When I bought my last new Mac two years ago, I set it up the way I had been setting up my personal computers for years: plug in a Time Machine drive and run Migration Assistant. On a modern Mac with an SSD, even if you have hundreds of apps installed like I do, the whole process takes about 20 minutes. It recreates your Applications folder, brings over preferences, and generally makes the new machine feel finished almost immediately.

Nothing could be easier.

There is a downside, though. Migration Assistant faithfully brings over all the accumulated cruft along with the good stuff. That’s how I ended up with Keychain entries for wireless access points I installed in 2014, and references in ~/Library/Application Support to apps I haven’t touched in years.

UPS is dropping a Mac mini on my doorstep sometime this morning. For the first time in a long time, I’m not going to use Migration Assistant.

Automated App Installation

Thanks to tools like Updatest and Cork, I’ve moved every application that can be managed by Homebrew into that ecosystem. On my current machine that covers 212 GUI apps plus 260 CLI packages and dependencies.

Recreating that environment on a new Mac is trivial.

To back up your current setup:

brew bundle dump

To install everything on a new Mac:

brew bundle install

By default, Homebrew can also install Mac App Store apps using the mas CLI. The generated Brewfile is plain text and extremely easy to edit if you want to remove anything before installing.

A small sample looks like this:

cask "gechr/tap/whichspace"

cask "wifi-explorer"

cask "wins"

cask "xbar"

cask "xnconvert"

cask "xnviewmp"

cask "zen"

cask "zotero"

mas "Acidity", id: 6472630023

mas "Actions", id: 1586435171

mas "Actions For Obsidian", id: 1659667937

mas "Amphetamine", id: 937984704

mas "AppTela", id: 6752568197

mas "AutoMounter", id: 1160435653

If you don’t use Homebrew, you can still automate Mac App Store installs directly with the mas CLI.

To export a list of installed App Store apps:

mas list | cut -d' ' -f1 > mas-app-ids.txt

To install them on a new Mac:

xargs -n1 mas install < mas-app-ids.txt

To identify apps that were installed outside Homebrew or the Mac App Store, run:

system_profiler SPApplicationsDataType -json > installed-apps.json

Open the resulting JSON file in a text editor like BBEdit. Any app showing:

_“obtained_from” : “identified_developer” _

was installed directly from a developer download and will need to be reinstalled manually.

Configuration

Applications are the easy part. Configuration is harder.

Just entering license keys and registration details for my paid apps could easily take hours.

I briefly looked at Mackup, but it doesn’t seem well suited for a GUI-heavy workflow like mine. A more modern tool, chezmoi, looks promising for exporting and restoring my dotfiles, including things like:

• .zshrc

• .gitconfig

• ~/.ssh/config

• .config/nvim/init.vim

For everything else, my plan is simple: build a small set of rsync jobs by hand and move over only what I actually need.

To avoid permission issues and sandbox quirks, I’ll launch each application once before restoring its configuration so macOS creates the necessary directories:

~/Library/Application Support/

~/Library/Preferences/

~/Library/Containers/

~/Library/Group Containers/

Because I run a heavily automated setup with apps like Keyboard Maestro, BetterTouchTool, Hazel, and Raycast, I’ll rely on their built-in export/import features rather than trying to automate those configs.

It’s technically possible to script the capture of a large number of system settings. In practice, the time it would take to build and debug that script would probably exceed the time it takes me to reconfigure things manually.

Teaching an Old Dog New Tricks

Earlier in my career in edtech, I spent a lot of time doing large-scale Mac deployments. The workflow was simple: build a golden image and deploy it hundreds of times using NetBoot to whatever hardware the district had just purchased.

Later we moved to modern deployment systems like Jamf.

If you need 900 eMacs unboxed and deployed, I’m your guy.

Highly opinionated personal setups like the ones most of us run on our own Macs are a different animal entirely. There’s no universal image for that kind of machine.

But there’s a lot we can learn from each other about building reproducible setups that stay clean over time instead of dragging a decade of digital barnacles from one Mac to the next.

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I’ve been hearing about Octarine for a while. It’s one of those apps that people whose opinions I respect talk about with a certain level of admiration. After testing it as thoroughly as I’ve tested any app in a long time, I understand why.

Octarine is a tool for creating, editing, and organizing text-based information using connected but independent documents: Markdown files. Without relying on plugins, it supports images, video, PDFs, and files created by other productivity apps. Those files can be linked inside Octarine but still open in their native applications.

Octarine isn’t designed for a single purpose. It’s more like a flexible Markdown workspace you can adapt to several overlapping uses:

• Journaling
• Task management
• Writing and long-form drafting
• Math or science reference notes
• Documentation
• Personal knowledge management (PKM)
• Project planning

Setup

Octarine is available for Windows, Linux, and macOS, but it’s not a heavy Electron app. The download is just over 30 MB, and it launches as fast as TextEdit; effectively instant.

The interface is tab-based, similar to a web browser. It isn’t strictly native macOS UI, but it’s clean, responsive, and supports customizable themes.

Installation on the Mac is simple:

1. Open the downloaded DMG
2. Drag Octarine.app into /Applications

That’s it.

When you launch it for the first time, Octarine asks you to open or create a Workspace. A workspace is simply a folder of Markdown files; either ones you create or notes that already exist somewhere on your Mac.

Structure

You can download, install, and configure Octarine in well under a minute and immediately start creating documents.

A key design choice is that Octarine uses the filesystem directly. Your workspace is just a folder containing Markdown files with human-readable filenames.

That means:

• You can manage files directly in Finder
• You can open them in any text editor
• Octarine will immediately reflect changes made elsewhere

I verified this by opening a note in Typora, adding a table, and watching it render instantly inside Octarine.

Because everything lives in normal folders and Markdown files, syncing is straightforward. You can use:

• iCloud Drive
• Google Drive
• Syncthing
• GitHub repositories (built-in integration)

The Git support also provides versioning for people who want a real audit trail for their notes.

Like most PKM-oriented tools, Octarine supports wikilinks. Typing [[ opens a searchable list of notes in the workspace. If you bracket a title that doesn’t exist yet, Octarine offers to create the note.

There’s also a knowledge graph showing connections between notes. Just remember: posting screenshots of your graph online costs you several internet credibility points.

Formatting

Most formatting tools are accessible through a slash command menu (/), which exposes a wide range of Markdown and extended elements:

• Headers
• Text styles (bold, italic, strikethrough)
• Callouts
• Code blocks
• Mermaid diagrams
• LaTeX
• Dividers
• Tables
• Colored text
• Dates
• Links
• Templates

You could easily use Octarine purely as a writing tool. It’s a full Markdown editor with live rendering similar to apps like Typora.

Under the hood, however, the file remains a plain text Markdown document. You can open it in BBEdit, import it into Obsidian, or process it with any other Markdown tool.

Octarine also converts pasted HTML into Markdown, preserving elements such as headers, links, bullet lists, and text styles.

Organization

The left sidebar provides a file tree for navigating your workspace. Nested folders work exactly as you’d expect.

When you attach files such as images or PDFs to a note, Octarine automatically creates folders to store them.

Octarine also supports seven types of metadata, which can be used to organize and filter notes.

The most powerful organizational feature is something called Views.

Views are dynamic, database-style tables that display notes based on filters, sorting rules, and custom columns.

Think of them as smart saved searches that update automatically as your notes change.

Tagging is also well implemented. Tags are clickable throughout the interface, and a Tag Manager provides a centralized list of every tag in your workspace.

AI Integration (Pro Version)

Octarine includes optional AI integration.

It works with:

• Local models via Ollama and LM Studio
• Apple Intelligence
• Cloud APIs such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google Gemini

AI operates within the context of the current note, allowing it to generate, rewrite, summarize, or refine content.

Like most AI writing workflows, the real learning curve comes from developing reusable prompts that produce consistent results.

Pro users can also download a 90 MB local model that can index an entire workspace to provide additional context-aware features:

• Context indicators

Each message shows the sources used (folders, notes, or date filters). Icons and hover cards reveal the details.

• References

A list shows which notes were consulted to answer your query.

• Export options

Responses can be copied as Markdown or plain text.

• Chat titles

Titles are generated automatically after the first response and can be edited using the Sparkles icon.

• Save the chat

Clicking the Create Note icon in the chat breadcrumb saves the conversation as a note. Your questions become blockquotes, with each Q&A pair separated by a divider.

An Opinion on an Opinionated App

There’s no question that Octarine is powerful.

As someone who has spent years building PKM systems, I can appreciate how much functionality is available without needing plugins or complex setup. Many of the features Octarine includes by default require significant configuration in something like Obsidian.

That simplicity removes a lot of early decisions that intimidate people exploring tools like this.

Octarine is developed by a single developer, which might give some users pause. Personally, it doesn’t worry me much. Some of the most respected Mac utilities come from solo developers, including:

• Keyboard Maestro
• Hazel
• BetterTouchTool
• Rectangle Pro

Looking at Octarine’s update history, development is clearly active and responsive to feedback.

The changelog shows frequent updates, and the roadmap includes plans for:

• iOS and Android versions
• One-click publishing
• Quick capture tools
• Task-management improvements
• Browser extensions

…and quite a bit more.

With the exception of AI features, most of Octarine’s functionality is available in the free version.

The Pro license currently costs $70 (early-bird supporter pricing) and unlocks all current and future features. That isn’t cheap, but it’s roughly in line with other established writing tools like iA Writer ($69) or utilities such as TextSoap ($45).

For users who want a structured Markdown workspace without the plugin rabbit hole, Octarine is definitely worth a serious look.

2026-04-01 - Recent Changes

• Bullet lists and task lists with nested children now show a collapse chevron on hover — click it to fold the nested items out of sight, keeping long outlines manageable.
• • Collapse state (headings, codeblocks, lists & tasks) are persisted automatically, so collapsed sections stay collapsed when you restart the app.

Performance

• Significantly reduced CPU and memory usage across the app — typing, idle, and workspace switching are all lighter.
• Improved workspace watching functions to be more performant and less power consuming.
• Reduced CPU spikes during workspace indexing.
• Embedding pruning for large workspaces is now much faster.

Improvements

• Date cells in Views now respect your preferred date format.
• Ask Octarine & Writing Assistant now shows error messages as toasts when something goes wrong, instead of failing silently.
• The task migration flow uses fewer file operations, making it faster and more reliable.

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Resurf is a clever new app, currently in beta, with a lot of potential. This is one of those “I needed an app to do X, so I built one” projects; the difference is that it was built by a design engineer who clearly understands macOS conventions. The result feels native and thoughtfully put together.

Using it brought back a few workflow habits I haven’t used since the days when Evernote was king.

The entry point into Resurf is a floating capture widget that you trigger with a shortcut. From there you can use either the mouse or the keyboard to capture five types of content, with some overlap:

• Notes
• Links
• Screenshots (using a built-in capture tool)
• Media
• Voice memos

The same widget also provides a Spotlight-style search across your Resurf vault, which is essentially the folder where everything you capture is stored.

Practical Use Cases

There are several ways Resurf can fit into a real workflow.

• Screenshot organizer
  A quick way to capture, store, and resurface reference screenshots without littering your desktop with files named Screenshot 2026-03-21 at 10.43.11.png.
• Bookmarks and lightweight browser
  Links can open directly inside Resurf so you can skim content without switching to a browser. Eligible pages default to Reader View with adjustable font sizes, but you can switch to a standard page view or send the link to your default browser.
• Scratchpad
  If you need a fast place to dump temporary information, Resurf works well as a searchable scratchpad. You can open straight into the notes interface and start typing.
• Quick notes staging area
  Once the shortcut becomes muscle memory, it’s easy to use Resurf for quick capture even if you keep your long-term notes somewhere else. When something turns out to be worth keeping, the macOS share sheet makes it simple to move it into another app.

Organizing Your Data

A Resurf vault can live in iCloud, in another synced folder like Dropbox, or locally on your Mac. If you use iCloud, you’ll be able to pair the Mac version with the upcoming iOS app.

You can also maintain multiple vaults, each located anywhere in your file system.

Within a vault, Resurf provides several ways to organize what you capture:

• Inbox / Later
  If you don’t want to categorize items during capture, everything can go into an Inbox for later triage. There’s also a Later folder for items you want to defer organizing.
• Areas
  Areas function much like folders and can hold any content type.
• Tags
  Tags can be created during capture. The sidebar includes both a tag browser and a dedicated tag view.
• Pins
  Any item can be pinned to the top of its area.
• Voice memo export for transcription
  Voice memos can be exported to the file system, making it easy to run them through a transcription tool and turn them into text documents.

Nice Touches

A few small details show that the developer thought about real usage rather than just features.

• Share Sheet support
  Resurf stores notes internally as JSON rather than plain files, but exporting content to other apps is straightforward through the macOS share sheet.
• Open In
  Similar to the share sheet; lets you send items directly to another app.
• Instant Markdown rendering
  Markdown renders automatically without switching between edit and preview modes.
• Slash commands
  Formatting can be applied quickly using slash commands.
• Notes about notes
  Every captured item can include an attached note, which is handy for adding context to screenshots, links, or media.
• Chrome extension
  Lets you save links directly from the browser.

Feature Requests

Resurf is still early in development, and there are a few capabilities that would make it significantly more powerful.

• Support for clickable internal links to things like Mail messages or Obsidian notes
• The ability to attach arbitrary documents to notes
• Inline images inside notes (currently you can only add notes about images)
• Shortcuts and AppleScript support
• A Safari extension

Privacy

You can read the full policy here:
https://resurf.so/privacy

Regardless of where your vault lives, your data remains private. The app only contacts Resurf’s servers to validate your license. According to the developer, no identifying information or user content is transmitted during that process or afterward.

The company is based in Canada. Because they never see your data, GDPR provisions around data access, portability, and deletion are largely irrelevant in this case.

Price

$39

• One-time purchase at the early supporter price. Unlimited captures. Any updates we release are free for 2 years after stable release.
• Unlimited captures
• Mac app license (up to 2 Macs)
• All beta updates included
• Any updates released are free for 2 years after stable release
• Priority email support

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Some small utilities become so embedded in my workflow that they start to feel like part of macOS itself. When I sit down at someone else’s Mac or a freshly set-up machine and they aren’t there, it genuinely throws me off.

I’m curious what apps fall into that category for you.

Shareful

One of those apps for me is Shareful by Sindre Sorhus.

The Mac share menu has always felt like an afterthought compared to iOS. Many developers don’t bother implementing it, and Apple keeps it oddly limited. Shareful fixes that by adding a few practical actions that save me a surprising number of clicks every day:

• Copy
• Open In
• Save As…
• Save to Downloads

It’s simple, but once you have it, the default share sheet feels incomplete without it.

Start by Innovative Bytes

Even though I’m very much a keyboard-launcher person (Team Raycast), there are situations where that approach breaks down.

Sometimes I need a small, obscure utility whose name I can’t remember. When your /Applications folder is as crowded as mine, scrolling through it isn’t realistic.

That’s where Start from Innovative Bytes comes in. Two features make it especially useful.

• Tagging
  Tagging lets you create categories for apps without any friction. You can even nest them, like Utilities/Screenshots or Utilities/Clipboard, which makes browsing a large app library much more manageable.
• Notes
  You can attach a short description to an app so you remember what it actually does.

A good example is the file-conversion utility Consul, which lets you change an image’s format just by renaming it. Seeing a note like “file rename / conversion” when browsing makes it much easier to find again later.

Honorable Mentions

• Apparency – The App That Opens Apps — a Quick Look extension and inspection utility for applications
• CleanShot X — the screenshot tool whose keyboard shortcuts are permanently burned into my muscle memory; although ScreenFloat is starting to make a case for itself

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I spend a lot of time trying to remove small bits of friction from my Mac workflow. macOS is a great system, but out of the box it still leaves a lot of obvious automation opportunities on the table.

I spend a lot of time trying to remove small bits of friction from my Mac workflow. macOS is a great system, but out of the box it still leaves a lot of obvious automation opportunities on the table.

Most of the improvements I rely on come from stitching together tools like AppleScript, Keyboard Maestro, Shortcuts, and a few power-user utilities I discovered at r/MacApps.

None of this is complicated once it’s set up. The goal is just to eliminate little interruptions that happen dozens of times a day.

Here are a few small automations and workflow tweaks that currently make my Mac feel a lot more like my machine.

• I like Safari, but I don’t like how easily it spawns extra windows. I now use an AppleScript tied to Keyboard Maestro. With a mouse click or hotkey, it closes every Safari window except the frontmost one.
• Safari has good AppleScript and Shortcuts support, but it still doesn’t provide a keyboard-friendly way to jump directly to a specific Tab Group. My workaround is an Apple Shortcut that batch-opens groups of URLs that mirror my tab groups: Server, Social, Blogging, Software, etc.
• I set up BetterTouchTool so that fn + Button 3 on my Logitech mouse triggers the New command across roughly two dozen apps. Depending on the app, that can mean a new tab, new note, new document, new Shortcut, new Keyboard Maestro macro, new email, or new message.
• I’m currently using SideNotes as my scratchpad. It stays hidden on the right edge of my primary display until I toggle it with a hotkey or an ExtraBar menu item.

Most of these are tiny things, but they add up surprisingly fast

• I use Rectangle Pro’s layout manager to launch and arrange 10 apps across two displays and eight virtual desktops. Each desktop has a keyboard shortcut, and I tie them together with a single Keyboard Maestro macro. (download link)
• I wrote a small shell script (download link) that reconnects me to Tailscale if the connection drops or fails to start. It runs via launchd, configured through Lingon Pro.
• I use macOS 26’s automation features in Apple Shortcuts to create my daily Obsidian note from a template. The automation also inserts a weather report and the day’s calendar events, so the note is ready when I sit down at my desk each morning. (Requires Actions for Obsidian.)
• When I need a dual-pane file manager instead of Finder, a Keyboard Maestro trigger runs an AppleScript that closes all Finder windows and replaces them with a ForkLift window. (download macro)
• I removed the menu bar icons for BetterTouchTool, Default Folder X, Supercharge, and Rectangle Pro. Their functions are now exposed through ExtraBar instead.
• If a developer doesn’t expose a URL scheme, you can’t deep-link into specific menu items. Finder is a good example; there’s no direct link for Go to Folder. ExtraBar can run scripts, though, so a small AppleScript can send keystrokes to trigger the command. If the feature exists in a menu but has no keyboard shortcut, you can also create your own under System Settings → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts.

Sample Script

tell application "Finder"
activate
end tell
tell application "System Events"
keystroke "g" using {command down, shift down}
end tell

None of these are huge changes individually, but together they remove a lot of small interruptions during the day.

Curious what small automations or workflow tricks other people here are using.

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I’m always impressed when an out-of-the-box thinker builds an app unlike anything I’ve seen before. Iterating on proven concepts is fine, but after testing enough clipboard managers and voice-to-text apps, they all start to blur together. Give me something new, clever, and useful, and I’ll happily change my workflow to make room for it. a year ago, DoubleMemory caught my attention with its interesting feature set and it's done nothing but improve since then.

DoubleMemory

I sometimes worry that one day my brain will run out of capacity for new hotkey combinations. When that happens, any app that relies on them will be off the table. DoubleMemory neatly sidesteps that problem by baking the instruction directly into its name.

Press ⌘C twice quickly, and the app captures either the webpage you’re on or the text you’ve highlighted. It then drops that content into an aesthetically well-designed, searchable, Pinterest-like interface with some surprisingly useful capabilities.

There’s a setting that allows DoubleMemory to save everything you copy, but I’d advise against leaving that on all the time. It’s not a clipboard manager in the sense that Raycast or PastePal are. For example, it doesn’t capture images.

Where it shines is with URLs. Highlight the URL of any webpage you’re on and press ⌘C twice. DoubleMemory downloads the page content and stores it locally, making it as much a read-it-later tool as a bookmark manager. In practice, it works well as either.

Saved content can sync via iCloud, which means your collection is accessible on your iPhone, iPad, and other Macs.

DoubleMemory also doubles as a lightweight notes tool. Highlight a passage of text anywhere, press ⌘C twice, and it’s saved to your board. From there you can add your own commentary and organize the entry with tags. There’s even optional AI-powered auto-tagging if you want help categorizing things.

One detail I appreciate: DoubleMemory doesn’t require an account, and you don’t need to install a browser extension. If you routinely save URLs from different sources on a specific topic, you quickly end up with a clean, searchable database that works offline.

It’s also refreshingly lightweight. The app uses roughly 10 MB of RAM during normal use. For automation fans, it supports Apple Shortcuts, the macOS share sheet, and drag-and-drop to the Dock (if you enable the Dock icon).

Interesting Features

• Bookmark Imports
  If you want to migrate an existing read-it-later list or bookmarks from another service (for example Raindrop), DoubleMemory includes solid import tools.
• Active Roadmap
  I’ve been following the project for about a year, and development has been steady. Planned features include image and screenshot support and automated imports of saved searches. Personally, I’d love to see it pull in my saved Reddit posts.
• Approachable Developer
  The developer is easy to reach and actively engages with users. There’s a Discord, a Substack newsletter, an active Reddit presence, and a well-maintained website with an up-to-date changelog.
• Freemium Model
  The free tier already allows unlimited saves, notes, bookmarks, and tags. The Pro plan mainly adds more than three saved searches and supports the developer. Future premium features are expected to focus on advanced retrieval, AI-powered organization, and richer content consumption tools. I have some 50% off subscription codes. Use the comment tool below if you want one.

DoubleMemory has a lot going for it. It’s easy to understand, genuinely useful in daily workflows, and feature-rich without feeling bloated.

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