#19

KWM, where have you been all my life?

1 Like
#20

Some counter positions form a looooooong time Mac developer (as in, I was on the Mac team at Apple in 1985!!!)

  • I’m a life-long vi/vim user: Get SublimeText or Atom and use that instead.
  • I’m a life-long vi/vim user: set -o vi will let you use vi keybindings on the command line! (This is a bash-ism and works wherever bash is sold)
  • Use git to manage your projects, and Atlassian’s free SourceTree as a lovely GUI into it.
  • The font Andale Mono is already on your mac - it is excellent for terminals. Also, I know people swear by iTerm2, but I find the standard Terminal completely up to the task.
  • Don’t use homebrew: Having developed tons of open source, I’ve learned the hard way that having homebrew on your system often conflicts with the library assumptions of OS X. As a consequence, stuff you build will work fine for you, but often not work for users who don’t have homebrew. The annoying flip-side is that if you want to use some open source library, you often have to build it yourself… ah well.
2 Likes
#21

Vim + SuperCollider tip:

I’m a vim nerd.

I use the atom editor with vim bindings and this package for SuperCollider:

Works quite well.

1 Like
#22

This is really terrible advice unless you really know what you are doing. Sorry Mark.

2 Likes
#23

Well, it depends on what you are doing: If you plan on releasing your software to people that aren’t developers, then I’ll stand by that advice. If you are just building for yourself, it’s fine.

1 Like
#24

I disagree completely. Without a package manager it becomes nearly impossible to track the state of the many interconnected dependencies that inevitably rear their heads.

#25

@mzero clarified for me offline that he intended to say that open source developers making OS X software for non-developers should use Apple’s packaging mechanism to allow for drag and drop installation rather than “brew install [package]”. That’s fair enough. I was imagining he meant “make; make install” as an alternative (which really is a terrible idea).

If you’re trying to reach non-developers and you feel comfortable with making use of Apple’s ecosystem, it’s probably good advice, but there are sooo many other reasons why a person might want to use homebrew.

1 Like
#26

It’s a bit more nuanced than that… but this is the wrong forum. Suffice it to say I don’t think homebrew is a necessity.

If software developers or others want to explore the details, PM me or we can start a new thread.

#27

Regarding Alfred, tell me more! What workflows do you use? I notice they boast music workflows – do you use the iTunes mini-player?

#28

And it might be. I think this is a workflow thing. I, for one, haven’t looked back since making the switch. (Actually, hey, maybe I should — it’s possible, like spotlight, that the gap has been narrowed in the years since!)

This may well be a topic for another thread but my 2 cents is that this is overly cautionary and throws the baby out with the bathwater for most people. Honestly, writing open source software is my day job and I’d be happy NEVER to have to build another dependency from source again. Regrettably, I have to sometimes but I’ll take what I can get to keep that at a minimum!

(Sorry if it seems like I’m trolling. Cheers @mzero! )

2 Likes
#29

I have. Also tried Slate, Moom and Hammerspoon. KWM is more like a real tiled window manager like XMonad or Awesome. Havent setup shortcuts yet. Mainly use alt+cmd+h for full screening stuff, the rest is being taken care of :slight_smile:

Coded a complete window manager with Hammerspoon and added some shortcuts/modals for external api requests (of my Logitech Media Server). Lua is a cute programming language. Have to say I need to install it again after my reinstall :slight_smile:

Using Cog (brew cask install cog) myself, probably it works with the itunes lib as it play everything. It hasnt been updated in years though.

I found that vim-mode-plus has the nicest vim emulation

2 Likes
#30

I use Logitech Media Server too, we’ve got a few of the pre-Logitech Squeezeboxes dotted around our house.

Not sure if you’re aware, but it’s possible to use your computer as an LMS client with squeezelite, this is what I do on my computer instead of bothering with iTunes et al.

#31

Nah, we’re all good! :grinning:

3 Likes
#32

The question seemed to be asked by someone looking to use a Mac for development, and given that: yes, I would recommend brew to all developers unhesitatingly.

Issues around distribution, however, are complex when expecting resources to be available on a system, and in general, there’s a reason compiled executables are good things (and why, though I don’t write it, I greatly like Go’s approach to making binaries). The built-in versions of (most open-source libraries) vary so wildly between OSX versions (especially when it comes to things like Perl, Apache, Ruby, etc) that I long stopped trusting the idea the built-in version would work. I think the only built-in open source product I use with regularity is the Apache install, and I got bit when they bumped it from 2.2 to 2.4.

I should caveat that: I only tend to program for either a) myself, b) hosted environments I will be in control of or able to specify and c) other developers. But as a developer, brew is a vital tool, and life is too short for me to be compiling Imagemagick or Elasticsearch from source.

1 Like
#33

Seconding this… I’ve got my music needs pretty well handled by Spotify and an old laptop that I leave plugged in to my stereo. I can just remote control it over the network.

For me, Alfred just seems like MORE complexity. Kind of loving how OSX has robust enough utilities that I only need to replace what ACTUALLY bothers me.

1 Like
#34

I’m a fan of Autojump, for quickly navigating directories (or opening Finder windows) from the terminal.

Anyone else using Fish? :grin:

1 Like
#35

yeah, I am very fond of j.

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#36

fellow fish shell and fish editor user here :wink:

autojump seems like a more feature rich version of z, will check out!

1 Like
#37

Completely off-topic, but I make it a point to thank everyone I meet who was on that team. Thank you for making our world a better place.

5 Likes
#38

This is so wonderful! Also, I actually completely agree on regular Terminal (so far) but iTerm2’s Hotkey Window and not wanting to have two terminal emulators open all the time has kind of forced my hand.
The font recommendation is also swell! I’ve been using PT Mono and am ready for a change.

I read through your argument against and jasonw22’s argument for brew and am thankful to have all this in the back of my mind now. I’m a student and package managers are what drew me to Linux because it saved me so much time. I think I’m going to stick with homebrew for now, but it’s valuable to know about that other reality out there!

Man, I wish. But I spend so much time SSH’d in to headless machines that I’m gonna keep working at some serious vim chops.