Some of the best Mac software in the world is built by volunteers and released for free, and a handful of open-source tools can genuinely change how you use your computer every day. Here are three standouts from a Mac power user’s daily toolkit: a clipboard manager that saves an hour a week, a firewall that puts you in charge of your network, and an AirDrop alternative that actually works when Apple’s own sharing flakes out.
Open-source tools for Mac (Credits: How-To Geek)
Maccy: The Open-Source Clipboard Manager for Mac
Maccy sits at the top of the pile. The open-source clipboard manager is free from the developer’s GitHub page, with a paid option on the Mac App Store or Gumroad for those who want to support the project. It handles everything your Mac can copy: text, images, files, colours and formatted text.
The workflow is simple. Hit Command+Shift+C, use the arrow keys to pick the item you want, then press Return to copy it or Option+Return to copy and paste it immediately. Items you paste all the time can be pinned so they are always within reach. Over a week, that can easily save an hour of tabbing back and forth between windows. Even with macOS 26 Tahoe’s revised Spotlight adding its own clipboard manager, Maccy still earns its place for how smoothly it slots into daily work.
LuLu: A Free Open-Source Firewall for Mac
LuLu is a free, open-source software firewall that lets you decide which apps can talk to the internet. It lives in the menu bar, quietly filtering network traffic in the background, and you can turn it off or review past decisions at any time.
Beyond simple Allow and Deny prompts, LuLu lets you write your own rules, which is handy if you want to stop a particular app from reaching specific domains or servers. On first setup, you can import all your existing rules by adding every installed app to the allow-list, or start from scratch and audit everything yourself. Setup requires granting it network extension permissions and access to your web traffic, and it works alongside VPNs and other traffic filters.
LocalSend: The Open-Source AirDrop Alternative
LocalSend is the open-source answer to AirDrop, and it shines exactly when Apple’s sharing does not. When an older iPhone refused to play nicely with a MacBook Pro, with transfers failing even when the Mac showed up at all, LocalSend had no such problems as long as both devices were on the same wireless network.
It remains the go-to for wirelessly moving files between a Steam Deck and a Mac, or between older Macs in the same household, and it is one of the few apps worth setting to launch automatically whenever macOS starts. If AirDrop has ever left you staring at a missing device, LocalSend is the fix to install before you need it.
Also Read: SideOS AI Launches a Local AI Assistant That Lives in Your Mac’s Notch and Actually Does Things | How to Turn Your Whole Website Into a Single WARC File You Can Replay in Your Browser
Source: How-To Geek — read the full story there.
