Setting up your MacBook for development.
MacBook is one of the best machines you can get for development, I know the price is a little high but most of the developers will recommend you to go for a Mac machine. In fact, some developers also tried (and succeeded) to build a Hackintosh that is Mac Operating system on a non-apple hardware a hacked macintosh hence the name Hackintosh.
I have always used a Linux machine for development and I still love the Linux environment but when I got my first MacBook, I quite liked it, it’s lightweight, the operating system is Unix-based which gave me feel of Linux plus the Operating System and the Hardware is built by the same company (Apple), the OS and the Hardware interaction is smooth.
Yes, there were some caveats while switching from my dear Linux and in this article, I will be sharing the required tools to get started with development on your MacBook.
iTerm the Terminal replacement
The terminal is one of the most essential tools for developers. Yes, the Mac terminal is no bad at all but I still prefer iTerm for Development.
By default, iTerm runs on Bash, but I would recommend you to switch to Zsh with oh_my_zsh with almost all the required plugins pre-installed.
- iTerm is more customizable
- iTerm has mouse support
- iTerm supports auto-copy by just selection.
- iTerm has theming support
HomeBrew
After switching to Linux, the main thing that I missed is, apt-get. apt-get is a wonderful package-manager for Linux. It does make setting up tools very easy and Homebrew is that same package manager for macOS. It does work almost the same as apt-get and makes setting up things very easy just run:
brew install <application-name>
VSCode
You won’t need any introduction to VS-Code, it’s our favorite atom-based, open-source, code editor by Microsoft. Everyone loves VSCode due to a variety of Plugins to help with your workflow and themes to customize the looks of the editor.
Firefox Developer Edition
You are almost done now the only thing you need is a good developer-friendly Web-browser. Safari is good, Safari is great at battery saving on the Mac but there are many things which it can not do out of the box. I like chrome but chrome is a RAM-hog, it uses so much of RAM. Hence, I prefer Firefox Developer Edition.
Firefox developer edition has great plugins, but there are many features which it provides out of the box. Features like:
- Auto JSON Formatting
- Pocket integration
- Reading Mode
- In-private browsing with Tracking Blockers
- The narrator in the browser
- Regular updates
Those are the first Apps I installed after switching from Macbook Air to Macbook pro and the views given in this article are my personal views about these applications. There are many other applications that you might have to install and are necessary for you but these are absolutely necessary applications to get started with.
