macOS has ok usability by default, most of the time at least. Some of the bundled softwares are good ideas but have terrible execution, the biggest example of this is Spotlight, which works nicely but is so insanely slow that it completely ruins the usefulless

Luckily, for most things, there’s third party alternatives / plugins / modifications that can help a lot, here I’ll list the neat softwares I use

Free

TinkerTool

One of macOS’s biggest flaws is the lack of customization options it provides. There’s a fairly numerous amount of tiny things I wish I could just slightly change, luckily TinkerTool allows that

It doesn’t necessarily have that many tweaks available but I found the ones available really useful already, notably the ability to disable delay before showing the dock in auto-hide mode

Quitter

macOS makes it absurdly easy to open apps, either through the dock or Spotlight (or Alfred), but it’s strangely cumbersome to quit apps. This is (also strangely) great, because it makes it quicker to open apps since, well, they’re already open, but at the same time it’s very easy to end up with a lot of apps open at the same time

Quitter allows you to automatically close or hide apps after a certain period of inactivity, very useful! It’s intended to prevent distractions, but it also works great just for closing inactive things automatically.

LinearMouse

macOS Mouse settings are very cumbersome to use when trying to get the perfect mouse sensitivity. It doesn’t help that some settings can only be accessed through the Terminal

LinearMouse is a great free and open source software that allows more control over the different settings. Super useful!

Free with paid features

Alfred

Alfred is pretty well known at this point, after all it released about 10 years ago. Not only is it the best application launcher for macOS, it’s also (in my opinion) the best application launcher that exists no matter the platform

Unfortunately a lot of the features are locked behind a paywall but I think it’s very much worth it for the huge productivity boost that it provides. It’s much better than Spotlight, macOS’s default application launcher

Paid

Mission Control Plus

Mission Control works, that’s about it. For something that is supposed to be one of the main way to manage your open windows and activities, it’s however, very barebones. Notably, you can’t close windows in it which to me, is absolutely insane and I can’t believe you still can’t even in Monterey. Shame on Apple

Thankfully, Mission Control Plus exists for that and works nicely. However, it’s paid but personally, I don’t mind spending a bit of my money for a better workflow, but it’s insulting to have to pay for such a small thing that should definitely be there by default