我每天都會用的 5 款 Mac 應用程式

I'm a developer. My Mac is open from the moment I wake up until I close the lid at night, and over the years a short list of apps has stayed open the whole time. Not the ones I installed once and forgot. The ones I'd reinstall first on a new machine.

Here are the five. Two are free, three are one-time purchases, and none of them is a subscription. Nothing annoys me more than a "cheap apps" list where everything turns out to be $20 a month.

1. Raycast

Raycast replaced Spotlight for me on day one. Same hotkey, same idea, far more behind it.

Launch apps, open files, do quick math, convert units. Clipboard history, so everything you copied today is one keystroke away. Window management without a separate app. And hundreds of extensions: translate text, search GitHub, pick an emoji, control Spotify.

The free version has everything I listed. Raycast Pro adds AI features and cloud sync, and I've never needed it.

Price: free, Pro is paid. raycast.com

2. Halo

Halo turns the MacBook notch into something like the iPhone's Dynamic Island. Play music and the notch shows the cover, the title and the lyrics. Change the volume and it shows the level. Plug in an external monitor and you get an island there too, so the feature isn't tied to the notch at all.

The part I use most is the shelf: drag a file into the island, carry on with whatever you're doing, and grab it later from any app. It's a drop zone that follows you.

It's made by one indie developer, and it's the first thing I notice is missing when I sit at someone else's Mac.

Price: $9.99 one-time, no subscription, macOS 15 or later. halo-mac.com

3. CleanShot X

The screenshot tool macOS should have shipped with.

Take a screenshot and it lands in a small overlay in the corner where you can annotate, blur, crop and copy it before it ever touches your desktop. Record the screen as a video or a GIF. Capture a whole scrolling page in one image.

Every screenshot in my support emails, changelogs and tweets goes through CleanShot. If you take more than two screenshots a day, it pays for itself in a week.

Price: $35 one-time, with a year of updates. cleanshot.com

4. Shedi

Shedi finds what's eating your disk and explains every item. Developer Macs fill up in ways that macOS's own Storage pane never shows: Xcode's DerivedData and old simulators, Docker's disk image, a node_modules folder in every project you cloned two years ago, and caches for npm, pnpm, Homebrew, pip, Cargo and Gradle.

Shedi scans those, tells you in plain words what each item is and whether it's safe to remove, and moves everything to the Trash first. Nothing is deleted outright, so a wrong click is undone with a right click.

I found it after my 512 GB Mac hit "disk full" and the usual cleaner apps couldn't tell me what a 21 GB folder in ~/Library/Developer was. Now I run it on the first of every month.

Price: $19.99 one-time for one Mac, $27.99 for two, no account, 14-day refund. The launch code EARLY10 takes $10 off at checkout. shedi.app

5. Ice

Ice hides the menu bar icons you don't need.

If you run more than a handful of menu bar apps on a MacBook, some of their icons disappear behind the notch and there's no way to reach them. Ice brings them back: it puts the icons you rarely use in a hidden section and shows them when you click or hover. Your menu bar ends up with the four icons you actually look at.

It's open source and free, and it does the one thing Bartender charges for.

Price: free. icemenubar.app

That's the list

Five apps, $64.98 in total if you buy all three paid ones at full price. Every one of them is open right now as I write this.

If you have a sixth that belongs here, tell me in the comments. I'm always looking for the next one.