8 Mac Apps Every Developer Should Install on a Fresh Setup in 2026

Whether you just unboxed a new MacBook or wiped your drive for a clean start, the first few hours of setting up a dev machine matter. You want to get productive fast without spending a whole day tweaking configs. I've set up more Macs than I can count at this point — for personal projects, work machines, and side hustles. Here are the 8 apps I install before I write a single line of code. 1. Homebrew — The Package Manager You Can't Skip If you're a developer on macOS, this is literally step one. Homebrew handles installing CLI tools, languages, and even GUI apps via casks. Before you do anything else, open Terminal and run the install script. Once it's set up, everything else on this list gets easier. brew install becomes muscle memory within a week. 🔗 brew.sh 2. Raycast — Spotlight on Steroids Raycast replaced both Spotlight and Alfred for me. It's a launcher, clipboard manager, snippet expander, window manager, and calculator rolled into one app. The extension ecosystem is insane — t