LinearMouse is an absolute requirement if I am plugging a mouse into macOS. I’m a huge Apple fanboy but the built in acceleration curve is absolutely maddening.

LinearMouse is an absolute requirement if I am plugging a mouse into macOS. I’m a huge Apple fanboy but the built in acceleration curve is absolutely maddening. Natural scroll direction also makes sense to me on a touchpad, but not a wheel. This program lets you keep the incredible touchpad experience while only changing scroll direction and acceleration curve on a mouse. It also enables universal back/forward with the side buttons. Hyperkey turns caps lock into a modifier key (ctrl+alt+cmd) when held and keeps it as caps lock when tapped. I use this with Moom for my window management shortcuts. I still find Alfred is better than Spotlight, which I bind to Cmd+Space and use for launching applications, and a lot of other miscellaneous things like locking the computer, shutting down, reboot, easy access calculator, finding files, etc. I’ve switched to Safari pretty much full time, because Apple Pay and the integration with iMessage for SMS login codes is worth it on top of the better battery life. The AdGuard extension works pretty well for ad blocking, and the only other extensions I have are 1Password and DarkReader. It’s not always a smooth experience but I put up with that out of protest against the Chrome monopoly. iTerm 2 with Fish makes for quite a smooth shell experience. Little Snitch for managing what my applications do. Can be useful for blocking native app product analytics network calls. Takes a couple weeks of nagging popups before you get it into good shape. Bartender keeps task bar under control. I can click the taskbar and it shows my less frequently used applications, and most of the time I just have a minimal set of icons visible. Sublime Merge when I want visual Git. JetBrains across the board for IDEs. VS Code when I’m using a language without good JetBrains support. I recently started using MailMate for email and am enjoying it so far. In system preferences I disable most of the built in, not useful keyboard shortcuts, never allow notifications from any application that isn’t a communication platform, remove all apps from dock and autohide it, enable auto dark mode and night shift, disable hot corners, and disable whatever Apple’s latest attempt at making me want to use widgets is (Dashboard, Notification Center, Stage Manager and now this annoying click desktop to hide all windows nonsense) At the end I have a mostly minimal but efficient desktop experience with a keyboard driven workflow, reduced distractions and good battery life.