As a developer, I’ve been working with almost any possible Linux distro, Windows (Linux subsystem, relax), but nothing compares to using my Macs so I’ve preferred OSX/macOS on my personal machines for almost a decade now. I do mostly development work, but also some photo and video editing and even 3D modelling, AR and gaming. The goal of this text is to lay down the basic tools that make me feel at home on a new Mac and cover how to get them. Also to have a single place to turn to when I set up a new Hackintosh. More on that on another post.
Homebrew
It’s a package manager for Mac (and Linux btw), which helps installing almost anything in a stable and predictable manner
/usr/bin/ruby -e “$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)”
brew update && brew upgrade
Git
Macs come with git preinstalled. The only problem is that it’s super out of date version. Did you know that git 2.23.0 finally differentiates between restoring a file to HEAD and switching between branches ;)
Backup available git:
sudo mv /usr/bin/git /usr/bin/git-apple
Install git with brew
brew install git
Sublime Text
Text editor of choice is my long time friend Sublime Text. I don’t plan on joining the holy war on text editors and compare it to vim/emacs/atom/VS code etc. Reason I use ST3 is that I already know the shortcuts by heart and it can open huuuge files with no sweating at all.
- Create a shortcut command:
ln -s /Applications/Sublime\ Text.app/Contents/SharedSupport/bin/subl /usr/local/bin/.
- set git commit message editor
git config —global core.editor “subl -n -w”
- doing the same for all other editors: here
iTerm2 - macOS Terminal Replacement
great customisation support, including the relatively new resource panel, which helps monitor how the system behaves right in the terminal
ZSH
Install:
brew install zsh
Set zsh as your default shell:
sudo sh -c "echo $(which zsh) >> /etc/shells" && chsh -s $(which zsh)
rbenv
Install:
brew install rbenv