How to Set Up a Mac for Web Development

https://www.upandrunningtutorials.com/how-to-set-up-a-mac-for-web-development/

by ooloth • 7 years ago

30 60 7 years ago

ex3ndr• 7 years ago

One question: Why Hyper is default choice?

badfrog2• 7 years ago

I wonder why the terminal app section is there at all, since the preinstalled Terminal is totally fine. Since this article seems aimed at brand new developers, I'd expect the author would want to eliminate any unnecessary steps.

jamescostian3• 7 years ago

iTerm 2 provides noticeable improvements. Being able to select text and have it immediately copied to your clipboard (much like the PRIMARY clipboard in Linux) is very, very nice. The UI is also much more customizable. And things like imgcat (a program like "cat" but for seeing images in your terminal) or even the ability to Cmd+click a file path on a remote server and have it downloaded over SSH onto your machine are fantastic

EDIT: also worth mentioning that if you use VS Code (or another GUI editor) and a separate terminal emulator, you may find VS Code's built-in terminal emulator to be very, very convenient. Although if you're overwhelmed with everything you already have to install, then it might be better to stick to iTerm 2 in the beginning, because it's a drop-in replacement for Terminal.app with awesome improvements

chrisseaton2• 7 years ago

This article will guide you through the minimum setup you’ll need to get up and running

Why complicate with things like third-party terminal emulators? Nobody at the level of getting started needs something like that.

cs02rm0• 7 years ago

I guess it depends what your starting point is, if it's from having done no dev work I'd agree. But if it's from having done dev work on Linux I certainly was relieved to find iterm2.

therein2• 7 years ago

iTerm is great but I'd like to take a moment to mention alacritty[0] in case some people haven't heard of it.

By far, the lowest latency terminal emulator on OSX.

[0] https://github.com/jwilm/alacritty

giancarlostoro2• 7 years ago

Yeah iTerm2 is a beautiful terminal like Terminix (or whatever its called now). Thereby giving me a consistent experience accross operating systems.

ihuman• 7 years ago

One of the recommended terminal emulators is the built in one, but I'm surprised its on the bottom of the list.

thatguyagain2• 7 years ago

"If you’re just getting started, choose Chrome."

Why, exactly?

llampx• 7 years ago

The same kind of thinking that led to IE6-only websites.

chessturk• 7 years ago

My boss says that's the world we're about to repeat.

delaaxe• 7 years ago

All of the recommended options seem based on market share / popularity.

alasdair_• 7 years ago

Except Hyper for terminal emulation. The built-in terminal is likely far kore popular.

swiley• 7 years ago

Last time I checked (I'm running firefox ESR right now so maybe it's gotten better recently) Chrome's dev tools were way better than the ones from mozilla.

ktross• 7 years ago

Chrome has better devtools.

Personally I use Firefox on my MacBook for slightly better battery life and the tools are good enough for the most part. AFAIK in terms of batter life it goes Safari > Firefox > Chrome.

I feel like all of this and more should have been mentioned in the article. It's surprising that Safari wasn't even mentioned when it has clear benefits in some cases (coming from someone who hates Safari).

thatguyagain2• 7 years ago

Interesting. How is chrome devtools better? They seem to offer the exact same things imo.

hartator2• 7 years ago

Didn’t knew about Hyper. What do you guys think?

toun• 7 years ago

I think it's a bit overkill to use a full Chromium runtime to display a black window with monospace text.

TamDenholm• 7 years ago

its cool and has eye candy but its incredibly slow, moreso over time. I went from iterm to hyper but ended up just going back to mac's own terminal app since i do very basic stuff in the terminal and dont need any bells and whistles.

yulaow• 7 years ago

It's ultra slow compared to any other decent alternative

applecrazy• 7 years ago

Not really, at least in comparison with iTerm 2. Hyper recently introduced a WebGL renderer and with my oh-my-zsh/pure-prompt config, both of them loaded in about the same time.

But keep in mind, the only reason I use Hyper is because of the borderless window aesthetic.

dorian-graph• 7 years ago

It's multiple things I dislike about modern development conveniently packaged together.

If you're on macOS, you can fairly happily get by with the default terminal (it's also super fast). Otherwise I would use iTerm2, alacritty, or kitty—all of which I've used individually for 6+ months straight at a time.

avip• 7 years ago

Really curious how these things make it to HN frontpage?

nktsg• 7 years ago

Surprised to see that articles like there still exist. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

sickcodebruh3• 7 years ago

I’m curious about what this would look like on Windows, especially for someone who’s been happily developing on Mac for nearly a decade. Is WSL or a VM required? I assume so, for many languages.

owenwil3• 7 years ago

It’d be WSL, and about as few steps as the article describes–I’ve documented it here: https://char.gd/blog/2017/how-to-set-up-the-perfect-modern-d.... You’ll just be using Aptitude to install packages instead–or you could use the new automation tools to get a fully disposable, native development environment without messing about (I forget the name right now, but I’ll post if I find it).

I’d argue that it’s getting easier to get a modern web dev environment going on a Windows box than much else these days, especially with WSL2 about to land. It’s fun that Microsoft is investing so heavily in the developer experience.

sickcodebruh3• 7 years ago

This sounds like what I was expecting, I’m glad to hear it. I already do a fair amount of work in an Ubuntu Desktop VM and it’s fine, so I imagine WSL2 should be at least a bit better than that. I’m REALLY over Apple hardware and don’t think I can justify the investment again. If WSL2 is as promised, it’ll probably seal the deal.

opencl• 7 years ago

Most languages are fine on Windows without using WSL. You just download some installers and run them. Node, Ruby, Python, Go, Rust, Java at a minimum all have readily available Windows installers. The git installer comes with bash and busybox which you can use with whatever terminal emulator you want.

sickcodebruh3• 7 years ago

I’ve always been under the impression that Ruby development in Windows is miserable, even with the installer. Something changed? Regardless, I (and I’d guess anyone coming from Mac) am so much more comfortable in bash, I’d really prefer WSL if performance is right.

FanaHOVA• 7 years ago

`nvm` should be the default for installing node imo.

andrewjrhill• 7 years ago

Why bother with nvm when you already have homebrew?

mnutt• 7 years ago

You may eventually want to pin your project to a specific node version, and homebrew aggressively upgrades dependencies with no easy way to run older versions, other than setting up your own tap.

PopeDotNinja• 7 years ago

Older software will tell you when you need NVM. A good example is I recently worked on a project requiring Node version 9.x or earlier (I don't remember why). Installing Yarn via brew installed Node v11.x. Even if I installed Yarn via brew without the Node dependency, brew upgrade would install Node whenever a Yarn upgrade was available. NVM, and alternatives like ASDF (some people like it, I don't care for it) we're created to work around blocking node version conflicts. Another option is developing in Docker containers, but using Docker is way beyond the scope of the beginner friendly setup in this article.

owenwil3• 7 years ago

It’s fascinating, really, that Microsoft has narrowed the gap so rapidly with WSL. I read these steps–which I performed for years over the space of a few machines–and am amazed at how janky the tooling is. WSL/WSL2 are clearly pushing to build better ways to create developer tool chains, without all of the janky macOS specific stuff. With everything being a container, and inherently disposable, along with all the investment Microsoft is making into VSCode and its remote tool chain, it’s a good time to be a dev on Windows (and I genuinely didn’t think I said that when I switched two years ago).

giancarlostoro2• 7 years ago

I am not an expert by any means but isnt Docker just good enough for this case as well? The benefit of WSL is that it doesnt consume more memory than it needs to has been my experience. I am not entirely sure of the memory consumption of Docker.

AlexeyBrin• 7 years ago

Docker on Windows runs in a VM through Hyper-V, by default it allocates 2GB of RAM per container (you can change the defaults if necessary).

owenwil3• 7 years ago

Docker is nowhere near as close to the metal as what Microsoft has done with WSL2—it's got better performance and runs as near-native as you could possibly get.

waterpowder• 7 years ago

I think installing Docker should be one of the first steps...

How to Set Up a Mac for Web Development

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