Homebrew and mise-en-place are the only must have apps for me (both of which are not .app applications). Everything else is pretty well context-dependant and/or built in.
For Homebrew - having used Nix, Macports, and pkgsrc, I found Homebrew easier than everything else. I would like to get into Nix, but there is too much mucking around for it to be worth it to me.
mise-en-place has such a unique feature set that I can’t compare it to anything else. I started using it as a replacement for pyenv and sdkman, and found it so helpful.
For me, the better-than-you-think built in apps are:
- Reminders - I haven’t gone all in on any other task management software, but I don’t bother because Reminders does everything I need
- Mail - it is fiddly and idiot proof to a fault, but provided you don’t have an exotic setup and can deal with only average search capabilities, it works well
- Calendar - it’s a calendar. Only thing I don’t particularly like is the date-picker interface for new events, and that’s mainly because I like my Sunday-Saturday format
- Terminal - it’s tidy and works well. Many swear by iTerm2; I find Terminal good
- Safari - does what it says on the tin and does it well, I like Safari. (Edit: I use Wipr2 for Adblock which is necessary)
- Passwords - having been a medium-long term user (2-5 years) at various times of both Keepass and Password Store, I ended up transitioning to Passwords because of its good integration with Safari and its sync in iCloud, which is good for family. However the app itself has improved over time as well and I call it good
There’s (arguably) an argument to be made that Emacs configuration distributions fit that niche - Doom Emacs, Spacemacs, and Prelude provide varying flavours for different kinds of Emacs users.
Apart from that, I don’t really know what an application would be to Emacs as nvim is to Vim. It’s more like nvim is to Vim what Emacs is to nano, except Emacs came first.
>Any union that does not represent its members to the best of its ability is not a good union.
I absolutely agree, but there are unions and unions. The SDA in Australia for instance is, for some members, useless, and for other members actually harmful - but it has been effective at winning better conditions for some workers. (SDA isn't the best example because RAFFWU, which is another union founded by workers and organisers who believe that SDA has failed workers, does a better job everywhere it goes.) A good union is better than a bad union, and a bad union is often but not always better than no union.
I also agree that unionised workers need to be able to effectively organise, which might involve starting a new union. That being said, union turf wars can devastate actual efforts to better conditions because of issues that could be resolved without splitting the union. The best reason to pack up shop and set up a new union is because the union doesn't have an effective means to, or a culture of, internal democracy, which means problems with the way the union is run can't be addressed. But if a union does have this, it's better to 'work within the system.'
This is definitely not unique to unions, nor are all (or many) unions like this. Of course the examples you list are ridiculous and shouldn’t happen, but the more boring instances of bureaucracy are just part of the mundane process of work in a large company (e.g. raising a ticket on a third party vendor to grant access to some service and the whole process descending into farce as no one knows how to/wants to do it and everyone has a problem with it). The benefits of unionisation almost always outweigh the negatives, and most of the time a union has some degree of member democracy so you can attempt to change internal processes.
mise-en-place has such a unique feature set that I can’t compare it to anything else. I started using it as a replacement for pyenv and sdkman, and found it so helpful.
For me, the better-than-you-think built in apps are:
- Reminders - I haven’t gone all in on any other task management software, but I don’t bother because Reminders does everything I need
- Mail - it is fiddly and idiot proof to a fault, but provided you don’t have an exotic setup and can deal with only average search capabilities, it works well
- Calendar - it’s a calendar. Only thing I don’t particularly like is the date-picker interface for new events, and that’s mainly because I like my Sunday-Saturday format
- Terminal - it’s tidy and works well. Many swear by iTerm2; I find Terminal good
- Safari - does what it says on the tin and does it well, I like Safari. (Edit: I use Wipr2 for Adblock which is necessary)
- Passwords - having been a medium-long term user (2-5 years) at various times of both Keepass and Password Store, I ended up transitioning to Passwords because of its good integration with Safari and its sync in iCloud, which is good for family. However the app itself has improved over time as well and I call it good