awesome-mac VS BetterDisplay

A large number of extremely talented engineers might beg to differ. Everything you listed as an issue has a solution. Like any operating system, you have to spend the time to learn the intricacies of how it works and to customize it to your liking. For me, must haves are Alfred to replace spotlight, my dotfiles which change a ton of defaults in various apps like finder, the dock, etc, setup key repeat, iterm2 colors and profile, etc. divvy and magnet for window management. Caffeine to prevent sleep. Stats open source menu monitors to replace istatmenus

I’m sure there are newer equivalents to what I’ve listed. I’ve been using those programs for years.

Some jumping off points

https://github.com/jaywcjlove/awesome-mac

https://formulae.brew.sh/analytics/cask-install/30d/

Have a look at these lists for more of the things you are looking for: https://github.com/jaywcjlove/awesome-mac

I guess the awesome Mac list is a solid place to start generally speaking, since there are a lot of apps of all kinds of use cases in there. Personally, I especially love - Raycast (replacement for spotlight, check out Alfred as well) - Bartender (to tidy up the menu bar) - AltTab (gives you a Windows like app switcher) - Rectangle (windows like window management) - purepaste (let’s you paste text without formatting)

I always reference this great repo: https://github.com/jaywcjlove/awesome-mac

> the 4K monitors the author recommends are not good for macOS due to them not supporting native retina scaling above 1080p

Is this true even with the help of 3rd party apps?

My 3840x1600 ultrawide has that problem using the native screen resolution tools but I can get it to full-res HiDPI using BetterDisplay [0].

[0] https://betterdisplay.pro/

2. "BetterDisplay" for better scaling quality on bigger screens, especially if you have a 4k ultrawide. https://github.com/waydabber/BetterDisplay

It isn't a device, it's a software tool. It doesn't make the monitor magically 2x the resolution; it can trick macos to render onto a 5k buffer and then downscale the output to the physical display so it looks not-broken.

https://github.com/waydabber/BetterDisplay

I'm not saying that it'll make 4k look good. I'm saying macOS is unusable on native resolutions - everything is either too small or too blurry, so a 4k display won't do me any good. 25x14 is the sweet spot for me, but I guess Apple decided I'm holding it wrong.

Download BetterDisplay (free to try, $18 for Pro, and well worth it IMO): https://github.com/waydabber/BetterDisplay

This article is very good to explain this ppi thing https://bjango.com/articles/macexternaldisplays2/ also an extra app can make some monitors display sharper (hidpi) https://github.com/waydabber/BetterDisplay

It can be found here: https://github.com/waydabber/BetterDisplay

So I installed the Better Display 2 app [link] , enabled HiDPI 1280x720, and suddenly everything looked both extremely sharp and in a good size. Judging by the size of the screenshot, it mimics Retina 2560 × 1440 and scales it down 2x to 1280x720, making it HiDPI. I can totally recommend you to do as I did.