Rich's Tongfamily

Ok, happy New Year and it seems like looking for cool little apps time, some of the ones working for me are:

1. Rectangle. Well, I’ve used Divvy for a long time and it works but it is paid. I tried Hammerspoon, but it was hard to get what I really want which is dividing a big screen into 2 x 3 (perfect size for development). But, rectangle is a new open source thing based on Spectacle. It has defaults which use Ctrl-Option which works pretty well. For instance the defaults make mose sense which is Ctrl-Option-Enter is maximize. And they moved the 2 x 2 to Ctl-Option-u,i,j,k which is very vim like so I kept those. On the Anne Pro v2 keyboard, sadly it doesn’t like Ctrl-Option-Command which works fine with divvy so figure. But it would be nice to throw things from one display to another.
2. Cheatsheet. So since we are in keyboard shortcut land, how do you know all the shortcuts that are available. this is a nice application which a brew install cheatsheet to get it and if you hold the Command ⌘ key down, you get all the shortcuts for the application that’s in focus. For instance, in Safari, I didn’t know ⌘-Y shows history or that Option-Command-F gets you to the search bar at the top which Command-F gets you to search on the page. Useful stuff.
3. Equinox. OK, I don’t have time to do it, but you can make your own dynamic wall papers with this nice little application, so you can have morning at your home and evening for instance and it works. Of course it’s simpler just to download some and there are plenty of websites with Dynamic Wallpapers or get some space ones from Dynwalls.com for free.
4. Dozer. OK, you can pay for Bartender, but Dozer is open source and simpler, if a little obscure. With a brew install dozer you get two little dots in the menu bar. The one on the far right is the anchor point, the one on the far left, you Option key and then drag it to the left. Anything that is to the left of it will get hidden when you click on the right icon. It works best if you just leave the two icon together, then there is a dot at the end of the menu bar for when you want all the icons. This is really useful with the new “notch” in the MacBook Pro 2021 14″ as you can easily spill too many icons. Also as a clever aside, holding down the option key and then shift on any icon move it around. I find that this works best with changing the new System Preferences > Dock & Menu Bar, you can go through each item and decide does it live in the control center or does it live in the menu bar. Before Dozer, I had to have things like the bluetooth connection two clicks down in the control center, now I can click on the Dozer button and when on a big screen see everything. It does seems a little unstable so I had to reinstall it to get it to work
5. Flycut. Normally when you copy and paste, you lose the item in the clipboard, but this gives you a clipboard history, you with a Shift-Command-V which is pretty handy. Note that unlike many applications, it doesn’t appear in System Preferences > Privacy & Security > Accessibility, you need to click on the + icon and add it for it to work. Also turn on the password detection so you don’t get passwords sprayed everywhere.
6. Battery Health. Yes it is nagware, but nothing else makes it so age and number of cycles on your battery. Note that you want to leave your battery at max charge 80% and discharge it down to about 40% for maximum life.
7. Al Dente. The open source version is good of enough for most people, but the key feature is not to charge to 100% unless you are really traveling. MacOS does have its own more basic battery manager, but I find it goes to 100% way too much and on this ultra long battery M1 Mac Pro, you don’t need it (as long as you don’t use powerhogs like Chrome 🙂
8. Stats (or trusty old Menu Meters). I’ve used this forever, but it is only getting minimal fixes, so this new ones looks way nicer.
9. MonitorControl. This means you don’t have to find those monitor controls, you can do it all in software on the menubar.