6 Apps to get the best Mac features on Windows
How to get Spotlight, Quick Look, Dock and more macOS feature on your Windows machine, all for free.
As a long-time Mac user, I got used to the features offered by macOS, and it’s been working great for me. But, from time to time I have to switch to a Windows machine mostly for specific work-related projects, and this is when I’m missing some of the macOS features I got so accustomed to.
The apps below try to fill some of these gaps, and they do a pretty good job IMHO. Best, all the apps listed here are free, and some are even open-source.
QuickLook
I don’t even know how Microsoft didn’t think of implementing a file preview feature in Windows Explorer. More recent versions of Windows Explorer have a limited preview capability, but it’s not even close to decent to be completely honest. This is where QuickLook excels. The app is available in Microsoft Store, it’s free, and it’s pretty simple to use: just press Spacebar on your keyboard and you’ve got a beautiful preview of the selected file.
Everything
Searching through your files on Windows is known to be quite slow and not entirely useful. Almost everyone agrees it’s a pretty frustrating experience. This is where a tool like Everything comes in. This is a tiny utility that can be either installed or simply downloaded and used as is. It’s super fast and has plenty of options to fine-tune your searches. While we are talking about search check out the next tool, grepWin, which is another fantastic little gem.
grepWin
grepWin is another great tool for searching your files on Windows. I personally like the regular expression feature along the text search, as well as the search & replace functionality, although I have to admit I haven’t used the later too often. I mainly use the regular expression/text search. Similar to Everything is super fast and it can search file names as well as file content.
Flow Launcher
Spotlight is probably one of the most used features on Mac and as a long-time Mac user I miss it every time I switch to a Windows machine for work or personal stuff. But do not worry, here is Flow Launcher. This beautiful app is an app launcher, search file utility, preview tool, web search, etc. Its plug-in system allows developers to create plug-ins and its current plug-in community is already rich.
ShareX
Built-in screen capture in macOS is pretty good, although there are some great tools there as well to make it better. But on Windows, let’s admit it screen capture is a joke. No worries, meet ShareX. This is a completely free, open-source screen grab, annotation, and share utility. It has similar keyboard shortcuts to macOS Screenshot utility (so it’s easy to transition), various capture methods (region, application, entire screen, etc.) and post-capture actions. Give it a try, you won’t regret it.
TaskbarXI
This one is more on the customization/personalization side of things. TaskbarXI allows you to customize the look of Windows taskbar and transform it into a macOS dock clone. Please note this version is specific to Windows 11. If you’re running Windows 10 please use TaskbarX. This utility doesn’t really add any features to the Windows taskbar, it just changes the look and feel to that of macOS dock.
I really hope you find these applications as useful as I do. If you have your own apps that bring macOS functionality to Windows I would love to hear from you. Please let me know in the comments section what apps you like.
