Ask HN: What are some cheap must-have software tools for Mac?

App Store:

  Fantastical - NLP calendar and reminders.

  Day One - Journal that can be used to replace scribbled sticky notes and notebooks
  you have laying around.

  AirMail - Mail client.

  SomaFM Radio Player - Ambient music stations.

  Textual - IRC.

  Moom - Window management.

  Pixelmator, iDraw, Sketch, Inkscape - Graphics, ditch Adobe.

  Markdown Pro - Markdown editor. End up using for repo readmes and for most textual
  documents.

  Incanter - Statistical computing and graphics.

  iTerm2 - Terminal replacement.

  Pencil - Prototyping/mockups.

  Wireshark - Capture ALL the packets!

  Temperature Gauge Pro - Monitor all your hardware sensors and control your fans.
  Better than SMC (plays nicely with Haswell/Mavericks).

  VIM, Emacs, Sublime Text, jEdit - Solid editors.

  Homebrew - Everything else (even some of the editors, if you wish). Be sure to check
  out interesting taps too (e.g. science and nginx):
  https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/wiki/Interesting-Taps-%26-Branches

ARQ - http://www.haystacksoftware.com/arq/ Duplifinder - http://www.haystacksoftware.com/duplifinder/ airfoil - http://rogueamoeba.com/airfoil/ Pocket - http://getpocket.com/ GifBrewery - http://www.helloresolven.com/portfolio/gifbrewery/

1Password - https://agilebits.com/onepassword/mac . It's not cheap but it's certainly worth the price ($40)

Surprised nobody has mentioned:

http://www.alfredapp.com/

Basic version free power pack 17 pounds

SuperDuper for making bootable clones of your hard drive. $27.95.

http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription...

Brew http://brew.sh/ Free

Sublime Text https://www.sublimetext.com/ $70 per user (install it on multiple machines and it is cheap)

Transmit http://panic.com/transmit/ $34

   * Pixelmator
   * Sublime Text 2/3
   * Tower or SourceTree
   * Mailplane if you run multiple Gmail accounts
   * If you need to work on Illustrator files: iDraw (in App Store)
   * TotalFinder is pretty cool, too

* Pixelmator * Sublime Text 2/3 * SizeUP * Brew

The rest of the stuff I've used is not deleted. I changed Tower for Git line command and started to become adicted to command line things.

--- * IA Writer (well, I do mostly of my text with Sublime).

Quicksilver http://qsapp.com/ Emacs http://emacsformacosx.com/

Fantastical - Awesome Mac Calendar - $19

http://flexibits.com/fantastical

Textedit -- free.