Does anyone use their mac for programming and if so what apps do you recommend?

Soldato
Joined
1 Nov 2007
Posts
6,489
Location
England
I've been using my Mac for programming since I got it but I always feel like I'm missing out on some essential apps. Can anyone recommend some apps that you use and that you find extremely useful?
 
I find Warp to be an excellent terminal application for macOS.

Raycast looks fantastic I'm going to start playing around with it.
 
Definitely recommend Jetbrains IDEs, e.g. PyCharm, Webstorm, IntelliJ, Clion, etc...
I've used them in the past and agree they are great but I'm getting used to Visual Studio Code. I also pay for ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot and Navicat for PostgreSQL.
 
I thought it might be useful to share the software we use for development on macOS as it is such a personal thing I'd expect there to be a lot alternatives available which is good.

So my stack is this:
  • Visual Studio Code (and extensions)
    • Github Copilot
    • Github Copilot Chat
  • Git (latest version installed via Homebrew)
  • Navicat for PostgreSQL
  • Warp Terminal
  • Homebrew
  • ChatGPT 4
  • VMware Fusion 13.5 Pro
  • Xcode
  • Apple Music (essential!!)
Furthermore I always have a $5 a month VPS up and running 24/7 so I can run the PostgreSQL server running on a proper Linux distro to make sure macOS does not cause issues.

What about you guys?
 
I found a couple of tools that look interesting but I haven't tried them yet.

zoxide
fzf

Edit: Combining that with tmux and neovim should be pretty good.
 
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I've started to move into iOS development and one of the frameworks I want to use is distributed via cocoapods which didn't work with the Ruby that comes with macOS by default so I had to install the latest version of Ruby to get it working which is a pain. Having said that once it was all working it does make things easier. I'd just rather have the Framework distributed as a library you could manually link with rather than yet another package manager.
 
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