Software to make Macs friendlier to Windows people

macOS has a few UX differences from Windows that can make it difficult to switch from Windows to macOS. Here's some tools and tricks to work around them:

Remap keys

You can change some default keybinds using the Settings app directly under Customize modifier keys (search for this in Settings). If you're more gung-ho, you can use hidutil (easier with this software tool to generate configs).

You can also use third-party software, some of it paid. The best free tool is Karabiner-Elements which is open source. In practice I remapped some things using the modifier keys, and then remapped some other things using Karabiner.

Alt-tab Windows-style

In macOS, alt-tab and command-tab (win-tab for Windows keyboards) do different things: command-tab switches between applications, and alt-tab switches between windows of the same application. This is fundamental because clicking "X" on a macOS window does not exit the application, it merely closes the current window. To fully exit an application, you have to hit command + Q or close it using the application menu on the upper left.

I find this confusing and just want to switch between all my recent windows when using alt-tab, so I installed an app called AltTab.

Search

Windows search (usually win key) is pretty terrible, and Spotlight is quite a bit better. So you should relearn the muscle memory to just hit command + space when you want to search.

Window Snapping

macOS has recently added better window snapping support, but for a long time it was not as good as Windows. You can obviously use a proper tiling window manager, but if you're lazy, I find Rectangle is the simplest way to get the same behavior. I've heard Loop is also pretty good and intuitive but there's slightly more of a learning curve.

Next time I set up a new Mac I'll document what I install (there's some software you can't live without, and some general hygiene stuff like not overwriting system Python) and put it here.