Hello,

I had the misfortune of getting a macbook as a new replacement laptop. since i have barely worked with macs, i was wondering if you guys could share your experience by listing what are the equivalent applications for the following and what ever comes to your mind
- notepad++
- winscp
- filezilla
- rdp client
- sharexmod
- keynote-nf

etc..

I hope to get direct answers and not debates on which is better than the other, kind regards BL


PS: apologies, i am still in the early stages so i havent been able to verify which software is already available for mac.
I don't know if Mac has 'Wine', but if it does, just install it to get certain Windows applications to work. But I do know that Linux has it for sure.

There's Teamviewer, Adobe collections, Evernote, Dropbox, MonoDevelop and most browsers. Sorry the only Mac I've ever ran was a Hackintosh Tiger X on a Windows machine, I'm not that friendly with Apple when it comes to PCs.
- SublimeText or TextMate as a text editor
- Transmit by Panic for SFTP
- scp is built in, just invoke it from the terminal
Your list
  • notepad++: If you're familiar with vim or emacs they're available on Mac OS X. Else I recommend Light Table. (Recommending a text editor is not easy, and usually the source of many flamewars).
  • winscp: scp is available in every Mac OS X as a command line tool. Do you need a GUI?
  • filezilla: The filezilla client is available for OS X.
  • rdp client: I used CoRD a few times. It works well.
I don't know keynote-nf or sharexmod to suggest alternatives.

Useful extras
  • IRC Client: irssi is a popular Unix text-based client. The default install is very minimal but highly extensible. If you know some Perl you'll love it. You might already be familiar with it from Linux and other Unix. If you want something more Mac-y, try LimeChat.
  • Terminal Emulator: If you work often inside a terminal, I suggest you avoid the basic Terminal app and replace it with iTerm.
  • Video Player: If you enjoy scripting your video player, try MPlayer. It has a great command line interface. If you want something a bit more "traditional", get VLC.
  • Torrent downloading: I use uTorrent because it's really light. Never tried any other one yet.
  • VPN client: I use a GUI client called Tunnelblick. It's open source and works well.
Become a true h4x0r
There are a couple more things you might want to consider if you want to make your OS X experience more hacker-friendly:
  • The shell shipped by default on modern Macs is bash 3.2. It's an old version of bash, and depending on how much you use the command line, you may want to seriously consider upgrading. If you consider installing a new shell, I suggest you also consider switching to zsh. It's backward compatible with bash, and add very interesting interactive features that will make your life a lot easier. Check out Oh-my-zsh for a repository of community-contributed zsh packages.
  • Speaking of package managers, I recommend installing Homebrew. It's a package manager similar to what you find in the Linux world (like APT or YUM), based on source packages, which means it downloads the source and compiles it locally before every install. It's logically only limited to open source software.
If Mac hinders your job, simply install Windows on the macbook (Install Bootcamp 5 to identify drivers). It's fast, looks nice, and heck it's more stable.

If you want to run executables on Mac, use "Crossover". You can even run Windows games on Mac (I tried C&C Generals Zero Hour).
Filezilla is available for mac
Why do you need Winscp? Filezilla supports SFTP by default.
On mac you have, by default Text mate, and you could install sublime text editor. Both are better than notepad++
RDP client, there are many, I'd use Teamviewer.

Never use Wine, unless you really have to, and on mac, you never have to, really!