Great Apps for Mac, Sorted by Job: Files, Writing, Menu Bar

A list of great apps for Mac is easy to read and hard to act on. Twenty entries arrive with no order of importance, no statement of what problem each one solves, and no mention of what it costs to keep them installed. Anyone who follows such a list to the letter ends up with a machine that starts slower, asks for more permissions, and has a menu bar that cannot be read at a glance.

Three jobs account for most of what people actually install: getting files under control, writing things down, and keeping the resident utilities from swamping the top of the screen. Taking them one at a time, with a test for what deserves to stay, produces a much shorter list than any roundup.

Three tests before anything gets installed

An application that runs on a Mac for years is a commitment, not a download. Three questions sort the keepers from the things that get uninstalled in a fortnight.

Test	The question	What a bad answer looks like
Ownership	Where does the data live when the app is gone	A proprietary database with one export button
Presence	Does it run all day or only when called	A permanent icon for something used monthly
Exit	What has to be done to remove it cleanly	Files left in Library and a login item that persists

Ownership is the one most often skipped. Software that keeps its content in ordinary files, in a folder that can be opened by anything, survives the day its developer stops shipping updates. Software that keeps everything inside itself is only as durable as its company.

Presence is about the menu bar and the login items, and it is the test the third section of this article is built around. Exit is worth checking before installation rather than after, because a tool that scatters helpers across the system is much harder to leave than one that is a single application bundle.

Files: rules do the work that folders cannot

Folders describe where things are. They do nothing about things arriving. The daily irritation is almost never the structure, it is the twenty downloads, exports and screenshots that have to be renamed and moved by hand.

macOS covers part of this without any purchase. A Smart Folder is a saved search that behaves like a folder, so everything invoice shaped from the last month can appear in one place while the files stay where they were. Selecting a group of files in the Finder and choosing Rename Items handles batch renaming, including find and replace and adding a sequence. Tags cut across folders for the cases where one file honestly belongs to two projects.

What none of that does is act on its own. Hazel is the common answer for the acting part, at $42 for Hazel 6, with a family pack and an upgrade price listed on the same store page. It watches folders and applies rules, so a statement that lands in Downloads is renamed by its date and filed before anyone looks at it.

For sequences that involve more than filing, the tool most often named is a macro editor. Keyboard Maestro states its licence plainly, which is worth noting because the pricing model matters as much as the feature list when a tool is expected to last.

Keyboard Maestro 11 is a one-time purchase. No subscription, you can purchase it now for US$36 plus applicable tax and use version 11 indefinitely. Source: keyboardmaestro.com, read September 25, 2026

The honest advice for this job is to start with the built in pieces for a fortnight and count how often they fall short. A rule engine is excellent when there is a repeated pattern to describe and pure overhead when every arriving file is different.

Writing: the file format outlives the application

The decision that matters in this category is not which editor has the nicer typography. It is whether the words end up in files that can be read without the app that wrote them.

Plain text and Markdown files in an ordinary folder can be opened by every editor, searched by the Finder, synced by anything, and diffed by version control. Notes inside a proprietary store are portable only to the extent that their export button is honest, and export buttons are the least tested part of most software.

Obsidian became the default recommendation for this job because it edits a folder of Markdown files directly rather than importing them.

Free without limits. No sign-up required. No strings attached. Source: obsidian.md, read September 25, 2026

The paid parts are services alongside the app. The same page lists Publish at $8 per site per month billed annually for putting a set of notes on the web, and a Catalyst licence at $25 as a one-time payment for early access builds. Sync is offered too, though any file syncing arrangement can carry the same folder, with the usual caution that two machines editing one note simultaneously is where differences appear.

The built in options deserve a fair hearing. Notes handles handwriting, scanned documents, and shared lists in ways a plain text editor never will, and it is the right answer for anything that is more scrapbook than document. TextEdit opens and saves plain text with no ceremony at all. Dictation, available from the keyboard settings, is faster than typing for a first draft that will be edited anyway.

The test applied

Run the ownership test across whatever is in use now. If the answer to where the words live is a folder path, nothing needs to change. If the answer is the name of a company, the question worth asking is how long the export would take and whether it has ever been tried.

The menu bar: the one space every app shares

Both of the previous sections end the same way. Each tool that runs continuously puts an icon at the top right of the screen, and unlike the Dock, that strip cannot be curated by dragging.

The system items are listed in one pane: System Settings, then Control Center. Each of them offers more than on and off. Show When Active puts an icon there only while the feature is in use, and Always Show keeps it permanently, which is why the Sound icon appearing and vanishing looks like a bug and is a setting. Further down the same pane, Allow in the Menu Bar lists the applications that provide their own items.

For the third party half there is no such pane. The strip fills from the right, it stops where the current application's menus begin, and on a MacBook the notch takes a slice out of the middle, so the leftmost icons end up underneath it. macOS 27 added an overflow control, a double arrow that appears when items are covered and shifts them out temporarily. It rescues a moment. It does not organise anything.

The tools that do organise it all work the same way, by keeping the rarely used icons behind a divider. What differs is the part nobody lists on a feature page.

Behaviour to test in the first minute	Why it decides whether the tool gets kept
A hidden icon opens its own menu with the bar still collapsed	Otherwise every use costs two actions instead of one
Revealed icons are drawn exactly as the app drew them	Percentages, badges and graphs are the reason the icon exists
An individual item can be summoned by keyboard shortcut	The pointer never has to travel to the corner
Conditions can bring an item out by themselves	A recorder or a VPN should appear when its state matters

Cost is the smaller question here, because the category has a free end and a cheap paid end. Ice is open source under the GNU GPL and free. Hidden Bar is free as well. Bartender 7 is paid and offers a four week unlimited trial. There is also a one-time licence at $14.99, covering the major version bought, with a fourteen day trial that asks for no card. The feature list is where to check the four rows above, and the comparison page sets them out tool by tool.

Resident utilities and the permissions they ask for

Anything that watches the system needs to be trusted with part of it. Three permissions come up repeatedly, and knowing which is which prevents both careless approvals and unnecessary refusals.

Accessibility lets an app control other apps, which is what window managers and macro tools need in order to move a window or press a button. Screen Recording is what an app needs in order to read what is drawn on screen, which is how a menu bar tool can show a hidden icon exactly as it looks rather than as a generic stand in. Input Monitoring covers global keyboard shortcuts. Each one is granted per app in Privacy and Security, and each one can be revoked there.

The category of utility where this trade off is clearest is hardware monitoring and control. iStat Menus, for example, puts sensor readings in the bar and offers a 14-day free trial before any payment. Battery tools are the other common case, and they are a good illustration of how much a free tier can differ from a paid one.

AlDente Free does not influence or disable Sleep Mode. Source: apphousekitchen.com, read September 25, 2026

That sentence is the kind of detail worth reading before installing anything that sits between the Mac and its hardware. A free tier is not a smaller version of a paid one. It is a different set of behaviours, and the difference is usually in what the app is allowed to override.

The exit test, done properly

Before the list gets long, spend ten minutes on General settings, then Login Items and Extensions. It lists what launches at login and which background items have registered themselves, and on a Mac a few years old the list contains entries belonging to software that was replaced long ago. Removing an item there is what actually stops an icon returning after a restart.

An application that arrived as a single bundle can be moved to the Trash and forgotten. One that installed helpers usually documents its own removal, and a tool that documents nothing is telling something about how it will behave later.

Two more places are worth a look when an icon keeps coming back after it has apparently been removed. Settings files live under the Library folder in the home directory, inside Preferences and Application Support, and helpers that launch on their own live in LaunchAgents in the same Library. Most well behaved apps clean those up or offer a remove option in their own settings. Checking after the first uninstall shows which kind of app it was, and that answer applies to every future update from the same developer.

What to change first

Start with the job that produced the most repeated annoyance yesterday, and solve only that one. Then take ten minutes on the menu bar, because every tool added after this will land there: a fourteen day trial of a one-time $14.99 licence shows within a day whether hiding two thirds of the strip is worth keeping. Koffret.