My Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Mac OS X (2011 Edition) • Hacker News Board

Re: My Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Mac OS X (2011 Edition)

#11

Post by gatlin » Tue, Dec 20, 2011, 7:05 PM UTC

My hardware is a brand new 13" MBA with an old monitor, comfort curve keyboard, bose notebook speakers, and the magic trackpad.

For software, homebrew and perlbrew are essential. vim and tmux are how I do everything related to my job.

Adium is for OTR and annoying scripts I've written[1]. Chrome for the being Chrome. I use dropbox like an addict, too.

I tend to script everything I need with Perl, including mechanized tests and creating quick REST APIs[2]. Being able to use v5.14 in place of whatever comes natively is a nice touch.

Homebrew brings in git, tmux, haskell, racket, go, and redis.

Combinations of these tools let me do pretty much what these other lists allow but I probably haven't had the most elegant experience, either.

[1]: http://www.adiumxtras.com/index.php?a=xtras&xtra_id=4187 [2]: https://metacpan.org/module/Test::WWW::Mechanize

Re: My Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Mac OS X (2011 Edition)

#12

Post by smspence » Tue, Dec 20, 2011, 7:06 PM UTC

thurn wrote: post #2

I'm surprised to not see Quicksilver on a list like this. It's definitely the tool that keeps me coming back to OSX. Most of the "replacements" for it on other platforms (and on OSX) implement very few of its power-user features.

I don't really understand the appeal of Quicksilver. If I want to quickly launch some random program, I just press Command + Space (activates spotlight), type in the first two or three letters of the program name, and press enter. You can also do calculations and look up words in the dictionary. Isn't this what most people use Quicksilver and Alfred for?

Re: My Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Mac OS X (2011 Edition)

#13

Post by smspence » Tue, Dec 20, 2011, 7:09 PM UTC

Pewpewarrows wrote: post #7

A decent starter list, but definitely not complete (for me at least). I'd add the following * TotalFinder (makes the OS X finder not terrible anymore, tabs, etc) * HandsOff/LittleSnitch (oh, you're just using the built-in firewall? that's cute.) * Transmit (everything you could ever want in an FTP app) * CommandQ (W and Q are way too close together) * Mou (free alternative to Byword) * Evernote (note-taking that sync…

I love TotalFinder, and also can't live without flux. I don't really understand the excitement over Alfred/Quicksilver though... what does it do that spotlight can't? Just activate spotlight by pressing Command+Space, and type in whatever you want to do (you can launch a program, do a calculation, look up a word, whatever).

Re: My Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Mac OS X (2011 Edition)

#14

Post by ernestipark » Tue, Dec 20, 2011, 7:13 PM UTC

I would highly endorse Slate (https://github.com/jigish/slate), a free, open source, awesomely configurable window manager for OS X. Also Vimium (http://vimium.github.com/) for browsing the web is incredible. It's made browsing much faster and more enjoyable. Both were developed by former co-workers of mine.

Re: My Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Mac OS X (2011 Edition)

#15

Post by dataphyte » Tue, Dec 20, 2011, 7:14 PM UTC

* calibre - ebook management and conversion

Re: My Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Mac OS X (2011 Edition)

#16

Post by Pewpewarrows » Tue, Dec 20, 2011, 7:15 PM UTC

smspence wrote: post #13

Pewpewarrows wrote: post #7

A decent starter list, but definitely not complete (for me at least). I'd add the following * TotalFinder (makes the OS X finder not terrible anymore, tabs, etc) * HandsOff/LittleSnitch (oh, you're just using the built-in firewall? that's cute.) * Transmit (everything you could ever want in an FTP app) * CommandQ (W and Q are way too close together) * Mou (free alternative to Byword) * Evernote (note-taking that sync…

I love TotalFinder, and also can't live without flux. I don't really understand the excitement over Alfred/Quicksilver though... what does it do that spotlight can't? Just activate spotlight by pressing Command+Space, and type in whatever you want to do (you can launch a program, do a calculation, look up a word, whatever).

It's really just Spotlight on crack. Once you've done your initial search and the file/app/whatever is highlighted, you can then proceed to instantly perform actions or scripts on it. It's basically just a really nice macro feature baked into Spotlight with a new UI.

Re: My Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Mac OS X (2011 Edition)

#17

Post by jz » Tue, Dec 20, 2011, 7:18 PM UTC

I am genuinely surprised at how much others spend on software. I started totaling up his list (excluding monthly services like dropbox) and stopped when I reached $500, which was right around Cornerstone.

Re: My Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Mac OS X (2011 Edition)

#18

Post by maximilian » Tue, Dec 20, 2011, 7:28 PM UTC

> There is absolutely no reason for me to have 16GB of RAM other than to brag about the fact that I have such a ridiculous amount of memory.

16GB in a desktop really isn't that ridiculous especially as a developer that might run VMs. In a non-mac with 4 ram slots, its <$100, which is very attainable. He is running an iMac with only 2 slots, making the RAM more like $250, but for a developer, this still isn't that much.

Re: My Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Mac OS X (2011 Edition)

#19

Post by Derbasti » Tue, Dec 20, 2011, 7:29 PM UTC

Emacs. 'Nuff said.

Just kidding. Actually MacVim, too.

The current gen i7 MacBook Pro is an insanely great machine.

- I pretty much can not work without VMWare Fusion.

- Tower for git, Cornerstone for svn

- Sparrow, for I want a second mail client beside Mail.app that does not suck

- TextExpander is pretty useful

- Pixelmator. It's enough for what I need to do.

- Reeder, my favourite RSS client

- The Unarchiver, in case anyone did not know that one

- Spotify

- Outbank, for European bank accounts

- Transmit. Awesome FTP client.

Re: My Ultimate Developer and Power Users Tool List for Mac OS X (2011 Edition)

#20

Post by falling » Tue, Dec 20, 2011, 7:29 PM UTC

JonnieCache wrote: post #3

Springy. http://www.springyarchiver.com/ An archiver for OS X that actually works the way you expect, by opening a window to let you look inside and selectively extract from archives, rather than just spurting files all over the place unbidden like the built in one and all the other replacement ones seem to do. For some reason it took me ages to find this when I switched to mac. Drove me mad.

The built one doesn't spurt anything: if the archive contains a directory or a single file it extracts that in place, if it contains a bunch of files it will create a directory with the archive name and put the files in there. This is what I want 99% of the time.