Mac OS X Dev Setup

• System update
• System preferences
• Google Chrome
• iTerm2
• Homebrew
• Consolas
• Beautiful terminal
• iTerm2
• Git
• Sublime Text 3
• Node.js
• JSHint
• Projects folder
• Apps

Extensions

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System preferences

In Apple Icon > System Preferences:

• Trackpad > Tap to click
• Keyboard > Key Repeat > Fast (all the way to the right)
• Keyboard > Delay Until Repeat > Short (all the way to the right)
• Dock > Automatically hide and show the Dock

Google Chrome

www.google.com/chrome.

iTerm2

iTerm2

In iTerm > Preferences..., under the tab General, uncheck Confirm closing multiple sessions and Confirm "Quit iTerm2 (Cmd+Q)" command under the section Closing.

In the tab Profiles, create a new one with the "+" icon, and rename it to your first name for example. Then, select Other Actions... > Set as Default. Finally, under the section Window, change the size to something better, like Columns: 125 and Rows: 35.

When done, hit the red "X" in the upper left (saving is automatic in OS X preference panes). Close the window and open a new one to see the size change.

Homebrew

Package managers make it so much easier to install and update applications (for Operating Systems) or libraries (for programming languages). The most popular one for OS X is Homebrew.

Install

An important dependency before Homebrew can work is the Command Line Tools for Xcode. These include compilers that will allow you to build things from source.

Now, Xcode weights something like 2GB, and you don't need it unless you're developing iPhone or Mac apps. Good news is Apple provides a way to install only the Command Line Tools, without Xcode. To do this you need to go to http://developer.apple.com/downloads, and sign in with your Apple ID (the same one you use for iTunes and app purchases). Unfortunately, you're greeted by a rather annoying questionnaire. All questions are required, so feel free to answer at random.

Once you reach the downloads page, search for "command line tools", and download the latest Command Line Tools (OS X Mountain Lion) for Xcode. Open the .dmg file once it's done downloading, and double-click on the .mpkg installer to launch the installation. When it's done, you can unmount the disk in Finder.

Note: If you are running OS X 10.9 Mavericks, then you can install the Xcode Command Line Tools directly from the command line with $ xcode-select --install, and you don't have to go through the download page and the questionnaire.

Finally, we can install Hombrew! In the terminal paste the following line (without the $), hit Enter, and follow the steps on the screen:

$ ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

One thing we need to do is tell the system to use programs installed by Hombrew (in /usr/local/bin) rather than the OS default if it exists. We do this by adding /usr/local/bin to your $PATH environment variable:

$ echo 'export PATH="/usr/local/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bash_profile

Open a new terminal tab with Cmd+T (you should also close the old one), then run the following command to make sure everything works:

$ brew doctor

Usage

To install a package (or Formula in Homebrew vocabulary) simply type:

$ brew install <formula>

To update Homebrew's directory of formulae, run:

$ brew update

Note: I've seen that command fail sometimes because of a bug. If that ever happens, run the following (when you have Git installed):

$ cd /usr/local
$ git fetch origin
$ git reset --hard origin/master

To see if any of your packages need to be updated:

$ brew outdated

To update a package:

$ brew upgrade <formula>

Homebrew keeps older versions of packages installed, in case you want to roll back. That rarely is necessary, so you can do some cleanup to get rid of those old versions:

$ brew cleanup

To see what you have installed (with their version numbers):

$ brew list --versions

Consolas

I really like the Consolas font for coding. Being a Microsoft (!) font, it is not installed by default. Since we're going to be looking at a lot of terminal output and code, let's install it now.

There are two ways we can install it. If you bought Microsoft Office for Mac, install that and Consolas will be installed as well.

If you don't have Office, follow these steps:

$ brew install cabextract
$ cd ~/Downloads
$ mkdir consolas
$ cd consolas
$ curl -O http://download.microsoft.com/download/f/5/a/f5a3df76-d856-4a61-a6bd-722f52a5be26/PowerPointViewer.exe
$ cabextract PowerPointViewer.exe
$ cabextract ppviewer.cab
$ open CONSOLA*.TTF

And click Install Font. Thanks to Alexander Zhuravlev for his post.

Beautiful terminal

Since we spend so much time in the terminal, we should try to make it a more pleasant and colorful place. What follows might seem like a lot of work, but trust me, it'll make the development experience so much better.

Let's go ahead and start by changing the font. In iTerm > Preferences..., under the tab Profiles, section Text, change both fonts to Consolas 13pt.

Now let's add some color. I'm a big fan of the Solarized color scheme. It is supposed to be scientifically optimal for the eyes. I just find it pretty.

Scroll down the page and download the latest version. Unzip the archive. In it you will find the iterm2-colors-solarized folder with a README.md file, but I will just walk you through it here:

• In iTerm2 Preferences, under Profiles and Colors, go to Load Presets... > Import..., find and open the two .itermcolors files we downloaded.
• Go back to Load Presets... and select Solarized Dark to activate it. Voila!

Note: You don't have to do this, but there is one color in the Solarized Dark preset I don't agree with, which is Bright Black. You'll notice it's too close to Black. So I change it to be the same as Bright Yellow, i.e. R 83 G 104 B 112.

Not a lot of colors yet. We need to tweak a little bit our Unix user's profile for that. This is done (on OS X and Linux), in the ~/.bash_profile text file (~ stands for the user's home directory).

We'll come back to the details of that later, but for now, just download the files .bash_profile, .bash_prompt, .aliases attached to this document into your home directory (.bash_profile is the one that gets loaded, I've set it up to call the others):

$ cd ~
$ curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nicolashery/mac-dev-setup/master/.bash_profile
$ curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nicolashery/mac-dev-setup/master/.bash_prompt
$ curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nicolashery/mac-dev-setup/master/.aliases

With that, open a new terminal tab (Cmd+T) and see the change! Try the list commands: ls, ls -lh (aliased to ll), ls -lha (aliased to la).

At this point you can also change your computer's name, which shows up in this terminal prompt. If you want to do so, go to System Preferences > Sharing. For example, I changed mine from "Nicolas's MacBook Air" to just "MacBook Air", so it shows up as MacBook-Air in the terminal.

Now we have a terminal we can work with!

(Thanks to Mathias Bynens for his awesome dotfiles.)

Git

What's a developer without Git? To install, simply run:

$ brew install git

When done, to test that it installed fine you can run:

$ git --version

And $ which git should output /usr/local/bin/git.

Let's set up some basic configuration. Download the .gitconfig file to your home directory:

$ cd ~
$ curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nicolashery/mac-dev-setup/master/.gitconfig

It will add some color to the status, branch, and diff Git commands, as well as a couple aliases. Feel free to take a look at the contents of the file, and add to it to your liking.

Next, we'll define your Git user (should be the same name and email you use for GitHub and Heroku):

$ git config --global user.name "Your Name Here"
$ git config --global user.email "[email protected]"

They will get added to your .gitconfig file.

To push code to your GitHub repositories, we're going to use the recommended HTTPS method (versus SSH). So you don't have to type your username and password everytime, let's enable Git password caching as described here:

$ git config --global credential.helper osxkeychain

Note: On a Mac, it is important to remember to add .DS_Store (a hidden OS X system file that's put in folders) to your .gitignore files. You can take a look at this repository's .gitignore file for inspiration.

Sublime Text

With the terminal, the text editor is a developer's most important tool. Everyone has their preferences, but unless you're a hardcore Vim user, a lot of people are going to tell you that Sublime Text is currently the best one out there.

Go ahead and download it.

Just like the terminal, let's configure our editor a little. Go to Sublime Text 2 > Preferences > Settings - User and paste the following in the file that just opened:

{
    "font_face": "Consolas",
    "font_size": 13,
    "rulers":
    [
        79
    ],
    "highlight_line": true,
    "bold_folder_labels": true,
    "highlight_modified_tabs": true,
    "tab_size": 2,
    "translate_tabs_to_spaces": true,
    "word_wrap": false,
    "indent_to_bracket": true
}

Feel free to tweak these to your preference. When done, save the file and close it.

I use tab size 2 for everything except Python and Markdown files, where I use tab size 4. If you have a Python and Markdown file handy (or create dummy ones with $ touch dummy.py), for each one, open it and go to Sublime Text 2 > Preferences > Settings - More > Syntax Specific - User to paste in:

{
    "tab_size": 4
}

Now for the color. I'm going to change two things: the Theme (which is how the tabs, the file explorer on the left, etc. look) and the Color Scheme (the colors of the code). Again, feel free to pick different ones, or stick with the default.

A popular Theme is the Soda Theme. To install it, run:

$ cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/Sublime\ Text\ 2/Packages/
$ git clone https://github.com/buymeasoda/soda-theme/ "Theme - Soda"

Then go to Sublime Text 2 > Preferences > Settings - User and add the following two lines:

"theme": "Soda Dark.sublime-theme",
"soda_classic_tabs": true

Restart Sublime Text for all changes to take effect (Note: on the Mac, closing all windows doesn't close the application, you need to hit Cmd+Q).

The Soda Theme page also offers some extra color schemes you can download and try. But to be consistent with my terminal, I like to use the Solarized Color Scheme, which already ships with Sublime Text. To use it, just go to Sublime Text 2 > Preferences > Color Scheme > Solarized (Dark). Again, this is really according to personal flavors, so pick what you want.

Sublime Text 2 already supports syntax highlighting for a lot of languages. I'm going to install a couple that are missing:

$ cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/Sublime\ Text\ 2/Packages/
$ git clone https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script-tmbundle CoffeeScript
$ git clone https://github.com/miksago/jade-tmbundle Jade
$ git clone https://github.com/danro/LESS-sublime.git LESS
$ git clone -b SublimeText2 https://github.com/kuroir/SCSS.tmbundle.git SCSS
$ git clone https://github.com/nrw/sublime-text-handlebars Handlebars

Let's create a shortcut so we can launch Sublime Text from the command-line:

$ cd ~
$ mkdir bin
$ ln -s "/Applications/Sublime Text 2.app/Contents/SharedSupport/bin/subl" ~/bin/subl

Now I can open a file with $ subl myfile.py or start a new project in the current directory with $ subl .. Pretty cool.

Sublime Text is very extensible. For now we'll leave it like that, we already have a solid installation. To add more in the future, a good place to start would be to install the Sublime Package Control.

Node.js

Install Node.js with Homebrew:

$ brew update
$ brew install node

The formula also installs the npm package manager. However, as suggested by the Homebrew output, we need to add /usr/local/share/npm/bin to our path so that npm-installed modules with executables will have them picked up.

To do so, add this line to your ~/.path file, before the export PATH line:

PATH=/usr/local/share/npm/bin:$PATH

Open a new terminal for the $PATH changes to take effect.

We also need to tell npm where to find the Xcode Command Line Tools, by running:

$ sudo xcode-select -switch /usr/bin

(If Xcode Command Line Tools were installed by Xcode, try instead:)

$ sudo xcode-select -switch /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer

Node modules are installed locally in the node_modules folder of each project by default, but there are at least two that are worth installing globally. Those are CoffeeScript and Grunt:

$ npm install -g coffee-script
$ npm install -g grunt-cli

Npm usage

To install a package:

$ npm install <package> # Install locally
$ npm install -g <package> # Install globally

To install a package and save it in your project's package.json file:

$ npm install <package> --save

To see what's installed:

$ npm list # Local
$ npm list -g # Global

To find outdated packages (locally or globally):

$ npm outdated [-g]

To upgrade all or a particular package:

$ npm update [<package>]

To uninstall a package:

$ npm uninstall <package>

##JSHint

JSHint is a JavaScript developer's best friend.

If the extra credit assignment to install Sublime Package Manager was completed, JSHint can be run as part of Sublime Text.

Install JSHint via npm (global install preferred)

$ npm install -g jshint

Follow additional instructions on the JSHint Package Manager page or build it manually.

Apps

• Dropbox
• Google Drive
• 1Password
• Marked: As a developer, most of the stuff you write ends up being in Markdown. In fact, this README.md file (possibly the most important file of a GitHub repo) is indeed in Markdown, written in Sublime Text, and I use Marked to preview the results everytime I save. ($4)
• Path Finder: I love OSX, it's Unix so great for developers, and all of it just works and looks pretty! Only thing I "miss" from Windows (OMG what did he say?), is a decent file explorer. I think Finder is a pain to use. So I gladly paid for this alternative, but I understand others might find it expensive just to not have to use Finder. ($40)
• Evernote
• Moom: Don't waste time resizing and moving your windows. Moom makes this very easy. ($10)