macOS Power Tips: 15 Quality-of-Life Wins for Developers

macOS is the best development environment shipping today. It's also full of defaults Apple set for normal humans, not for developers. Here are 15 changes that compound to dramatically better daily experience.

1–2. Launcher replacements

1. Raycast (free) — Spotlight replacement with extensions, clipboard history, snippet expansion, window management. Single biggest QoL upgrade most devs can install today.
2. Alfred — older alternative, still excellent. Pick one.

3–4. Terminal upgrades

3. Ghostty — modern GPU-accelerated terminal. Fast, minimal config, great defaults. Replaces Terminal.app and iTerm.
4. tmux — terminal multiplexer. Persistent sessions, splits, panes. Essential for serious shell work.

5–6. Window management

5. Rectangle (free) — keyboard shortcuts for snapping windows to halves, quarters, edges.
6. AeroSpace — i3-style tiling window manager for macOS. Aggressive but transformative.

7–10. Defaults to change immediately

7. Tap to click on trackpad — Settings → Trackpad. Saves your wrists.
8. Three-finger drag — Settings → Accessibility → Pointer Control. Move windows without click-drag.
9. Reduce motion — Settings → Accessibility. Faster animations.
10. Show hidden files in Finder — Cmd+Shift+. toggles.

11–12. Shell improvements

11. Starship prompt — fast, beautiful, contextual prompt. Works with zsh, bash, fish.
12. fzf + ripgrep + bat — fuzzy file finding, fast grep, syntax-highlighted cat. The modern shell toolkit.

13. Dotfile portability

13. chezmoi or dotfiles in a Git repo — your shell, editor, git config should travel with you. New machine should be productive in 30 minutes, not 3 days.

14–15. AI tools

14. Claude Code — the most productive coding environment available. See our Anthropic post.
15. Raycast AI — system-wide AI access via launcher. Quick rewrites, summaries, lookups without app switching.

Each of these is small. Together they save hours per week. The cumulative time savings is the difference between "I'm fighting my tools" and "my tools disappear into the work."