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MacOS software development tools

· 3 min read
Ilia Kebets
Ilia Kebets
Software engineer @ Sonar

I cover the different tools I use on MacOS to facilitate and speed up my work as a software developer.

Terminal​

I use iTerm2 as my terminal. It allows me to split my screen into multiple parts when I need to monitor multiple processes on a single screen. CMD+D and CMD+Shift+D for horizontal and vertical split respectively. One setting I always tweak is the line buffer size.

multiplexing with iTerm2

As a shell, I use Oh My Zsh for its out-of-the-box plugins offering shortcuts and because it displays my current branch in git repositories. My main shortcuts are for git and folder navigation:

  • gco: git checkout
  • gm: git merge
  • gl: git pull
  • gp: git push
  • ll: ls -l
  • .. and ..., etc: cd .., cd ../.., etc

For folder navigation, I also use autojump which allows me to jump quickly between folders I visited like j my-repo. It matches the target folder by name and number of visits.

I don’t like the wall of text that man pages usually output, so I use tldr pages.

TL;DR of ln command

Git client​

I use tig as a CLI git client, it’s a fast tool that allows me to stage files, cherry-picking blocks of codes or lines if needed. Navigating through the log is very convenient as it supports the same search keys as less. Here is a great article about it.

Status view in tig

You can open the log view with tig, but I recommend setting up this alias to open tig in Status view directly: alias s="tig status". If you use “Oh My Zsh”, you should append this in ~/.zshrc.

I configure git to track remote branches automatically: git config --global --add --bool push.autoSetupRemote true.

Also, I prefer that git branch (or gb) doesn’t pipe its output in less with git config --global pager.branch false.

Node.js​

I use nvm to work with multiple versions of Node.js. You can install a new version like 20 with your global dependencies using: nvm install 20 --reinstall-from=current.

Print installed Node.js versions, the one in use and the default one

Switch between versions easily with nvm use 18 and update your default with nvm alias default 20.

JavaScript/TypeScript IDE​

As the majority of people, I use the VS code IDE for JS/TS.

VS code IDE

I open it from the terminal using code . which you can set up like that.

For extensions:

Java​

I use sdkman to install and switch between Java versions.

Available Java version, highlighting installed and in use

I use IntelliJ as an IDE for Java. It has a lot more built-in tools for Java development and beats VS code to it. It requires some time to learn all the shortcuts that will make you a power user but makes up for the loading time it spends indexing the projects.

IntelliJ IDE

Misc​

For many of the tools here, I used homebrew to install them.

List of packages installed with homebrew

For app multiplexing on the desktop, I use Moom which is a paid tool. It allows me to resize apps to fit half or a quarter of a screen like on Windows.