I finally did it, with the arrival of my shiny new iMac, I’ve switched my primary development environment to OSX. I’ve just finished installing Jekyll, so this is my inaugral rant!
Unsurprisingly, I ran into some issues almost straight away, due mostly to the fact that, under the hood, OSX is so very similar to the best OS, Linux. I immediately felt I was on familiar ground. It was because of this that I tripped on some small things, the silly stuff, which if I am honest made me feel like a total n00b.
Baby steps
It took me sometime to discover how to view .dotfiles for example, and I feel I have a long way to go yet with regards to keyboard shortcuts! My hind-brain is still causing my hands to hit keys on my keyboard that don’t exist and parts of my keyboard that are now empty desk (why is the keyboard so small??).
Why is my user in a group called ‘staff’? I’m tempted to chrgp it, but concerned I may well break everything. I’ll wait till I have a good backup in place! The ‘Dashboard’? What’s it for? Yuh, widgets obviously, but a separate canvas for that?? It seems completely alien to me.
I’m sure someone can very quickly give me a great answer, but why for example is it not possible to pin the terminal to the dock? I like the terminal, when it is the fastest way to do something…
Here and now
Then there are the other things, the things that have just blown me away. Some of the apps in particular have opened my eyes to OSX as a developers machine. The apps! My word, the apps!
After installing my stalwarts, Twitter, Dropbox, Thunderbird, Chrome and Sublime Text 2 I asked the good people of Twitter for the recommendations. Following many positive endorsements I then installed CodeKit and Tower, both of which will be changing my development process for ever!
Tower really does make using git enjoyable, and that is something I never thought I would hear myself (or anyone else) say. It beats using the command line every time, because it’s faster, more intuitive and incredibly user-friendly. I’m in love.
CodeKit? The little beauty, it just sits back and does it’s thing and does it so incredibly well it’s almost magical. If I’d know how good it was I would have switched to a Mac sooner, it’s that good.
What next?
What else am I missing? I want lean, mean developer tools primarily and I prefer those that follow the Unix way, small apps that do one job, and one job only, but do it incredibly well.
So, if you have any suggestions, please let me know. Thanks.