After using a MacBook Pro for two years I thought it was time to share what utilities I found really useful to have. These are obviously weighted towards being a software developer, so your mileage might vary.
Brew
It is the missing package manager for MacOS, so as with NPM, Chocolatey, or Composer, where you can install what you need via the command line.
It may seem weird, like what is wrong with just download and install what you need?! The advantage is that you can write this stuff down so that if you need to reinstall it is easier (and also easier to share to help others get up and running).
A second advantage is updating, it takes one command to update all the tools I use.
VSCode
More than an IDE, this is my go-to tool for anything text; Editing config ✅taking notes ✅anything really.
Install with Brew: brew install homebrew/cask/visual-studio-code
An important tweak for VSCode is to make sure it is launching from the Terminal, thankfully it is really easy.
Aerial
The AppleTV has the best screensaver I’ve ever seen, and some smart person ported it to MacOS with the name Aerial.
A word of warning, these videos are massive and will destroy your bandwidth. One tip to solve that is that under the settings is a Cache section - make sure you have the Cache Aerials As They Play checked else this will destroy your bandwidth. If you are on uncapped, then there is also a download now option which is a must to use.
Install with Brew: brew install caskroom/cask/aerial
Fish
Bash is nice, Fish is nicer. It just feels like what you expect in a modern world.
Install with Brew: brew install fish
Fish Node Manager
Part of my job has involved working with multiple projects, and that means multiple versions of Node, and that was a pain. Thankfully there is a Node Manager for Fish that lets you easily change what version of Node you are using.
Unfortunately, this isn’t as easy to setup, as to install it you first need Fisherman, which is like Brew but for Fish; which leads to this 3 step process to install it and configure it.
curl -Lo ~/.config/fish/functions/fisher.fish --create-dirs https://git.io/fisher
fisher fnm
fnm use latest
Amphetamine
Amphetamine is a massively useful tool for MacOS, especially in a DevOps culture where you might get up in the night and just need your machine to behave the exact way you want it. Its core use is to not let your Mac go to sleep and you can control what triggers that, automatically or manually.
Status Clock
Another very useful tool is Status Clock which can show a second time on the menu which is exceptionally useful if you need to work across countries.
Settings Tweaks
Beyond useful tools, there are some useful tweaks to the standard MacOS settings: