I wanted to write a short article since I've had to setup a few Macs for myself lately. This is mostly for future Liam to be able to remember what to put on my computers but I love talking about tools I love so here we go.
Productivity
Starting off we've got some pretty standard productivity tools:
Notion - I've been using notion for the last 5ish years first for school and now for work and personal stuff. It's a great tool to organize your life with and any text heavy content.
Notion Calendar - Cron (now Notion Calendar) is an amazing tool. Some highlights include minute-before meeting notifications with the meeting link accessible in the notification (literally never miss a meeting again), a super nice mobile experience, and many more.
Helium - I was on Dia for a little bit but Helium is so great in that it gets out of the way. Dia tries a little too hard to put you in an AI chat when Google is often 10x better for super simple searches.
Paper - I'm not doing as much heavy design work, but Paper is incredible.
Raycast - Probably should be the first thing on this list but Raycast is the best. Some of my favorite feature include custom keybinds for Spotify controls (next/prev track and pause/play without having to use the pretty bad default Mac media control keys).
Magnet - I use Magnet for window management. There are probably better free alternatives (even Raycast) but I have the keyboard shortcuts burned into my brain.
Spotify - Music. Just music.
Zoom - For talking to other humans with my voice and face.
Google Drive - My go to for cloud storage.
Dev
Agents - I use the standards: Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and Opencode (probably in that order of usage, Grok 4.6 is really good so far)
TS Tooling - Bun, NVM, Node
Tableplus - I have yet to see a better DB client. It's such a great tool.
Tailscale - Starting to get my feet wet more with Tailscale. Seemingly going to become more and more important with agents.
Zed - The best editor. I was VSCode pilled for a long time and could never go back now that I've used Zed.
Ghostty - It's a good terminal
Docker
Conductor - My absolute favorite local dev app. Super fun to rip agents all day long.
Ngrok - Local tunneling, mostly for webhook related stuff.
oh-my-zsh - For nice terminal prompts
Github CLI - Pretty much non-negotiable for coding agents.
Homebrew - Packages and things