4 Apps for a Minimal Mac Experience

As developers, we get junk everywhere. Hundreds of files in your Downloads folder, dozens of apps open at once and lots of little utilities that overwhelm your menu bar. Let’s check out a few of my favorite apps to help you keep focused and experience that blissful minimal Mac experience.

Hazel by Noodlesoft

Hazel bills itself as your personal housekeeper and it performs admirably. It installs through System Preferences and allows you to create automation rules.Here are a few that helps prevent junk from piling up:

Automatically delete files that have been in the trash for a set number of days. It also supports “app sweep” to uninstall any leftover artifacts from removing an application.

Auto Trash Downloads

A good Hazel rule to pair with emptying the trash is setting up one that finds old files in your Downloads folder and automatically moves them to the trash.

With this setup, now any downloads added four weeks ago is automatically trashed.

Limitless Rules

You can setup many different rules for your personal workflow. For example, I have one in place to sync from Dropbox/Camera Uploads to Google Drive, so I get a secondary backup.

Bartender

The menu bar can quickly turn into a dumping ground of every utility app that you keep running. I have 14 apps with menu bar icons and just looking at that giant list is overwhelming.

With Bartender you can hide all these behind a single icon, giving you the ultimate minimal menu bar.

Of course, all the apps are still accessible from Bartenders icon, the star in the above screenshot.

Hocus Focus

On a Mac, when you switch apps the last opened ones cascade in the background. If the active app window is smaller than the others then the back ones can call for your attention.

Hocus Focus is designed to prevent this by automatically hiding inactive apps. This helps remove distractions and clutter.

Moom by Many Tricks

Moom is an app that allows you to quickly move and resize application windows. Using a grid, you can position an app at any location on the screen.

Splitting two apps across the screen is great when doing research so you can position your browser on one side and your writing app on the other. Just note that if you are using Hocus Focus, you will need to set both apps to not automatically hide in this scenario.

What I like about Moom is that you don’t have to remember any keyboard shortcuts. Just hover over the “full screen” icon in the upper left of your open app and the grid pictured above auto expands so you can position how you want.

Minimal Mac Zen

These four apps will help you get in the zone and keep you from losing focus. If you’ve been feeling overwhelmed give these a consideration. They are essential to all my Macs.