Install software development tools on Macintosh

There are tools and utilities software developers use to write, test and deploy code. These are some of them to make our life easier.

Commonly used applications

Text Editor

Visual Studio Code

Atom

  1. Download it from https://atom.io/
  2. Double click the downloaded ZIP file to extract the application,
  3. Drag the Atom application into Applications

Configure Atom

See Atom text editor configuration

Terminal Window

iTerm2

Install iTerm2, a smart terminal emulator to issue Bash commands and log into Linux servers.

See Install and configure iTerm2

Git

See Install Git on Macintosh

Install JQ

JQ is a JSON command line tool to read, write and convert data to an from JSON.

brew install jq

JSON in the browser

To automatically pretty print JSON responses in Chrome

Remote Desktop Client

Download the Microsoft Remote Desktop app from the App Store

  1. Open the App Store
  2. Search for “microsoft remote desktop”
  3. Click the Microsoft Remote Desktop icon
  4. Click the blue Get button
  5. Click the green Install App button

Docker Desktop

Kubernetes cluster management

OpenLens

OpenLens is the open source (free) version of the Lens application. Muhammed Kalkan provides binary builds and installation instructions on his GitHub page at ttps://github.com/MuhammedKalkan/OpenLens

The simplest is to install OpenLens with Brew using his builds:

brew install --cask openlens

Nice to have utilities

Window Manager

Rectangle

Rectangle is a window management app based on Spectacle, written in Swift.
Installation instructions are at https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle

  1. Install Rectangle with
    brew install --cask rectangle
  2. Configure iTerm for better resizing behavior with
    defaults write com.googlecode.iterm2 DisableWindowSizeSnap -integer 1

Comparison tools

diff-so-fancy

Smart diff visualizer that highlights the parts of the line that changed

  1. Install it
    brew install diff-so-fancy
  2. Configure Git to use it as the default diff tool
    git config --global core.pager "diff-so-fancy | less --tabs=4 -RFX"

Install the database management tools

Working with Windows servers from the Mac

If you want to work with Windows servers, you may need to run Windows applications on

Memory usage monitor

  1. Download  Dr. Cleaner Elite from the App Store to be able to monitor memory, CPU and network usage from the Menu Bar.

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