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Comment by alpb | Hacker News Reader

Projects like these should be celebrated through donations and this project makes it easy. When’s the last time you’ve seen freeware developer tool for macOS that’s not from a corporation with money to spare?

I personally can’t think of anything beyond iTerm (utility), Homebrew (utility), ...aaand that's where my list ends.

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Fork is a great Git GUI with a very "Mac-like" interface (also available for Windows): https://git-fork.com

I use it for some git operations when I would be slower on the command line, and I can highly recommend it. The UI is very polished! Bonus: I can open it from the command line with a simple "fork" command.

Thanks! I will try that over SourceTree! Do you know how it compares? Especially with other clients like Kraken / Tower?

I haven't really used any of the other clients long enough to give you a solid answer.

For me, Fork just works, I can scroll through the commits easily, file trees are available as a tab for each commit. The UI is very easy to use and discoverable, that's why I like it.

You should also give Sublime Merge a go. I'm mostly a CLI git user, but Sublime Merge is so lightweight (and intuitive to someone who knows git), it's had me using it quite a bit.

That looks really good! Thanks for sharing it.

I don't think that freeware is really a part of the Apple Developer ecosystem. Most of the MacOS exclusive software I use on a daily basis costs $20-$30, a price I'm more than willing to pay for software like Pixelmator, DaisyDisk and Alfred that is significantly more polished (and Mac-ish) then the average piece of open-source software just due to the resources available to them.

It used to be though. I think the freeware culture slowly moved away at 10.5 or so. Maybe that was accelerated by the app store release in 10.6.

Quicksilver, while at the time a terrible mess in terms of the code is basically the forefather of all these launchers.

Apple also removed a lot of the MacOS APIs that allowed you to mod system components (e.g. input managers) around the same time.

I think that's just because the software landscape matured in general. More people use apps, more developer make a real business out of it instead of tinkering in their free time. A few years ago people around me would look at me weirdly for paying for apps for a phone. Now it's normal that you pay for some apps and subscriptions on a monthly basis.

most of the things i use for development on windows/linux are open source by comparison whereas buying a macbook led me to spend 200 bucks on utilities. definitely feels like an apple tax

It’s a user experience tax, I think. Most utilities on a Mac are a pure joy to use, well-maintained, and integrate terrifically with the OS.

If you didn’t care about user experience (or didn’t think it was better) and just wanted to save money, why would you ever get a Mac anyway?

I disagree with this strongly. While it is the case in some instances, on macOS you often have to pay for the most basic of utilities, quality of life improvements, stuff like better window snapping and unarchivers etc. Things that are no worse on Linux. You even have to pay for a decent file manager on macOS and it usually still doesn't come close to Dolphin, which is a pure joy to use on Linux, while still being free software.

I think it's more to do with the (lack of) ideology when it comes to macOS developers, as in, they don't feel strongly about advancing free software etc. even if they grew up on it, they see software development as a job like any other, to make money from and nothing more. Am not saying it's an illegitimate view, but dressing it otherwise is I think not accurate.

This is exaggeration. You're overselling linux but underselling macOS. It's not terrific in every aspect (window snapping being one) but you don't have to pay for every basic utilities on mac. Finder is reasonable. Preview supports a lot of file formats and even allows PDF stitching (few platforms support this out of the box). Keka is a free unarchiver for macOS. Karabiner is a free tool for remapping keyboard keys. Homebrew. iTerm. IINA. Compared to Windows, macOS support a lot more out of the box.

> You even have to pay for a decent file manager on macOS and it usually still doesn't come close to Dolphin, which is a pure joy to use on Linux,

You're conflating expectations. A vast majority of people are using the file manager for basic stuff. Not everyone needs a feature packed one for day to day operations. If they need one, Commander One is free.

> (lack of) ideology when it comes to macOS developers, as in, they don't feel strongly about advancing free software etc.

This is cynical. I see plenty of developers on mac or developing for mac using it to contribute to open source projects. Just because it's not translating into free and open source consumer-facing projects on macOS does not imply that devs do not care about open source. In fact most of the important projects put instructions for developing on and for macOS first.

From what I've seen, people on macOS are mostly paying for software like BetterTouchTool, Alfred, Keyboard Maestro, Hazel, Carbon Copy Cloner, Ulysses. Software which extends the core OS in a set of ways fitting a myriad set of needs - not for basic stuff. Few of these have convenient or easy to use alternatives on other platforms. People are paying for options, convenience and polish.

> You're overselling linux but underselling macOS.

I use both platforms daily and while I agree that macOS has more 'polish' in terms of being more uniform, I don't think am overselling that there are many tools on Linux for which I have to pay on macOS to get similar capabilities.

> You're conflating expectations. A vast majority of people are using the file manager for basic stuff.

Right and there are many basic file managers for Linux too, but there are also advanced ones that you don't have to pay for, which was my point.

> Finder is reasonable.

Agree to disagree.

> I see plenty of developers on mac or developing for mac using it to contribute to open source projects. Just because it's not translating into free and open source consumer-facing projects on macOS does not imply that devs do not care about open source.

Perhaps I worded this poorly, but I meant macOS developers as in Swift/ObjC/Cocoa, not developers in general who happen to be using a Mac. So yes, I meant those developing customer-facing software specific to the platform, not say webdevs on a Mac. There's many open-source libraries sure, but that's because of convenience. When it comes to customer-facing apps, it is nowhere near Linux level and given the many more devs on the platform that speaks for something.

> From what I've seen, people on macOS are mostly paying for software like BetterTouchTool, Alfred, Keyboard Maestro, Hazel, Carbon Copy Cloner, Ulysses.

Right, and my point is that on Linux utilities akin to BetterSnapTool, Alfred, Keyboard Maestro tend to be free software and not particularly worse in terms of polish.

I see some convenience value in a tool like Ulysses, even if Org-mode could be used to achieve similar results, I don't see the value in utilities like BetterSnapTool and PDF Expert, since there's no extra polish that's not available on Linux as free software.

LauchBar created in 1996 for NeXT pre-dates both QuickSliver and Mac OS X. LaunchBar was one of the first utilities I installed on the OS X beta and originated the use of cmd-space as the launcher shortcut

I still use qs!

A few on here https://github.com/jaywcjlove/awesome-mac

I just like that Sequel Pro isn't electron based like so many dev tools are these days.

I share the feeling. I'd just like to add IINA [1] to the list, it's an excellent video player and I use it daily.

[1] https://iina.io/

I have used iina myself. I was very fond of smplayer in linux and windows and iina is very similar in a lot of ways. I like to drag forward with keyboard shortcut and iina/mpv does that well. VLC makes a screeching sound with each drag. And per file position reminder is fabulous for breaks in watching a media.

Unfortunately the last pre 1.0 was giving error from Cylance on libuchardet.0.dylib. Anyone has any idea on that?

Agreed! It also has youtube-dl built in so you can stream twitch/youtube videos in it pretty easily.

I'm way more inclined to use something on a daily basis that I pay for to be honest as this means I have some kind of influence on how long the project will be around that I incorporate in my workflow. At least a little bit more than if I use a free product.

I don't mind paying for quality software and I think a lot macOS users feel the same way.

To be fair, you can usually donate to free software as well, it's just that people seem to be less inclined to do so vs straight up paying for a proprietary one, sadly.

If you're talking strictly developer tools, I have GitUp and Hex Fiend in my Dock right now. If you stray out further into productivity tools, I have Hammerspoon, Jumpcut, Karabiner-Elements off the top of my head; on the command-line side MacPorts brings me many cross-platform tools.

I was going to mention macports. As an aside, I still don't understand why folks suddenly decided homebrew was "it", when macports already does the job so we'll.

Unclutter is also good for clipboard manager as well as taking a quick memo that doesn't get in the way.

cyberduck, iina, adium, notational velocity, divvy, hex fiend, keka, xee, unicodechecker, textual, …

That's just a subset of what I saw scanning my /Applications, and I don't specifically look out for replacing existing software with free (whether freedom or beer) applications.

Adium is basically abandoned and cyberduck has always been a clusterfuck by virtue of being a Java app. As such the UX is terrible. If I'd paid for either I'd want my money back.

> divvy, textual

Neither of these are freeware?

Textual is open source https://github.com/Codeux-Software/Textual

Mac's third party app lineup is just so much better than Windows in my opinion, I don't care what OS to use but not going to leave Mac because of them.

Windows culture of free but mediocre or good but bloated and expensive never really hits the right spot.

Projects like these should be celebrated with license fees.

I don't see many MacOS-specific developer tools in general. Command line tools are portable, at least between Unices, and often even beyond that. Going back to the MPW...

Nowadays even IDEs aren't platform-specific anymore, more often than not.

I would put GitX in the top of my list. Best Git GUI IMHO, and it’s the piece of software I miss the most when I’m on windows.

Another that comes to mind is Transmission.

macvim and macports come to mind. But I guess the "developer tools" space is pretty restricted anyway, most of it is editors and command line stuff (compilers, interpreters etc) which is often free in this era.

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