I recently got a Macbook Air (very expensive birthday for myself). So, it was fun getting to know MacOS and how Darwin works (at least, the bits I can see).

Built-in tools Link to heading

MacOs comes with built-in unix (Darwin is unix based anyway) mainly at /usr/bin/. There is also a terminal emulator conveniently named Terminal

Command Line tools Link to heading

xcode is Apple’s toolchain to develop all of their applications. but there is something called “Command Line Tools” that can be installed separately with xcode-select.

sudo xcode-select --install

It has some useful exectuables such as gcc, llvm, git and python.

ls /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/usr/bin
2to3					llvm-size
2to3-3.9				lorder
aarch64-swift-linux-musl-clang.cfg	m4
aarch64-swift-linux-musl-clang++.cfg	make
ar					mig

Brew Link to heading

brew is the package manager for mac (and can work on linux apparently)

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

Then add to .zprofile

echo 'eval $(/opt/homebrew/bin/brew shellenv)' >> ~/.zprofile
eval $(/opt/homebrew/bin/brew shellenv)

Taking it for a spin to install python3.12

brew install python3.12

vscode Link to heading

That’s simple. download the installer from vscode website and we are good to go.

UTM and qemu Link to heading

UTM is the free virtualization software for MacOS that can Virtualize(ARM) or emulate other archs. It uses Qemu under the hood.

Raycast Link to heading

raycast is window manager, clipboard manager and more stuff i don’t understand yet.

brew install --cask raycast

To setup it up, use soptlight to start it. Once that’s done, it can be started Option + Space.