Snap windows to halves, thirds and quarters from the keyboard or the menu bar.
Small, great Mac apps that live at the top of the screen
Small Mac utilities and menu bar apps, in one open menu. 146 entries, each with a checked link. Price and where to get it only when we've seen that on the official page.
Editor's picks
Twelve we'd install first, from this list. Our opinion, not a ranking.
A small, fast clipboard history in the menu bar. Search, pin, and it stays out of the way.
A fast, light screenshot tool with OCR, measurements and annotation, made by one person and priced that way.
A fast launcher with a large extension store, clipboard history, window management and an optional Pro plan.
A free, open-source menu-bar monitor that covers the same ground as the paid ones, in small widgets you choose.
IceNew
A free, open-source alternative to Bartender for hiding and arranging menu-bar icons.
Shows the next calendar meeting in the menu bar and lets you join the call with one click.
Control the brightness and volume of an external monitor from the keyboard and the menu bar.
A small popup of actions that appears when you select text: copy, search, define, and a long list of extensions.
The key remapper almost everyone else sits on. Change caps lock, build layers, fix awkward keys.
A tiny, open-source menu-bar replacement for Caffeine: one click and the Mac will not sleep.
Caps the charge on a notebook battery so it does not sit at 100% all day on the desk.
Window management
Snap, tile and switch windows from the keyboard, the trackpad or a little menu extra. macOS now tiles in a basic way on its own; these go further.
Snap windows to halves, thirds and quarters from the keyboard or the menu bar.
The paid big brother of Rectangle: more snap areas, move-and-resize with a modifier, and custom shortcuts.
A straightforward window snapper sold on the Mac App Store, with halves, quarters and a few arranged presets.
Draw a custom layout on a grid, save it, and recall it. Quieter and more precise than the one-shot snappers.
AeroSpaceNew
An i3-style tiling window manager for macOS that stays out of the way of the system's own Spaces.
A scripting-friendly tiling window manager. Powerful, and it asks more of you than the snap apps.
Automatic tiling in the style of xmonad. Windows arrange themselves as you open and close them.
LoopNew
Hold a key, move the pointer, and drop the window into a radial overlay of sizes.
Snap, switch and manage spaces with trackpad gestures from the title bar and the dock.
A long-running snap utility from the BetterTouchTool maker, with custom snap areas along the screen edges.
Gestures, keyboard shortcuts, window snapping, notch extras and a lot else, in one deeply configurable app.
A Lua bridge to macOS. People build their own window managers, mute keys and menu extras with it.
Windows-style app and window switching, with live previews, including minimised and hidden windows.
A fast sidebar and search for switching windows, built for people who keep a lot of them open.
Replace the system app switcher with a list that can show every window, including ones in other Spaces.
A lightweight, scriptable window and shortcut layer, if you want to write the rules yourself in JavaScript.
An older, still-maintained snapper for halves, quarters and making a window fill the screen.
Drag windows into a layout you design, and save those layouts for different setups.
Clipboard
Keep a history of what you copy, pin snippets, or clean and compress whatever just landed on the clipboard.
A small, fast clipboard history in the menu bar. Search, pin, and it stays out of the way.
A visual clipboard manager with boards, pin stacks and iCloud sync, sold as a subscription.
Tapbots' clipboard manager: filters, paste queues and a well-made Mac-native window.
A straightforward, open-source clipboard history you cycle with a shortcut.
A popular open-source clipboard history and snippet tool. Development has been quiet, but it still works for many people.
A hidden panel at the top of the screen for files, notes and clipboard history, revealed with a scroll.
ClopNew
Watches the clipboard and quietly shrinks screenshots, video and copy-pasted files so they send more easily.
A simple menu-bar clipboard history from Fiplab, with a paid upgrade for more slots and features.
One of the oldest Mac clipboard histories still going: a tiny, keyboard-driven stack of recent copies.
Screenshots and recording
Grab the screen, annotate, read text off it, or record a short clip. The built-in tools are fine; these make the result something you can send.
The all-in screenshot and recording app: annotate, hide the desktop, scroll capture, and a tidy history.
A fast, light screenshot tool with OCR, measurements and annotation, made by one person and priced that way.
Takes a screenshot and instantly turns it into a tidy, padded product shot with a background and shadow.
An open-source screen recorder that exports to GIF, MP4 and a handful of other formats, with plugins.
Desktop recordings with automatic zoom and smooth motion, aimed at polished product videos.
A small recorder that lives in the menu bar and turns a screen grab into a GIF or a short video.
CapNew
An open-source alternative to the hosted recording tools, for short product and explain clips.
Screenshot, annotate and upload, with a free tier and paid cloud storage.
Upload screenshots and files to your own S3, SFTP or similar, from a menu-bar app.
Drag a box over anything on screen and copy the text, including text in videos and images.
A menu-bar OCR tool: capture text from the screen and send it to the clipboard, a translator or a QR decoder.
Optical character recognition for screenshots, PDFs and images, with a plain Mac-native window.
Draw on the screen, put a highlight under the pointer, and annotate while you share or record.
Capture screenshots and short videos and share a link. Formerly CloudApp.
Launchers
Open apps, files, snippets and commands from the keyboard, without taking your hands off it.
A fast launcher with a large extension store, clipboard history, window management and an optional Pro plan.
The long-standing Mac launcher. The free app opens things; the paid Powerpack adds workflows, clipboard and snippets.
Objective Development's launcher: type an abbreviation, chain actions, and stay on the keyboard.
The original free, open-source Mac launcher, still maintained, with a verb-object way of acting on things.
Focus and time
Block the distracting sites, time a stretch of work, or dim everything behind the window you mean to be in.
Block sites and apps on a schedule, across your Mac and your other devices.
A hard site and app blocker, including locked sessions you cannot turn off early.
A free, open-source blocker that stays on until the timer ends, even if you restart the Mac.
Inserts a short breathing pause before you open the distracting apps and sites you name.
Focus sessions and app blocking, with a clearly designed Mac and iOS pair.
A website and app blocker with planned sessions, breaks and a menu-bar timer.
A Pomodoro-style focus timer with websites blocked for the length of a session.
Automatic time tracking for the Mac: what you had open, and where the hours actually went.
Dims every window except the one you are in, so the rest of the desktop falls away.
A plain Pomodoro timer that lives entirely in the menu bar.
Gentle or full-screen breaks at an interval you set, from a long-running Mac utility maker.
An open-source break reminder that nudges you to stand up and look away from the screen.
A blocker and focus app for Apple devices, with sessions you can share and a clear off-switch for the noisy apps.
A focused Pomodoro timer with a menu-bar presence and a matching iPhone app.
System monitors
CPU, memory, fans, temperature and network, living in the menu bar so you can glance without opening Activity Monitor.
The long-standing, deeply detailed menu-bar monitor for CPU, memory, disks, fans, batteries and network.
A free, open-source menu-bar monitor that covers the same ground as the paid ones, in small widgets you choose.
Classic CPU, memory, disk and network meters in the menu bar, kept alive as an open-source fork.
Temperature, fan curves and alerts, aimed at Macs that run hot or sit under load.
A hardware dashboard, cleaner and performance panel in one, including temperatures and disk health.
Audio and display
Route sound, equalise, drive an external monitor's brightness, or warm the colours at night.
Per-app volume, audio routing and effects, from the menu bar. The everyday half of Rogue Amoeba's audio tools.
A free app that lets you set volume per application and auto-pause music when other audio starts.
A virtual audio driver so you can route the Mac's output into another app, for recording or calls.
Control the brightness and volume of an external monitor from the keyboard and the menu bar.
Scaled resolutions, virtual screens, brightness and a lot of control over what a monitor can do.
Adaptive and manual brightness for external displays, including ones that do not expose the usual controls.
Warms the display at sunset so late-night screens are less blue. A classic, still maintained.
A system-wide equaliser for the Mac, with a free core and paid extra features.
A menu-bar companion for Night Shift: turn it off for a bit, disable it in certain apps, or set custom hours.
Text and snippets
Expand abbreviations, pop actions on selected text, pick colours, or run a little text utility from the menu bar.
A small popup of actions that appears when you select text: copy, search, define, and a long list of extensions.
Expand short abbreviations into longer snippets, forms and shared team snippets, by subscription.
A paid, buy-once text expander for snippets, dates and formatted bits you type often.
A long-running Mac text expander with sets, regular expressions and a one-time licence.
A free, open-source text expander that works the same way on the Mac, Windows and Linux.
Type a colon and a name to insert an emoji, Slack-style, anywhere on the Mac.
Shows the keys you press on screen, for recordings, talks and tutorials.
Another look at the current app's keyboard shortcuts, opened with a key, in a tidy overlay.
A tiny, scriptable scratchpad for transforming text: encode, format, hash, and write your own scripts.
A notepad that calculates. Type a sum in words and numbers and it keeps the result in the menu bar if you want.
A more serious notepad calculator, with units, variables and a clear paper-like tape.
A menu-bar colour picker with palettes, contrast checks and export into the tools designers already use.
A free, open-source colour picker that lives in the menu bar and does one job clearly.
A friendly colour picker with contrast, palettes and a menu-bar dropper.
A menu-bar box of everyday developer tools: encode, decode, format JSON, generate UUIDs, and the rest.
KeysiNew
Hold Command and see every shortcut in the front app, read live from its menus. The job CheatSheet used to do.
KeyMinderNew
A free, open-source menu-bar app that shows the front app's keyboard shortcuts, grouped by menu.
Files and drop shelves
A shelf for mid-drag files, smarter Save dialogs, archives, disk space, and the apps that keep a Mac tidy.
A drop shelf at the edge of the screen, so you can park files mid-drag and drop them somewhere else.
A floating shelf that appears when you drag files, for stacking, sharing and quick actions.
A dock or notch shelf with actions: move, upload, resize, and your own scripts.
Gives the Open and Save dialogs favourite folders, recent files and a much shorter path to the right place.
The free un-zip, un-rar, un-almost-anything utility most Macs end up with.
A compact archiver that can create and open the formats the Finder still fumbles, including 7z and RAR.
A sunburst map of what is eating the disk, so you can clear the big things first.
A free treemap of disk use. Plainer than DaisyDisk, and it does the same essential job. Listed on the Mac App Store.
Drag an app in and it finds the leftover files a plain Trash drag would miss.
PearcleanerNew
A free, open-source uninstaller and leftover cleaner, actively maintained.
Checks the apps you have installed and tells you which ones have an update waiting.
A thorough app-update checker that covers apps the App Store and Sparkle miss.
Folder rules: when a file arrives, rename it, file it, tag it, or run a script. A Mac classic.
Drop images in and it losslessly (or nearly) shrinks them, stripping junk in the process.
A dual-pane file manager with a lot of remote-server support, for people who outgrow Finder windows.
Keyboard and pointer
Remap keys, fix cheap mice, and run macros. The un-glamorous layer a lot of other tools sit on.
The key remapper almost everyone else sits on. Change caps lock, build layers, fix awkward keys.
Turn off mouse acceleration, set a different speed for a mouse and a trackpad, and keep it in the menu bar.
Smooths the scroll wheel on a cheap mouse so it feels closer to the trackpad.
Natural scroll on the trackpad, old-style scroll on the mouse, at the same time.
Makes a generic mouse feel at home on a Mac: better scrolling, buttons and gestures.
The deep Mac automation app: macros, palettes, scheduled actions and a lot of ways to glue apps together.
Puts your AppleScripts and shell scripts on a menu and on shortcuts, from Red Sweater.
HomerowNew
Click links and controls by typing a short hint, Vimium-style, in almost any Mac app.
A detailed driver for non-Apple mice: buttons, wheels, axes and per-application settings.
Calendar and meetings
A calendar that fits in the menu bar, world clocks, and a one-click join for the next call.
A tiny calendar that opens under the menu bar, and can stand in for the system clock.
A menu-bar calendar and world-clock replacement for the system date, with upcoming events.
Shows the next calendar meeting in the menu bar and lets you join the call with one click.
World clocks in the menu bar, with a search for time zones and a quick look at other cities.
Power and battery
Keep the Mac awake, cap the charge on a notebook, or read the battery's real health.
A tiny, open-source menu-bar replacement for Caffeine: one click and the Mac will not sleep.
A polished keep-awake menu extra, with a timer and a shortcut, from Sindre Sorhus.
Caps the charge on a notebook battery so it does not sit at 100% all day on the desk.
Reads the battery's design capacity, cycle count and health, for Macs and for a connected iPhone.
A free, very configurable keep-awake app on the Mac App Store, with triggers and a menu-bar extra.
More utilities
Default browsers, camera checks, firewalls, Bluetooth headphones, and the other small tools that do one job well.
Picks a browser per link: work links in one, personal in another, and Zoom links in the Zoom app.
A long-standing default-browser helper, with rules for which browser opens which kind of link.
A JavaScript config file that decides which browser opens a link. Free and exact.
One click in the menu bar to see what the camera sees, before you join the call.
Automatically turns on Do Not Disturb when you share your screen, so Slack does not pop up mid-demo.
A quiet watchdog that tells you when a process is using the camera or the microphone.
Free camera and microphone monitoring from Objective-See, with an alert when something turns them on.
A free macOS firewall that asks when an app wants to leave the machine.
The paid, very mature Mac firewall and network monitor, with maps, profiles and a menu-bar filter.
An AirPods and Beats experience closer to iOS, with a menu extra and a battery popover.
One click, or one shortcut, to connect or disconnect a Bluetooth device, with a battery reading in the menu bar.
When you are on a hotspot, only the apps you allow get to use the network.
Puts a bidirectional link between the thing you are looking at and a related note, file or email.
Shows your Spaces in the menu bar, so you can see which desktop you are on without gesturing.
Nothing in the list matches that. Try another word, or suggest an app.
Suggest an app
If a small Mac utility or menu bar app is missing, send the name and a link. We only add it after checking the page.
A note when the list grows
Occasional email when we add a batch of apps worth opening. No ads, and we never sell the address.