Just bought my first macbook what apps should I install as a web developer?
During my entire life (32 years) I used windows and linux machines. Now I bought my first mac book and I would like to know what tools is nice to have to make my work easy.
I am a developer ruby on rails and use vscode, also I use the terminal a lot and the default terminal is not that great. Also I miss notepad++
I highly recommend people use docker for anything they would use Homebrew for. Homebrew is fragile and breaks often. Obviously I understand the appeal, but it isn't worth the heartburn.
I found postman using insane amounts of RAM a few times and some of my coworkers had switched and it’s been pretty nice so far. Pretty much the same feature set without being a RAM hog.
iStat Menus - gives nice menubar system monitoring panes Soulver - notepad/calculator hybrid. great for working out thinky problems that involve math GrandPerspective - disk space usage management/visualization. There's prettier options but none as quick and straightforward. Postico - Nice GUI for postgres
Turn on hot corners for multitasking. Throw your cursor in a corner -> see all open apps/windows/desktop. (Used to be a default but now it's more hidden.)
For development? I just use VSCode and the default terminal with zpresto. (Though i switch to Nova for basic build-less html css/js stuff. It's a nice native app as all things Panic are.)
CodeRunner, Whisk and Sublime are pretty good alternatives to Notepad++. I've tried each and can say that the apps are great.
Insomnia is a great thing to use, too.
And the other apps I use have already been recommended, so I hope something will work for you too.
There are a lot of different apps, and it depends on your preferences. Also, there are different articles and blogs where you can read the info, sometimes reviews, and choose something you like and find useful. Here is one article https://setapp.com/how-to/how-to-recover-excel-file-on-mac I read it recently, and it provided me with some useful info about recovering files on Mac. There, you can also see some info about the app, which can help you to do it, and I think it's also a useful one.
HomeBrew: This is your new best friend, one of the best package managers out there and makes installing specific versions of runtimes and switching between them seamless.
iTerm 2/Termius: Default Terminal isn’t bad but these add a lot of quality of life features such as click to move cursor without using your keyboard and smart text linking.
VSCode: Unrivaled in terms of extensions.
Rectangle: Basically adds Windows’ snapping feature to macOS and has a lot of cool tiling features.
Insomnia: Postman alternative that doesn’t have a crap ton of telemetry. Bonus: You can use vim in it.
DBeaver: One stop shop Database client and there are drivers to make everything from Hive to Teradata connect seamlessly.
Agree with the other commenter about iterm2. I also like Maccy a lot as a simple/free clipboard manager. Alfred is really nice too as a general purpose search/calculator/a lot of other things available at a shortcut.
Termius: A very nicely designed SSH & SFTP program
Sip: A menubar app to grab colors from your screen in hexadecimal
Amethyst: A Tiling Window Manager. You'll either love it or hate it, depending on how much you like keyboard shortcuts
Codekit: An all-in-one preprocessor. Less practical for large projects, but it's no-nonsense setup is nice for small ones
Arc Browser: A mac-exclusive Chromium based browser, built specifically to organize large amounts of tabs at once. It also provides excellent support for splitting the pane between multiple tabs and is very pretty
I'll second the rec for iTerm 2. It's a very dependable terminal.
While it has nothing to do with web dev, the app “Paste” gives you an infinite copy-paste history that is extremely useful in all kinds of ways, but I certainly make use of it when moving code around or needing to paste short strings in sequence from one place to another. You can just copy-copy-copy-copy a bunch of things and then be able to easily find the spots you have to paste into without all the flipping back and forth.
VS Code works well on macOS. I use it on my Windows work computer and my Mac home computer, and the experience is pretty much the same, aside from key bindings.
From my understanding, Emacs is easier to get up and running in macOS, though I'm not really sure what the challenges are on Windows.
You can install homebrew packages via brew.sh. It'll bridge some gaps for you coming from Linux. As for terminal, I like Kitty personally, but iTerm2 is very popular as well. As far as a note pad I like Obsidian for knowledge management. If you're in the terminal a lot, learning an editor like vim or emacs could make you more productive, or even learning it and installing a vscode plugin that emulates vim keyboard navigation.
You can’t go wrong with iTerm 2, it provides a lot more functionality than the default terminal. Many of my coworkers are diehard sublime users for a notepad++ alternative!
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