Apple

Rectangle - for arranging windows
Warp Terminal - a souped up terminal
Maccy - clipboard manager
Homebrew - installing packages
Sublime - notepad++ equivalent
Insomnia - api request manager like Postman

iStat Menus - gives nice menubar system monitoring panes
Soulver - notepad/calculator hybrid. great for working out thinky problems that involve math
GrandPerspective - disk space usage management/visualization. There's prettier options but none as quick and straightforward.
Postico - Nice GUI for postgres
Turn on hot corners for multitasking. Throw your cursor in a corner -> see all open apps/windows/desktop. (Used to be a default but now it's more hidden.)

For development? I just use VSCode and the default terminal with zpresto. (Though i switch to Nova for basic build-less html css/js stuff. It's a nice native app as all things Panic are.)

While it has nothing to do with web dev, the app “Paste” gives you an infinite copy-paste history that is extremely useful in all kinds of ways, but I certainly make use of it when moving code around or needing to paste short strings in sequence from one place to another. You can just copy-copy-copy-copy a bunch of things and then be able to easily find the spots you have to paste into without all the flipping back and forth.

You can’t go wrong with iTerm 2, it provides a lot more functionality than the default terminal. Many of my coworkers are diehard sublime users for a notepad++ alternative!

You can install homebrew packages via brew.sh. It'll bridge some gaps for you coming from Linux. As for terminal, I like Kitty personally, but iTerm2 is very popular as well. As far as a note pad I like Obsidian for knowledge management. If you're in the terminal a lot, learning an editor like vim or emacs could make you more productive, or even learning it and installing a vscode plugin that emulates vim keyboard navigation.

• Little snitch is an overpowered firewall which is overall excellent.

• Obsidian works on all platforms and is a good note keeper.

• Keyboard maestro allows for automated keyboard input.

• alt tab restores some windows like behaviour which I like the option of

VS Code works well on macOS. I use it on my Windows work computer and my Mac home computer, and the experience is pretty much the same, aside from key bindings.

From my understanding, Emacs is easier to get up and running in macOS, though I'm not really sure what the challenges are on Windows.

CodeRunner, Whisk and Sublime are pretty good alternatives to Notepad++. I've tried each and can say that the apps are great.
Insomnia is a great thing to use, too.
And the other apps I use have already been recommended, so I hope something will work for you too.
There are a lot of different apps, and it depends on your preferences. Also, there are different articles and blogs where you can read the info, sometimes reviews, and choose something you like and find useful. Here is one article https://setapp.com/how-to/how-to-recover-excel-file-on-mac I read it recently, and it provided me with some useful info about recovering files on Mac. There, you can also see some info about the app, which can help you to do it, and I think it's also a useful one.

LaunchBar as an Alfred alternative. (paid application)
I use MacPorts in place of Brew.
Kitty as another terminal alternative.

Dash for offline documentation, combined with Alfred for instant searching.

Very worth paying for, the increase in productivity is awesome.

Iterm2 is also very helpful

My recommendations are going to be:

• Termius: A very nicely designed SSH & SFTP program
• Sip: A menubar app to grab colors from your screen in hexadecimal
• Amethyst: A Tiling Window Manager. You'll either love it or hate it, depending on how much you like keyboard shortcuts
• Codekit: An all-in-one preprocessor. Less practical for large projects, but it's no-nonsense setup is nice for small ones
• Arc Browser: A mac-exclusive Chromium based browser, built specifically to organize large amounts of tabs at once. It also provides excellent support for splitting the pane between multiple tabs and is very pretty
• I'll second the rec for iTerm 2. It's a very dependable terminal.