches MacBook Pro for data science work, as machine learning training has moved to cloud platforms.

Outlook for Mac lacks features compared to the Windows version. This applies to most Microsoft applications on Mac.