THE SMALL STUFF
The mods quietly making everything less annoying.
Jade shows information about whatever block or entity you are looking at. Just Enough Items (JEI) lets you browse all items and their recipes. Enchantment Descriptions explains enchantments in tooltips. Better Ping Display shows ping in milliseconds in the player list. Chat Heads shows who you are chatting with.
Inventory Essentials adds essential inventory tweaks including sorting. Mouse Tweaks improves dragging and moving items with the mouse. Pick Up Notifier lists everything you just collected. Polymorph resolves recipe conflicts by letting you choose the crafting result.
Ok Zoomer adds zoom on the C key with configurable presets. Better Third Person improves the third person camera. Harvest with ease lets you right click crops instead of breaking them. Global XP adds a block that stores XP accessible to all players, and Magnum Torch prevents mob spawns in a large area around your base.
Controlling adds a search bar to Options, Controls. Search the mod name and you will find its keys.