I love my Macbook Pro, for development and general computing use. Before I purchased it I was a die hard linux user (apart from gaming which is still dominated by windows unfortunately.) My work involves linux¹ and I am a committed vim user.

My work colleagues tend to laugh when I say that I want to use my mouse as little as possible, and that I am quite experienced in command line use. It pains me every time I see my office mates reach over to the mouse to click the save button.

This workflow does not translate too well to the Mac; as far as I understand it Apple² were one of the first companies to introduce guis for their operating systems.

On the other hand I love the user interface, operating system and window/font rendering systems. It’s quality hardware and a fantastic (IMO) keyboard, coupled with excellent software and makes me feel really good using it. It’s become my main operating system at work now since I code almost exclusively on my macbook. Occasionally I have to SSH into the work computers to access data but usually this is from my laptop.

I also like automation.

During (node) development I much prefer editing code in my editor and either seeing it instantly in my browser, or just reloading it myself. For this and other development, I use a few tools:

• Homebrew for package installation
• Better snap tool for tiling windows side by side
• Macvim for editing, brew install macvim
• iTerm2
• when-changed.py for compiling/running/whatever when files have changed

I’ll discuss these tools in turn.

Homebrew

Linux has it’s share of problems, which should be classed as more challenges than problems as it’s fun I assure you. On the other hand it’s package management system is top notch. The Mac OSX equivalent is Homebrew and is superbly managed with packages on github. This takes the difficulty out of installing a lot of packages, but is still missing some nice features.

The nice thing about Linux’s package management is that the packages are binary packages, so no compilation is required. They are compiled by someone with extensive knowledge of the package and operating system - usually the package maintainer. Packages on Mac OSX still have to be compiled from source so can take a long time.

Better snap tool

Having multiple windows open simultaneously is a huge timesaver as you can see the contents simultaneously. Having multiple monitors is a fantastic but expensive option, but if on a single window you could resize the windows yourself but this can be time consuming if it needs to be done many times.

This tool allows some keyboard shortcuts to resize the windows to take up half the screen each. There exists a keyboard shortcut for restoring the windows back to their original position as well.


The reason I chose this tool over other similar tools is that it allows for a nice border around windows which I could not find with other tools. It’s a small point but I like to keep the look of OSX as much as possible and I feel like non-fullscreen windows fits this bill.

Macvim

I mentioned that vim is my editor of choice, and macvim is the epitome of this editor for OSX.

iTerm2

This is a great replacement for the Terminal.app that ships with OSX but otherwise is a simple terminal emulator. It has nice support for profiles (e.g. setting up an ssh link from a few keystrokes).

when-changed.py

This script watches for filesystem changes, and runs a simple command when something is different.

The command used for writing this blog post is as follows:

when-changed.py $(find content -name '*.md') -c 'fab build'

Any time I save the post, by build system (fabric) recompiles the post so I can just reload the browser to see the changes.

Application to node

node actually comes with a tool similar to when-changed.py, it’s called supervisor, and can be installed globally with npm: npm install --global supervisor. It can reload the server file with any changes. I can edit it in one pane with macvim, and view the changes in the browser by just reloading the page.

Bliss