Mac Applications for Web Development

Laura Shapiro
Aug 24, 2017 · 3 min read

Hey friends and strangers! You may have noticed that I have not posted on this blog for several months. That is because I am now employed, and thus I have been busy learning things that are proprietary and/or not interesting to anyone besides the four people on my team.

Well, I’m now two months into this job. I’ve just wrapped up a Windows-only project, and I’ve finally been allocated a brand new MacBook. OSX has always been my preferred development environment, so I had lots of applications and utilities I knew I needed ASAP.

As I was installing things, I started taking notes for my own reference. But then I realized that this could be useful for a more general audience. That being said, this is just my personal workflow; obviously there are tons of tools out there, and I’m sure your text editor is also awesome.

Also: I am pretty sure this is all free to use. If I get a “trial expired” popup I will update this post.

Xcode /Apple’s developer tools

I don’t actually use xCode as an editor, but among other things, this gives me ruby and python (2.7) and git.

Node

I’m primarily developing in Javascript so this is a must.

NVM (node version manager)

Sometimes, while I’m doing said Javascript development, something gets thrown off by Node 8 and I need to try it in Node 6.

Homebrew & Homebrew-Cask

Package manager; an easy way to install many of these other apps, and it will inevitably come in handy again.

Spectacle

A super-intuitive window management tool. I cannot tell you how many times I tried to use these keyboard shortcuts on my PC and got frustrated.

Chrome

in this case it was a Safari butter-robot but still applicable

Sublime Text

My preferred text editor. I haven’t tried all of them or even most of them! But I’m familiar with this one’s keyboard shortcuts which is the most important part for getting down to business. It does not include the very important terminal shortcut out of the box, but it’s just one command:

ln -s “/Applications/Sublime Text.app/Contents/SharedSupport/bin/subl” /usr/local/bin/subl

Clipy

A clipboard manager is crucial because I am constantly copying and pasting snippets of code and I very frequently need to harken to back the one I copied ten minutes ago. (My previous favorite, ClipMenu, has ceased development; this is a fork.)

Hub

A command line tool that provides extra utilites for github. I have really only used the “create” command, but that’s useful enough I wanted this on day 1.

Postman

Robust GUI for testing out your API calls. Test that REST!

GitKraken

A git GUI is super useful now that I am actually collaborating with people and need to browse their commits and resolve merge conflicts and so forth. On the PC I was using the generically-named Git Extensions; this was a top Google result and it looks pretty neat so far.

Visual Studio Code

I’m mostly sticking with my sublime-and-terminal workflow, but there have been few times when I’ve absolutely needed to use VSCode features (breakpoints, intellisense). Also, I’ve been working a bit on Electron apps, and I’ve heard this is one of the best in the genre.

The Unarchiver

Exactly what is says on the tin. (Opens up zip, gzip, rar, etc.)

Macdown

I’ve never actually used a non-browser markdown editor before; when I saw this on a list of developer tools, I figured it would save me that inevitable “reformatted readme” commit.

f.lux

Flux changes the light coming off your screen to mimic the temperature of natural light. Frankly, I think resetting my biological clock to a pre-screen era is a losing battle, but it’s a low effort utility so I might as well have it.

You might be wondering why I did not install Slack. I am not alone in thinking that the Slack client slows down my whole computer. In the meantime, I’ve had perfectly good results allowing desktop notifications from my work’s channel from a Chrome tab. (This also keeps me from being distracted by all the other Slack channels I’ve joined.)

I hope this list was useful for you! If you have recommendations of additional or replacement tools, I’d love to hear about it!

)

Laura Shapiro

Written by

journeyman web developer coding in NYC

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