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Top 23 C++ MacOS Projects
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I tried 3 options, for converting a DWG to a DXF -- FreeCAD, CloudConvert and LibreDWG, and I will be talking about how all 3 options failed for me.
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keepassxc
KeePassXC is a cross-platform community-driven port of the Windows application โKeePass Password Safeโ.
Project mention: Preparing for KDE Plasma's Last X11-Supported Release | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-06-02 -
As a both old Linux and now decade user of MacOS, after I got used to no middle-click paste and no focus-follows-mouse:
1. Keyboard shortcuts are Emacs, Ctrl-A: start of line, E: end of line, K: kill selected or to end of line, Y to paste, etc. https://support.apple.com/en-au/102650#text
2. Karabiner elements (FOSS) fixes keyboard mappings outside of the Settings: https://karabiner-elements.pqrs.org/
3. I have the dock on the left hand side, not bottom and I have a 2 monitor (iMac 5K 27"+ Dell 4K 27") setup with the iMac flat in front of me and the curve/2nd to the right. Menu bar is then close to the main windows.
4. Menu bar widgets etc are fixable with thaw https://github.com/stonerl/Thaw
5. Window management via keyboard is fixable with rectangle https://rectangleapp.com/
6. Use Macports to add all the Linux/Unix utilities, works with MacOS properly (eg Python/Java frameworks). Ports can have variants, plus you can have multiple versions installed side-by-side with `port select`. https://www.macports.org/
Not sure about fonts, on a 5K iMac they're fine and the 4K Dell works too. You need to use a resolution that fits with Mac's ideas of resolution, so I've got the 5K and 4K both at 2560x1440, which is Mac's idea of 2x resolution.
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Kodi Home Theater Software
Kodi is an award-winning free and open source home theater/media center software and entertainment hub for digital media. With its beautiful interface and powerful skinning engine, it's available for Android, BSD, Linux, macOS, iOS, tvOS and Windows.
https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/28404
And yes, it correctly diagnosed the problem - I confirmed this morning. The cache had been partially deleted (exactly like it said) and the patched version of the software automatically detected this and rebuilt the cache rather than crashing. This was using the initial version of the patch from commit 1 of the PR.
I then talked with Claude a bit to come up with a less hacky solution that doesn't require constant cache rebuilding, and it suggested writing the "cache" to no_backup, bypassing the cache trimmer. However, this required rebuilding the .so via NDK, so it spun up a full VM in multipass, installed all the tools in there to build the fully patched APK, and built it (the VM was my suggestion, it was about to just brew install everything and mess with my local dev environment).
You can read the full log here, it's nuts:
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BackgroundMusic
Background Music, a macOS audio utility: automatically pause your music, set individual apps' volumes and record system audio.
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MMKV
An efficient, small mobile key-value storage framework developed by WeChat. Works on Android, iOS, macOS, Windows, POSIX, and OHOS.
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DearPyGui
Dear PyGui: A fast and powerful Graphical User Interface Toolkit for Python with minimal dependencies
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My "Notepad++ for Mac" so far has been NotepadNext (https://github.com/dail8859/NotepadNext). I will give this one a try as well, and wish them best of luck. I hope they release the Linux version as well.
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sherpa-onnx
Speech-to-text, text-to-speech, speaker diarization, speech enhancement, source separation, and VAD using next-gen Kaldi with onnxruntime without Internet connection. Support embedded systems, Android, iOS, HarmonyOS, Raspberry Pi, RISC-V, RK NPU, Axera NPU, Ascend NPU, x86_64 servers, websocket server/client, support 12 programming languages
The assistant button opens a turn-based voice loop (speech to text, then VAD, then Gemma 4, then text to speech) that stays local by default. The built-in voice recognition and TTS on phones are fast but flat and robotic, so Aide ships a real choice of voices instead: roughly 23 Piper, Kokoro, MeloTTS, and Matcha voices for output and a stack of Zipformer, Whisper, Moonshine, Parakeet, SenseVoice, and GigaAM models for input. The whole voice toolkit runs on Sherpa-ONNX, which gives Aide one fast, on-device runtime for STT, TTS, and VAD across all of those models, so none of your audio has to leave the phone to be heard or spoken back.
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Project mention: Show HN: FluidCAD โ Parametric CAD with JavaScript | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-04-10
I'll throw my hat in on the feedback... looks great!
https://github.com/openscad/openscad/pull/4478#issuecomment-...
My pet use case is: "My naive approach as a programmer would be: `pen := new Pen(q,r,s,t); box := new Box( pen.L, pen.W, pen.H )`" along with being able to sometimes work with the whole pen, and sometimes touch the pen vs. the cap separately.
Since it's all javascript, it seems like there's a chance that this use case would work (ie: `p = Pen(...).render().getWidth()`)? Additionally, your intermediate step screenshots really makes it seem like a SketchUp-ish GUI would be perfect! Obviously a ton of work, but SketchUp's "grab face + extrude / push", but if it were "sticky" to the underlying parametric components seems like it'd be an awesome combo... something like group/components, but backed by code instead of GUI-only (or GUI-centric) editing.
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Project mention: Microsoft is open sourcing Windows 11's UI framework | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-08-02
No, it implements its own functionality. As an example consider one of the most basic controls which is available pretty much everywhere (i.e. no need for polyfill), the push button: the source code[0] for QPushButton clearly implements the behavior itself, it does not rely on any native button.
Compare with wxWidgets' equivalent to QPushButton, wxButton, where there is a backend-specific header[1] and implementation[2] where 99% of the wxButton functionality is there (there is a `btncmn.cpp` under `common` that is shared across backends but that has very little code itself).
[0] https://github.com/qt/qtbase/blob/dev/src/widgets/widgets/qp...
[1] https://github.com/wxWidgets/wxWidgets/blob/master/include/w...
[2] https://github.com/wxWidgets/wxWidgets/blob/master/src/msw/b...
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caesium-image-compressor
Caesium is an image compression software that helps you store, send and share digital pictures, supporting JPG, PNG, WebP and TIFF formats. You can quickly reduce the file size (and resolution, if you want) by preserving the overall quality of the image.
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Clipboard
๐๐๏ธ๐ฌ Your new, ๐ง๐๐๐ค๐ฃ๐ ๐ช๐ก๐๐๐๐ค๐ช๐จ๐ก๐ฎ smart clipboard manager
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Project mention: GOG is getting acquired by its original co-founder: What it means for you | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-12-29
You might be interested in VCMI, which is an open source engine for HoMM3.
https://vcmi.eu/
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The-Forge
The Forge Cross-Platform Framework PC Windows, Steamdeck (native), Ray Tracing, macOS / iOS, Android, XBOX, PS4, PS5, Switch, Quest 2
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OpenRGB
Open source RGB lighting control that doesn't depend on manufacturer software. Supports Windows, Linux, MacOS. Mirror of https://gitlab.com/CalcProgrammer1/OpenRGB. Releases can be found on GitLab.
Project mention: Writing a basic Linux device driver when you know nothing about Linux drivers | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-06-26I think they wrote the code more for the challenge of it than anything else. The final code doesn't seem to do more than the bare basics (which is probably enough for the author).
Plus, to port this to OpenRGB, you'd need to rewrite the code into C++ (ugly, old C-inspired C++, at that: https://github.com/CalcProgrammer1/OpenRGB/blob/master/CONTR...) which would take most of the joy out of it for me at least.
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Project mention: Mounting tar archives as a filesystem in WebAssembly | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-04-24
Now I want to try how does that work with BTFS which in a similar vein mounts a torrent file or magnet link as a read only directory https://github.com/johang/btfs
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warzone2100
Command the forces of The Project in a battle to rebuild the world after mankind has been nearly destroyed by nuclear missiles. A 100% free and open source real-time strategy game for Windows, macOS, Linux, BSD+
Project mention: Ask HN: Which Do you know any open source games? | news.ycombinator.com | 2025-08-10 -
waifu2x-ncnn-vulkan
waifu2x converter ncnn version, runs fast on intel / amd / nvidia / apple-silicon GPU with vulkan
NOTE:
The open source projects on this list are ordered by number of github stars.
The number of mentions indicates repo mentiontions in the last 12 Months or
since we started tracking (Dec 2020).
C++ MacOS discussion
C++ MacOS related posts
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macOS Needs Its Grid Back
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Past Tense: A DragonRuby Sound Installation Built on libpd
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Show HN: Contrapunk โ Real-time counterpoint harmony from guitar input, in Rust
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Opera: Rewind The Web to 1996 (Opera at 30)
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Jemalloc Un-Abandoned by Meta
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Claude Code Voice Mode
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Setting Up Kanata with Karabiner-DriverKit-VirtualHIDDevice on macOS
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A note from our sponsor - SaaSHub
www.saashub.com | 7 Jun 2026
Index
What are some of the best open-source MacOS projects in C++? This list will help you:
| # | Project | Stars |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | FreeCAD | 31,340 |
| 2 | shadPS4 | 31,269 |
| 3 | keepassxc | 27,522 |
| 4 | Karabiner-Elements | 22,254 |
| 5 | Kodi Home Theater Software | 20,805 |
| 6 | BackgroundMusic | 19,013 |
| 7 | MMKV | 18,608 |
| 8 | DearPyGui | 15,464 |
| 9 | NotepadNext | 14,211 |
| 10 | sherpa-onnx | 12,755 |
| 11 | openscad | 9,513 |
| 12 | multipass | 9,129 |
| 13 | olive | 9,040 |
| 14 | Mumble | 8,044 |
| 15 | wxWidgets | 7,160 |
| 16 | caesium-image-compressor | 5,974 |
| 17 | Clipboard | 5,798 |
| 18 | vcmi | 5,666 |
| 19 | The-Forge | 5,560 |
| 20 | OpenRGB | 4,094 |
| 21 | btfs | 3,945 |
| 22 | warzone2100 | 3,831 |
| 23 | waifu2x-ncnn-vulkan | 3,411 |
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