Efficient Mac Development Tools Unveiled: Productivity Secrets for Backend Engineers

4 min readNov 5, 2024

Introduction

As backend developers, choosing the right tools can significantly boost our productivity. In this article, I’ll share my experience accumulated over years of Mac development, introducing several Mac applications and plugins that I find particularly helpful for backend programmers.

Writing Tool: Craft

I’ve used various note-taking apps, like Evernote, notion, then moved to VNote for its Markdown support.

I eventually discovered Craft, a popular note-taking tool with Markdown support, aesthetically pleasing fonts and colors, and template functionality suitable for daily reports.

Content can be organized into blocks and pages with nested hierarchies, allowing me to manage yearly reports within a single file, integrating weekly and daily reports. It also offers 50 free AI actions per month, similar to Notion AI, useful for document editing.

Essential Mac Development Tools

Another Redis Desktop Manager

A user-friendly Redis management tool for Mac, providing a graphical interface for managing and deleting keys.

Chat2DB

A next-generation DB management tool aiming to replace Navicat. It supports AI-powered SQL generation. While the interface is still under development, it offers all the basic functionalities.

Warp

A modern terminal replacement. It’s intelligent and user-friendly, offering auto-completion and suggestions. It’s highly recommended.

Cursor

A coding editor leveraging GPT-4 for intelligent code modification. Useful for quick edits, offering an advantage over IDE plugins that provide suggestions in dialog boxes. However, it lacks the comprehensive features and keyboard shortcuts of a full-fledged IDE.

OrbStack

An alternative to Docker on Mac, offering faster startup times for managing containers.

ServBay

Allows for quick setup of local development environments, including PostgreSQL, Redis, Memcached, PHP, Node.js, etc.

Parallels Desktop

A reliable Mac virtual machine software for tasks that require a Windows environment.

IntelliJ IDEA Plugins

CamelCase

Quickly convert strings between camelCase, snake_case, and other casing formats.

Fitten Code

A Github Copilot alternative offering AI-powered code suggestions. It claims faster suggestion speeds than Copilot. In my testing with algorithm problems, the suggestions are quite good, even better than Copilot in optimizing details. However, it’s not necessarily superior in all aspects. I’ll provide a more comprehensive evaluation after further testing.

IdeaVim

Highly efficient once you’re accustomed to it. While the trackpad often suffices for cursor movement, the real power lies in combining nnoremap with IntelliJ IDEA's actions.

For instance, to copy an Arthas watch command for a method, I simply press <Space>a>w. This is achieved through key mappings in the .ideavimrc configuration file:

" watch
nnoremap <Space>aw :action ArthasWatch<CR>
" trace
nnoremap <Space>at :action ArthasTrace<CR>
" jad
nnoremap <Space>dc :action ArthasJadCommandAction<CR>

Different key sequences yield different command results, streamlining workflows. For example, to quickly select an entire method including its comments, I use the following configuration and press <Space>e>x:

nnoremap <Space>ex va{<Bar>:action EditorSelectWord<CR>:action EditorSelectWord<CR>:action EditorSelectWord<CR>:action EditorSelectWord<CR>

If there’s enough interest, I can dedicate a separate post to my IntelliJ IDEA Vim configuration.

Conclusion

I hope this article provides valuable insights for choosing and using Mac development tools. Whether you’re a beginner or a seasoned developer, these tools can become indispensable assets.

Finally, I’d love to hear your feedback and experiences. What are your favorite tools? What other gems are worth recommending? Please share your thoughts in the comments, let’s learn and grow together.