Good Clean Fun With Homebrew
I discovered the joys of homebrew my sophomore year of college. My neighbor Mario was an enterprising sort who sold homebrewing supplies out of his garage. It was hard to walk by his house without stopping and having a taste of whatever delicious thing he had on tap. These were the early, wild west days of craft beer, without the endless choice of hazies and DIPAs and sours. Mario offered the key to happiness. Mario was a great salesman.
Soon I had all the gear I could afford jammed into my tiny apartment. Homebrewing became the chemistry class I never took in high school. Water, malt, hops, yeast and sugar. It was going to be amazing! My girlfriend and I brewed several inaugural batches, poured them into 5 gallon glass carboys, capped them and stashed them in the bathroom to ferment before leaving for winter break.
It was great to be home for the holidays, but I couldn’t wait to get back and taste our first home made beers. When we arrived back to the apartment the overwhelming sweet smell hit me first. Then I opened the bathroom door and saw the walls were brown, covered floor to ceiling in sticky shards of glass. The chemistry experiment had gone totally wrong. My dream had shattered. It was a total mess.
The Missing Package Manager for macOS
Fortunately, Homebrew for Mac is a lot less messy. Homebrew bills itself as “The Missing Package Manager for macOS (or Linux)”.
Ok, that sounds cool. But what does it do? Again, Homebrew has an answer! “Homebrew installs the stuff you need that Apple (or your Linux system) didn’t.”
Cool. What kind of stuff is that? We’ll get there. First you need to install Homebrew. But…. before you install Homebrew you need to install Xcode tools for your mac:
xcode-select — install
With that out of the way you can now install Homebrew:
/bin/bash -c “$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"
The installation can take a few minutes, so while that is happening, pour a cold one and let’s learn a bit more about Homebrew.
First a few key Homebrew terms:
Tap — This is a Git repository of packages. Normally, Homebrew has the homebrew/core tap already “tapped”, which means that you can install packages from this source.
Cellar — This is where your local packages are installed by Homebrew. A cellar exists only on your local machine.
Formula — This is basically a software package. When you want to install new programs or libraries, you install a formula. Homebrew keeps multiple versions of formulae in the Cellar, so that you can revert to previous versions if needed.
5 Good Clean Packages to Check Out
1. mas
Want to install Mac App Store apps directly from the command line? mas allows you to search for apps, install updates, and more! It goes like this:
brew install mas
List all apps: mas list
Search for apps: mas search Xcode
Update apps: mas upgrade
There is even something called lucky which returns a random app!
* cask is a package that does similar things:
brew install cask
2. tree
Want to see your Mac’s directories in a tree-like format? Get a handy visual represenation of your file structure:
brew install tree
3. htop
Want to have the functionality of Activity Monitor in the command line? Check out htop:
brew install htop
htop will give you visual indicators for process activity, CPU activity, memory usage, load average, and process management..
4. wifi-password
This handy app will display the wifi password of the wifi network you are currently connected to. When we start having guests in our homes again that will be really handy.
To install run the command:
brew install wifi-password
5. links
Want to run a web browser in your terminal? links will give you a simple, text based version of a website displayed in your terminal.
brew install links
So perhaps you have learned just enough about Homebrew to wet your whistle. To learn more be sure to check out https://brew.sh/
Cheers! 🍻
