TL;DR

In this episode, you’ll discover 3 third-party Mac apps that will help you further reduce unnecessary clicks.

To measure the number of clicks and cursor movement you’re experiencing on your Mac, I suggest installing the free app called Mouse Miles: https://www.pointworks.de/software/mouse-miles/

Here are 40 keyboard shortcuts that will help you reduce unnecessary clicks https://macpreneur.com/ks (no signup required):

Links to the third-party tools mentioned in this episode:

Curious to know how well you’re taming the 3 killers of Mac productivity? Take a free quiz at https://macpreneur.com/score

Summary:

This episode discusses three third-party tools for Mac users that can enhance workflow speed.

The first tool is Raycast, which is like an enhanced version of Spotlight with built-in window management capabilities. It offers 11 built-in extensions and allows for customization of keyboard shortcuts.

Moom is another tool that provides window tiling, custom window layouts, and the ability to snap windows to edges and corners. It also offers keyboard shortcuts for moving and resizing windows.

The most powerful tool mentioned is BetterTouchTool, which allows users to configure gestures, launch applications, resize and position windows, and automate tasks. It supports various triggers such as mouse gestures, keyboard shortcuts, and even iPhone or iPad applications.

Raycast and Moom are free to use, while BetterTouchTool offers a free trial and paid options for software updates.

Overall, these tools can greatly improve productivity and efficiency on a Mac.

Takeaways:

Raycast is an extensible tool that enhances Spotlight and offers built-in window management capabilities.
Moom allows for window tiling, custom window layouts, and snapping windows to edges and corners.
BetterTouchTool is a powerful tool for configuring gestures, automating tasks, and interacting with applications.
Raycast and Moom are free to use, while BetterTouchTool offers a free trial and paid options for software updates.
Raycast has a wide range of extensions available, including Google Translate, DuckDuckGo search, and speed test.
Moom allows for precise customization of window size and position, as well as the ability to save and recall window layouts.
BetterTouchTool supports various triggers, including mouse gestures, keyboard shortcuts, and iPhone or iPad applications.
BetterTouchTool is recommended for users who have exhausted the capabilities of native macOS features and other third-party tools.

Full transcript

Intro

Hello, hello!

Are you a solopreneur looking for Mac productivity hacks that will help you to do more in less clicks?

I’ll unpack all of this after the intro.

Welcome

If this is the first episode that you’re listening to, welcome to the Macpreneur Tribe.

Before diving into today’s topic, I want to quickly mention that this episode is part of a short series focusing on the three killers of Mac productivity, namely unnecessary clicks, repetitive typing and file clutter.

In episode 58, I introduced the three killers, and in the previous episode 59, I dove deeper into native macOS features that can help you reduce unnecessary click.

This episode is now focusing on third-party tools that are either free or very inexpensive to further speed up your workflows on your Mac.

The first one is Raycast, then Moom, and then BetterTouchTool.

Among those three, betterTouchTool is the most powerful one, but, It may not be for everyone.

It belongs to what I call the Ninja solution category because it can help tame the three Mac productivity killers at once.

Now, regardless if you plan on trying them out, I’d recommend testing each of them separately simply because they all have ways to manage application windows that may conflict with each other.

Raycast

So let’s start with Raycast, which I would call Spotlight on steroids with built-in window management capabilities.

So if you missed episode 58, Spotlight is a feature from macOS, which is invoked by the keyboard shortcut COMMAND SPACE, and it allows to quickly launch applications, find and open documents, folders contacts emails.

What I didn’t mention is that Spotlight can also perform quick calculations and even currency conversions or converting between the metric and the US unit system.

So for instance, that’s how I converted my cursor travel distance from kilometers into miles.

So, yeah, Spotlight is great but limited, and this is where a third-party solution like Raycast comes in.

And the best is that everything that I will be talking about today is available for free.

Now, the first reason I love Raycast so much is because it is extensible and it comes with 11 built-in extensions, which allow you to, among other things, check your calendar, access your clipboard history, create and complete reminders, you can move and resize application windows and many more.

And on top of that, for each action related to each extension, you can configure your own keyboard shortcuts.

And this is especially useful if you want to use Raycast to manage the position and the size of the application windows.

Here are a few examples that make my life easier. I’ve configured control shift left arrow to resize a window so that it takes the left half of the screen, then it’ll be control shift, right arrow to do the same on the right half of the screen.

I’ve even chosen four keys that are near each other and that form a four by four square in order to reposition windows in any of the four corners of the screen.

In addition to the 11 prebuilt extension, there is a vast extension ecosystem.

At the time of recording, there are about 1100 extensions available. There are a few that I’m using.

There is a Google Translate extension, so you don’t need to open the website. You just copy paste words or sentences and it’ll automatically translate it.

You can search the DuckDuckGo engine right from the desktop through Raycast.

If you need to know how many characters or many words a snippet on of text contains, there is an extension called count.

If you do graphic design or if you need to know or grab the hex code of a color that you see on the screen, there is an extension called color picker. And so you just click on the color that you see and you want and automatically the hex code is copied to the clipboard, so you just need to go to wherever you need to command V and you can paste it.

Now if you do ChatGPT if you need prompts. There is an extension called GPT3 Prompt Search, which is a collection of boilerplate prompts for different tasks.

For instance plagiarism checking, or it has also predefined rules like you can make it such as the initial prompt is as if you were a motivational speaker and so on.

There is a speed test extension allowing you to quickly know the speed of your internet connection.

You can also know your IP address, the IP geo localization and so on.

Some of the extensions require an API Key.

API stands for Application Programming Interface.

It is needed when you want to perform actions on the backend of a web service or a website without the need to click and physically interact with it.

And to get an API key you, you usually need to have an account with the website service.

And in some cases, you also need to pay based on the, the number of API requests that are performed through Raycast.

Three examples.

Searching images and videos on Pixabay or on Pexels, for instance. If you have an account on those two websites, you can get for free an API key, and then you can get, you can put that API key into the Pixabay or Pexels extension inside Raycast. And so from within Raycast, you can immediately search the Pexels or Pixabay database.

There is a ChatGPT extension. So if you have an OpenAI API key, which is a paid service, right you will pay for every time that you query the OpenAI API. Then from Raycast, you can immediately enter prompts and get answers from ChatGPT.

There is an extension called YouTube Video summary, which also requires an OpenAI API key. So what you do is you, you paste a YouTube U R L. And then that extension has been built in such a way that it’ll go use OpenAI to fetch the transcript of the YouTube video, and then we’ll give you a summary. Right from within Raycast.

Everything that I’ve been talking so far is free, barring the API key billing obviously, but as much as Raycast the application is concerned. You don’t need to pay anything to Raycast for what I’ve talked about.

If you want more features, then it becomes a paid subscription, including, for instance, unlimited clipboard history.

If you want to be able to synchronize the configuration of Raycast, meaning all the extensions that you have configured, the keyboard shortcuts that you have defined and so on, and you have if you have two Mac. You’ve spent a lot of time configuring Raycast on one Mac, and you would like not to do the same for the other Mac, then you would need to pay a subscription for Raycast to have this synchronization of Settings.

If you don’t have an OpenAI API key and you don’t want to go to the trouble of creating an OpenAI account and, and managing all that. Raycast now is offering what they called Raycast AI, which basically is ChatGPT, but it’s using their own OpenAI API Key, meaning that then you just pay Raycast rather than paying OpenAI.

The PRO plan for Raycast starts at $10 per month, or $96 per year, and it uses GPT-3.5.

If you want GPT-4 via Raycast AI then it’s $18 per month.

Now on my side, I’m really happy with what I can do for free. I have an OpenAI API key anyway, so I don’t feel the need to get more than that.

Moom

Now let’s turn our attention to Moom, for which I would like to highlight three interesting capabilities.

The number one is window tiling, the second one is custom window layouts, and the third one is “Snap to edges and corners“.

Let’s go and define what it is.

So window tiling: by default in macOS when you hover the mouse over the green bubble, right in the top left corner of an application window, you have these three bubbles, red, yellow, green.

If you hover the mouse over the green one, you have the choice between moving the application window full screen, or you can initiate a vertical split screen mode, for instance, that window, you can decide, I’m going to put that window on the left. It’ll ask you, which one do you want on the half right of the screen?

With Moom, you can override this behavior giving you two more options. You can have actually in horizontal splits, so you can do everything that is built in, but you can also decide that one application window will take the top half of the screen or the bottom half of the screen.

And like with Recast in Moom, you can configure keyboard shortcuts to quickly move and resize application windows.

But where it goes beyond what you can do with Recast is that you are not limited to predefined options.

Basically, you can configure almost any window size or position that you need.

And on top of that, it offers custom window layouts.

What does it mean?

There are situations when every time I do something, it’s always the same windows that are opened, and I want those windows to always be at the same place.

For instance, when I have my weekly one-to-one meeting with the president of the BNI chapter that I’m managing, I usually have Slack in the top left corner, OneNote in the bottom left corner, Zoom in the top right corner, and PowerPoint in the bottom right corner.

So I could select each window, Then using the keyboard shortcuts, reposition them. But it’s still a manual operation.

Now with Moom, I can position the windows as I want them, and then record that layout, the positioning and the size of those windows.

I can give it a name, I can assign it a keyboard shortcut.

So now, as long as I have those four windows opened, so Slack, OneNote, Zoom, and PowerPoint.

When I press control option command B, all those windows, doesn’t matter where they are, how big they are, they will resize and reposition immediately in their corner.

So very quick. No need to click and drag and resize manually.

The last feature of Moom that I’d like to discuss is called Snap to Edges and Corners.

Those of you who are familiar with Microsoft Windows, you will remember that if you drag a window, let’s say, to the right edge of the screen, what happens is that it can automatically expand to take the right half of the screen, then asking you which window do you want on the left half?

Well Moom offers the same capability.

Now pay attention because if you have defined Hot Corners, which I’ve introduced in episode 59, you might have conflicts, if you position the mouse in a corner and it’s both a Hot Corner and something that Moom expects to do, you might not like the behavior.

If you have defined spaces, so different desktops on your one Mac, then it’ll also conflict with that. And if you have multiple monitors, it’s also the same. Okay? You go to the edge of the screen, either Moom kicks in or you want to go to the other monitor, so be careful with, with that.

In terms of cost, you can use Moom for free 300 times, but then you will need to pay a one-time license fee of $10, which is really a bargain.

BetterTouchTool

Now I’ve kept the most powerful tool for the end, and it’s called BetterTouchTool.

As the name suggests you can easily configure your own magic mouse or magic trackpad gestures in order to trigger a bunch of things.

You can make BetterTouchTool open files, launch applications, resize and position application windows.

You can interact with applications, meaning that you can launch a series of keyboard shortcuts.

So if in your workflow you need to do several things always in the same order, yes, obviously you could learn the keyboard shortcuts and do them one after the other.

But with BetterTouchTool, you could do one thing, and the three or four keyboard shortcuts you do in a row will be applied automatically.

And you can even further then launch automations. So it’s compatible with Shortcuts, AppleScript, Automator.

In terms of triggers, you can do more than the Magic Mouse and the magic Trackpad gestures, you can define your own keyboard shortcuts.

If you have a MacBook Pro with a TouchBar, you can also use then the TouchBar as the trigger.

If you have an Apple TV Siri remote, you can use that.

The developer has created an iPhone and an iPad application called BetterTouchTool Remote. And so from your iPhone or your iPad, you can trigger stuff that can happen on your Mac.

It could be time-based. It could be when you open a specific URL. It could be when you connect to a given Wi-Fi network or when one of your devices is within Bluetooth range.

You can see it’s a really, really powerful application.

Now, I would recommend trying it out only. When you have exhausted what you can do either with Native macOS capabilities or with Raycast and Moom.

In terms of price, you can try it for free for 45 days, and after that you have two options. You can pay $10 for two years of software updates, or you can pay $22 for a lifetime license. Again, it’s quite inexpensive.

And if you have a Setapp subscription, so SETAPP, it’s a subscription that allows you to install and use more than 240 applications which starts at $9.99 per month for one Mac and goes up to $14.99 per month for four Macs and four iOS devices.

If you have that, you can then use BetterTouchTool, not for free, but it’s part of the package.

By the way, a link to all the tool that I have mentioned in this episode will be available at macpreneur.com/episode60.

Recap

So to recap, the goal of this episode was to explore third-party utilities that can help you drastically minimize the number of unnecessary clicks on your Mac.

I have started with Raycast, a very powerful and extensible alternative to Spotlight. Then I’ve covered Moom, an all-in-one utility to manage application windows, and I finished with BetterTouchTool, the Swiss Army Knife of Mac Automation.

In the next episode, episode 61, I will dive deeper into strategies and techniques to minimize repetitive typing.

So that’s it for today.

If you’d like to know how well you are currently coping with the three killers of Mac productivity, I’ve prepared a free quiz available at macpreneur.com/score. S C O R E.

So visit macpreneur.com/score to discover your Mac productivity score today.

And until next time, I’m Damien Schreurs, wishing you a great day.