This is an old revision of the document!


Developing on a mac

This page is under construction, please feel free to add a relevant section or subpage, For now I just need to mention homebrew because it's the preferred method for getting Meld.

Command Line Interface

The default app providing a CLI on macOS is Terminal. It's located in /Applications/Utiilties/Terminal if you're looking for it in Finder, but the simplest way to get to it is to:

  1. press Command + Space
  2. in the resulting search box, type Term
    • you should see the Terminal app as a top search result
  3. use the Down arrow to highlight the Terminal search result
  4. press Return
  5. you should now have a terminal window open

Homebrew

Homebrew is a package manager for macOS. Pretty much any developer software made for Linux (and much that's not) is available for install via Homebrew, and this installation is typically much simpler than alternatives, especially for developer tools.

Both installing Homebrew itself, as well as afterward using it to install other software are done via the command line.

Install Homebrew

On the command line, paste the command found at https://brew.sh/#install to install homebrew.

Install other packages via Homebrew

To install a package that's command-line-only, simply run:

  1. brew install <package>
    • e.g. brew install lolcat

To install a package that has a graphical user interface, simply run:

  1. brew install --cask <package>
    • e.g. brew install --cask meld