from Hacker News

Power user replacements for OS X default apps

by subelsky on 1/27/11, 1:09 PM with 170 comments

  • by generalk on 1/27/11, 2:24 PM

    I love my Macbook Pro -- best laptop I've ever owned. I even love OS X in that, for the most part, everything works without issue. But articles like this make me wonder why I shouldn't switch back to Ubuntu.

    TFA mentions the following software that runs just fine on Linux:

      * Chrome
  * Dropbox
  * Google Services
  * Crashplan
  * LastPass
  * Google Calendar 
  * VLC
    Some software doesn't run under Linux but has perfectly capable replacements:

      * Adium: Pidgin
  * TextWrangler/BBEdit: GEdit, Emacs, Vim
  * Mail.app replacements: GMail's web interface 
  replaced these long ago.
  * Evernote: Can be used via the limited web 
  interface.
    Some of them are even commercial replacements for features that most Linux desktops have had forever:

      * iStat Menus (which I bought)
  * Witch window switcher
  * HyperSpaces

  • by siddhant on 1/27/11, 3:22 PM

    You must go through this list - http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/82/os-x-application...

    Infact, most of the questions on http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions?sort=votes are worth checking out. It'll make life a lot easier (at least it made mine).

    The whole eco system of applications on the Mac makes me think that switching over from an ArchLinux box to a Macbook Pro was one of the best decisions I ever made.

  • by stuhacking on 1/27/11, 1:31 PM

    Is a power user now someone who needs all their documents synced using some cloud service?

    Aside from using Chrome, Quicksilver and Emacs, I find most of the other listed OS X defaults to be perfectly adequate for my needs. I'll handle my own replication and backups, thanks.

  • by pflats on 1/27/11, 3:48 PM

    Rather than replace Quicktime with VLC, you're much better off, in my opinion, installing the Perian plugin. It runs almost everything: http://www.perian.org

    I suppose I've also technically "replaced" my dock and Spotlight search with Launchbar, which gives you, essentially, an Apple-fied version of a command line. Hitting a shortcut (cmd-space for me) opens the app, and it auto-completes application names and common OS tasks for you. Quicksilver is an FOSS alternative that does much of the same.

    Launchbar: http://www.obdev.at/products/launchbar/

    Quicksilver: https://github.com/tiennou/blacktree-alchemy

    Finally, not a replacement, but anyone who runs Boot Camp or anything similar owes it to themselves to install NTFS-3G, to read and write to NTFS partitions: http://macntfs-3g.blogspot.com/

    edit: Fixed a bit of formatting. Also, saw a few of these were already mentioned (at least in passing) while I was putting my reply together. Sorry about the repeats.

  • by program on 1/27/11, 1:37 PM

    A Power User that doesn't replace "Archive Utility.app" with The Unarchiver?

    http://wakaba.c3.cx/s/apps/unarchiver.html

  • by ams6110 on 1/27/11, 2:59 PM

    I use: Emacs for editing/coding, mail, chat, task management, and calendar; Terminal for file system manipulation; Safari for browsing, though Chrome is nice too; Preview seems fine for PDFs.

    Not much else on a daily basis.

  • by woid on 1/27/11, 2:05 PM

    what about TotalFinder? (warning: I'm the author, but I would still vote for it :-) http://totalfinder.binaryage.com

  • by JonnieCache on 1/27/11, 2:37 PM

    Anyone looking for a simple, (open!) osx music player that just has a playlist you can drop folders onto and nothing else, check out Cog.

    http://cogx.org/

    Also, Path Finder, a finder replacement in the vain of Directory Opus on windows. It has tabs, split windows, everything you would expect. It also has command line integration and a built in hex viewer/edtior. The only thing I've ever wanted for is regex-based filtering of listings, but I can cope without that.

    http://cocoatech.com/

    I would go mad without this. Finder sucks.

    EDIT: And how could I forget springy, an archiver that lets me double click on archives and actually lets me browse them in their own windows and selectively extract from them, rather than instantaneously spurting files everywhere like every other OS X archiver seems to do.

    http://www.springyarchiver.com/

    It took me over a year just to find an OS X archiver that behaves like ones on other platforms. It seems mac devs are a little obsessed by mimicking the default apple workflow.

  • by tialys on 1/27/11, 1:31 PM

    Gmail only (for the time being), but Sparrow has become my new mail app of choice.

    http://www.sparrowmailapp.com/

  • by pak on 1/27/11, 7:01 PM

    The best "power replacement" for anything on OS X is not an app, it's a piece of hardware: an SSD. If you still have a hard drive, go get an SSD replacement--it makes a world of difference for OS X performance. I couldn't imagine going back. I see some people in this thread talking about how this or that is slow and I can bet that for most of them, a $200 SSD would change everything.

  • by ams6110 on 1/27/11, 2:55 PM

    I don't find that VLC is a good replacement for Quicktime Player. I often have problems with VLC playing audio streams (frequent rebuffering, often freezing up completely), whereas Quicktime will play the same stream faultlessly.

    Edit: I do use VLC though, it's great for other things, just doesn't replace Quicktime for me.

  • by vault_ on 1/27/11, 3:46 PM

    If you think that VLC is a good Quicktime alternative you should try out mplayer. There's an awesome Mac gui for it called MPlayer OSX Extended (http://www.mplayerosx.ch/). It's a lot more streamlined and will play at least everything that VLC does.

  • by oscardelben on 1/27/11, 1:37 PM

    I think it comes down to personal preferences.

    I've tried several times to switch to Chrome, but for me Safari is better. For example I like how I can access bookmarks from hotkeys.

    Same for textedit and terminal, I can't think of any reason to switch, and I've tried several alternatives.

  • by mcmatterson on 1/27/11, 3:28 PM

    I maintain a list of the apps I use (and a list of must not use apps) at

    http://www.longbeard.org/static/macapps.html

  • by speleding on 1/27/11, 3:19 PM

    Perhaps I'm not enough of a power user since I'm quite happy with most OS X apps, but there are two replacements I can recommend:

    - Spell catcher to replace the built in spell checking

    - Divvy for window management

  • by stcredzero on 1/27/11, 3:15 PM

    For a text editor on OS X, look at SubEthaEdit. It looks and behaves a lot like XCode, probably because it uses the same Cocoa libraries as XCode. It has code folding that works well, even in Python, and you can even have selections processed by by external commands.

    If you need to open a ridiculously large log file, there's also gedit. On OS X, it looks ugly and awkward, but it gets the job done on 500 megabyte files where even AquaMacs and TextMate fall down.

  • by m0shen on 1/27/11, 4:29 PM

    Some additions:

      Xee                  - A fast image viewer
  The Unarchiver       - Extracts everything, with some nice options
  MPlayer OSX Extended - Another great media player
  KeePassX             - Open source password manager
  Burn                 - Alternative image/file burning utility
  Disk Inventory X     - Disk space visualization
  muCommander          - An advanced file manager

  • by kayoone on 1/27/11, 6:45 PM

    Every few month i get the feeling of trying out linux again on some machine. Had a MSI Wind U100 netbook lying around and got the latest Ubuntu 10.10 netbook edition because i thought the netbook is pretty old now and stuff should work with the latest ubuntu. It didnt.

    While ubuntu was running fine i had problems with the wifi waking up after hibernate/sleep which always forced me to reboot to use wifi again. Googling revealed some people having similar issues, stating that it worked fine under 10.04 but now unter 10.10 it doesnt. I thought minor releases were ment to fix bugs, not create new ones. People on the ubuntu forums suggested trying the windows wifi drivers through ndiswra...nope, i wont start fiddling with stuff like that for hours on end again to get basic functionality working. Power management also was worse than on windows... i didnt even try to get bluetooth to work and installed win xp sp3 on it... Sorry Linux, it didnt work out this year, again :/

  • by exasecond on 1/27/11, 5:19 PM

    One really useful program that replaces various things in MacOS X is Keyboard Maestro (http://www.keyboardmaestro.com/). It's a way of getting your keyboard to control more things on your system - from triggering abbreviations that expand into words or phrases, to starting or controlling other applications. These abbreviations can run shell scripts too. It's considerably better than Automator, I think.

    I particularly like and use the web triggers (which let you access the KM engine using the built-in web server) and the iPhone app (free) which you can use to control your Mac from other locations. It makes a killer remote control too...

  • by ams6110 on 1/27/11, 3:17 PM

    Some other keyboard shortcuts:

    In Safari, alt-tab switches focus to the next control; tab normally just switches to the next input element.

    In Expose (F3), cmd-tab cycles apps; limits the Expose view to that app's windows. Arrows select a window, <return> then brings that window in focus.

    In Expose, cmd-` cycles apps, limits Expose view to that app. Similar to above but you don't see the App icons overlay on the screen; they are instead highlighted on the Dock and the switching happens immediately.

    To activate Spaces view, F8 by default but that launches iTunes on my MacBook. I remapped mine to F6 in the System Preferences. Then arrow keys select a space.

  • by ludwigvan on 1/27/11, 4:36 PM

    Two small additions:

        * cdto: "Fast mini application that opens a Terminal.app window cd'd to the front most finder window." 
    * fastscripts: "Powerful script management utility." You can assign shortcuts to your scripts.
    http://code.google.com/p/cdto/ http://www.red-sweater.com/fastscripts/

  • by h5n1 on 1/27/11, 3:24 PM

    I'm surprised that the author replaced iTunes with Pandora when Grooveshark is so much more versatile. Plus, it can be made into a damn good Fluid app. Additionally, some of his "replacements" are just extensions to normal processes; Hyperspaces runs within spaces, and Witch runs within Expose. On that note, though, there's a QuickTime add-on called Perian that makes the program much more versatile, and can in many cases re-replace VLC.

  • by iqster on 1/27/11, 2:01 PM

    Just wait for the network connection to go down.

  • by xuki on 1/27/11, 5:16 PM

    No one here uses SizeUp and JumpCut? They're pretty awesome.

    http://jumpcut.sourceforge.net/

    http://www.irradiatedsoftware.com/sizeup/

  • by kevingessner on 1/27/11, 9:55 PM

    Funny to see this today, since I just had my first app accepted to the Mac App store. It's called Twitch, and it's a launcher designed for power users and keyboard junkies: http://twitchapp.com

  • by damoncali on 1/27/11, 4:57 PM

    Not really a replacement, but if you're on OSX and are not using Fake (http://fakeapp.com) for your in-browser testing, you're missing out.

  • by octopus on 1/27/11, 8:24 PM

    A nice replacement for the Mail program is Thunderbird, if you use this you can move your emails on any modern OS by just copying a folder.

    VLC for movies and dvd's.

  • by imperialWicket on 1/27/11, 2:54 PM

    I prefer KeepassX for password management. It's a little more hands off than its more browser-oriented counterparts. It's also free, open source, and cross-platform.

  • by soolwan on 1/27/11, 10:47 PM

    ShiftIt is great for positioning windows, a la Compiz Grid. (http://code.google.com/p/shiftit/)

  • by tommypalm on 1/27/11, 2:02 PM

    Launchbar over Alfred as a replacement for Spotlight. I just prefer the 30 day trial model over limited free usage and then pay for 'power user' features.

  • by paul9290 on 1/27/11, 2:18 PM

    iTunes overall is the worst experience on a MAC. For any user who used Windows for a few years and jumps onto a MAC I would bet most find it frustrating! It takes so long to load up and then to transfer music to then listen ... uggh! Thus like the author of this article I use YouTube, Vevo and Pandora to listen to my music collection; either on my desktop or thru my iPhone.

  • by gaiusparx on 1/27/11, 2:10 PM

    Just realized I'm not a power user if I use Safari. Damn Apple.

  • by leon_ on 1/27/11, 1:33 PM

    The most power user replacement would be to replace the OS X window manager with a custom tiling manager.

  • by tkahn6 on 1/27/11, 1:55 PM

    Chrome keep tabs in separate processes (not threads).

  • by hexley on 1/27/11, 2:49 PM

    "Power user" replacements for OS X default apps more like, very questionable list that is...

  • by timtadh on 1/27/11, 1:57 PM

    I am sorry but this was a pointless article. You can down vote me now.