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Unstopable macOS toolkit that will make you work 10x faster

Unleashing Your macOS Potential

In this blog post I will cover all the apps that I and many other developers and mac power users, use in order to work much faster without having to reach for the mouse or think about what you are doing. The goal here is to make your machine an extension of your mind, where you can think of a task and it just happens, instantly and without friction. This means maximizing keyboard use, minimizing context switching, and automating as much as possible.

Apps for Everyone

These are the essential tools that anyone on macOS can use to drastically improve their workflow and get closer to that coveted "speed of thought" ideal.

  • Homerow or Shorcut: These apps are almost direct mouse replacements, allowing you to click *anywhere- on your screen with just your keyboard. They overlay hints (letters or numbers) on clickable elements, letting you trigger them with a keypress. They also allow you to fuzzy search for an element that you want to click on. This completely eliminates the need to reach for your mouse, keeping your hands on the keyboard and your focus uninterrupted.
  • Raycast or Alfred: These are your command centers that go far beyond macOS's built-in Spotlight. They are powerful launchers that let you open apps, search the web, perform calculations, manage snippets, run scripts, control your system, and so much more, all from a single keyboard shortcut. By centralizing these actions, you eliminate searching through menus or clicking icons, allowing you to instantly access whatever you need, when you need it. They also allow you to add or code your own extensions, this will allow you to automate and customize your system to help you work faster.
  • Yabai or Aerospace: These are both tiling window managers that eliminate the mess of overlapping rectangles and tons of drags and clicks. They automatically arrange and snap windows when they open into a clean, organized grid, ensuring every application has its designated space. This predictability reduces cognitive load and allows you to switch between tasks seamlessly. They also are very configurable and allow you to use keyboard shortcuts to navigate, resize, move all your windows as fast as possible.
  • Comet Browser or Dia Browser: Since bowsers are where many of us spend a huge chunk of our time, it makes sense to pick on that helps you and reduces the most amount of friction as possible. Traditional browsers are built for mouse interaction, but AI browsers are designed to integrate intelligence and keyboard-first navigation into your web experience. They can help you summarize pages, answer questions, and sometimes even navigate with smarter shortcuts, streamlining your information consumption and interaction with the web.
  • Vimium or Surfingkeys Browser Extension: Even if you don't use a specialized AI browser, extensions like *Vimium- or *Surfingkeys- for Chrome (and other browsers) bring powerful keyboard navigation to *any- website. They allow you to scroll, click links, open tabs, and search without ever touching your mouse. This extends the "no-click principle" directly into your web browsing, ensuring your flow state remains unbroken no matter what site you're on.
  • Super Whisper: Sometimes, typing isn't the fastest way to get your thoughts down, or your hands are busy. This tool leverages super quick AI for dictation, allowing you to speak naturally and have your words accurately transcribed into any application. This is especially powerful for brainstorming, drafting long emails, or capturing ideas when your hands are occupied, adding another layer of "speed of thought" input.
  • Shottr: Its a lightweight, powerful screenshot tool that lets you quickly capture, instantly edit (blur, highlight, add text), and copy your screenshots with minimal effort, eliminating the time sink of frequently needing to capture, annotate, or copy parts of your screen. It streamlines the entire process, making visual communication and documentation much faster.
  • Karabiner Elements: This is the ultimate tool for customizing what your keyboard can do on macOS. It allows you to remap keys, create complex keybindings, and even modify how modifier keys behave. This means you can tailor your keyboard exactly to your preferences, making it a truly personalized "weapon of choice" that enhances your speed and reduces strain. It also lets you run terminal commands and shortcuts that normally require a lot of steps to do, all with one keyboard shortcut (I use it for making the arrow keys more accessible and helping me open apps that I use frequently in one stroke).

Apps for Programmers

For developers, the quest for speed and efficiency is even more critical. These tools take the core principles of keyboard-driven workflow and apply them directly to coding and terminal environments.

  • Warp: It is an AI-powered terminal that redefines the programmer's home experience. It offers modern features like AI command suggestions, intelligent auto-completions, and a block-based interface, making your command-line interactions faster and more intuitive. It’s like having an intelligent assistant built right into your shell.
  • Cursor/ AI powered coding tools: *Cursor- (or similar AI-native IDEs) integrates large language models directly into your coding environment, offering intelligent code completion, refactoring suggestions, and even generating entire apps/ scripts from natural language prompts, dramatically accelerating development. This offloads repetitive tasks, suggests optimal solutions, and allows you to focus on actually building the app instead of spending hours trawling Stack Overflow for that one stubborn bug.
  • Zed or Neovim: Both are super lightweight yet powerful editors for quick edits, scripting, or focused coding. *Zed- is a modern, high-performance editor built for speed and collaborative coding. *Neovim- is a highly configurable, terminal-based editor known for its incredible efficiency once mastered, allowing you to manipulate code at the speed of thought purely with keyboard commands.

Terminal/ Cli tools

  • Homebrew: It is an essential package manager for macOS, allowing you to easily install, update, and manage a vast array of command-line tools and applications, making it the foundation for many of the tools listed here and dramatically simplifying your setup.
  • Zoxide: It is a smart cd command that learns your most frequently visited directories and allows you to jump to them with just a few keystrokes, eliminating tedious path typing.
  • FZF: It is a blazing-fast command-line fuzzy finder you can use to quickly search for files, command history, processes, or anything else, making navigation and data retrieval incredibly efficient.
  • Yazi, NNN, Ranger, etc. (Terminal File Managers): While graphical file explorers force you to break your flow and reach for the mouse, these powerful terminal file managers give you complete, keyboard-driven control over your file system. Browse, copy, move, delete, and organize your files with lightning-fast commands, all without ever leaving your terminal. They eliminate the friction of traditional file management, ensuring your hands stay on the keyboard and your focus remains uninterrupted, truly allowing you to manage your projects at the speed of thought.

The overarching idea behind all these tools, whether you're a developer or just a power user, is to eliminate friction between your thoughts and your actions on the computer. It's about empowering you to work at the speed of thought, reducing the time and cognitive load of interacting with your machine. No matter what apps you choose to use and what system that you are on, the core principle remains: prioritize keyboard control, automate repetitive tasks, and strive to keep your hands on the keyboard and your mind in the flow. Your keyboard is your weapon of choice, and with the right toolkit, you can make your macOS environment truly unstoppable.