twenty-four things tagged “utilities”
Mousecape is a Cursor Manager for macOS
Good old-school fun. I miss being able to theme OS X. How much fun is this? I hope Apple doesn’t bork whatever makes this work.
Keka, an Unarchiver for macOS
Because The Unarchiver now shows fucking ads.
Yes, I am complaining about a free thing. I have zero problem paying for the application and/or for the ads to go away. We drown in enough shit as it is. Does make me think why I need a separate unarchiver… perhaps for RAR files?
Navidrome is a free, open-source music player with a web UI
Here’s a demo site (demo:demo). I was able to launch it in under 30 seconds (M2 MacBook Air, 24GiB) against a ~200GiB music library.
UX and beets integration aside, it’s essentially what I tried to build a long while ago. A simple music player (based on Rust/Golang, SQLite, and simple Web APIs) whose UI made sense to normal and reasonable people and not ambitious product managers.
hidutil key remapping generator for macOS
I use the excellent Karabiner for my keyboard but this appears to be a more ‘native’ solution. Here’s a copy of the repository.
CASCII is a lovely ASCII editor for the browser
And it’s a single file! I’ve cached it here. This is a lite version of one of my favorite apps, the excellent (and surprisingly cheap) MonoDraw for macOS.
Tart lets you run VMs on macOS
Very cool. More CLI than UTM. Another is Lima.
BatFi gives you full control over how your Mac laptop is charged
You can use System Settings -> Battery -> Battery Health -> Info Icon to toggle this “ML” approach where macOS (and the developers who know more than you about how to care for your Mac) will handle this for you but I’ve never gotten it to work as expected despite docking my laptop repeatedly, and for half the day, over a year.
You can buy it on Gumroad or here’s a download link.
TmpDisk - RamDisk UI for macOS
Here’s a Github Gist for a CLI option that uses diskutil.
Cowsay! 🐮
I love me my cowsay. It’s a lovely amusement that greets me every time I open a terminal session. People typically use it with the fortune command but my cow moos a random developer excuse. I generate that using this bash function and this invocation: command -v cowsay >/dev/null 2>&1…
OpenCore Legacy Patcher allows you to run the latest macOS (Monterey) on your old Macs
For day-to-day things, a 10-year old MacBook Air is perfectly adequate (except, maybe, if you’re trying to read an article on the Des Moines Register’s or KCCI’s websites without using a PiHole…)…
pup is a delightful little command-line utility that lets you parse HTML
Think jq but for HTML/DOM. If you wanted to get all the post titles on this log, curl -s -o - https://log.nikhil.io/ | gunzip - | pup "header > h2 > a" text{} Lovely stuff.…
“entr” provides a nice interface to inotify
Saved me a ton of time with small project I’m working on right now. Looks like it’s written in C.…
“Got Your Back” will back up your Gmail inbox to your computer.
I’ve been nearing capacity for a while and this is a Godsend.…
Docsify is a Markdown-based documentation generator.
It’s very simple and clever. This is an example of what’s rendered from this giant Markdown file 💙…
FlameShot just might be the ultimate screenshotting utility.
No macOS love though 😔…
Single-binary Compilers for Node
Nexe and pkg are two compilers that create self-contained executables out of your Node scripts. Deno introduced this in a recent release, which got me looking for Node-based alternatives.…
Tesseract is an Open-Source OCR Engine
Here’s a short overview but I found it as easy as brew install tesseract # See output.txt tesseract -l eng input.png output…
Hazel for macOS is an automation tool that lets you watch folders and apply all sorts of rules to them.
By a single dev. At $42, an absolute steal for all the things you can do with it. Perpetual license, no bullshit subscription model. 😍…
gron is a JSON grepper
Woo! Covers the biggest reason why I use jq (grep for fields) which, as the gron author notes, is more general-purpose and takes a little more effort to understand and use.…
LiteCLI is a command-line client for SQLite
And a delightful tool I use almost every week for its auto-completion and syntax highlighting,