macOS users: what have you installed with brew?

Basically everything. It’s by far my preferred way to install and manage apps.

It has its criticisms, but it’s easy to use and fast enough for the amount I need to use it.

I try to avoid installing anything with brew, because I can't install a new package without first upgrading all my other packages, which often leads to one of them breaking in not-so-fun ways (e.g. an openssl upgrade breaking my Python installation).

My favorite would be modernCSV since I look at CSVs all day

Also I found this cool brew bash function i thought i share this here

brewpackages (){ brew list --formula | xargs -n1 -P8 -I {} \ sh -c "brew info {} | egrep '[0-9]* files, ' | sed 's/^.[0-9] files, \(.\)).$/{} \1/'" | \ sort -h -r -k2 - | column -t }

This allows you to view how much space each package is taking

On this computer, asdf bison c-ares cmocka drud/ddev/ddev fd go guile htop imagemagick jj jpeg libedit libiconv libuv libxml2 make nss ocrmypdf php postgresql@14 re2c ripgrep ruby-build smartmontools wireguard-tools zlib, 1password-cli ipatool

I'm not sure the story behind all of those, but I use several of those CLI tools regularly. brew install __ usually gets me what I went when I'm on a Mac and a linux tool is missing when I try to run it.

I'd like brew to handle per-user installations better (you can with a flag, but it'll still have path issues with some installs), but I'm thankful for it overall.

Brew feels slow and does not seem to like older MacBooks, so I've been using MacPorts more often or downloading things on my own.

I prefer AppStore. If the app is not on there, I'll check their website, and download from there. Lastly, I use brew.

The exception is command line tools, those I usually install with brew. (pyenv, ffmpeg, etc)

due to its analytics, one can see the number of installs on formulae.brew.sh e.g. https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/awscli but I don't offhand know how to show "most popular across formulae"

I also don't offhand know if those "Build Errors" are their bottle build errors, or it reports all build errors

I'm not ignoring your question, but it's also meaningless to post any such thing on HN since

  $ brew list -1 | wc -l
  682

macOCR - macOCR is a command line app that enables you to turn any text on your screen into text on your clipboard. When you envoke the ocr command, a "screen capture" like cursor is shown. Any text within the bounds will be converted to text.

You can install it w/ brew install schappim/ocr/ocr

[1] https://github.com/schappim/macOCR

The distance of cask means I install everything with it.

Which is handy if I ever feel like wiping my Mac fresh and running a single command to install everything.

ack antiword aspell automake bash bash-completion bison chruby cmake cmake-docs coreutils curl dbus docbook-xsl dos2unix exiftool fetchmail ffmpeg findutils fortune gawk gcc gdbm git global gnu-typist gnupg grep httpd imagemagick jq libffi libgccjit libvterm libxml2 links lynx mailutils mairix make msmtp nano nmap nmh node openssl@1.1 openssl@3.0 orc pipx pkg-config pngcrush procmail qrencode ripgrep rsync ruby-install sevenzip solargraph tern texinfo tmux tree tree-sitter watch wget xml2 yt-dlp zint zlib

every piece of software I install, which as of today is 139 packages.

Nothing, I’m a nix user. Here’s what I have installed in general though

The latest for me was Gradle.

autoconf bumpversion cocoapods doxygen ffmpeg gnu-tar gobject-introspection gradle guile llvm make node@10 nvm openapi-generator openjdk@11 openjdk@17 subversion yarn

What great way to do reconnaissance about your own machine so that the hackers don't have to!

for my personal mac, I've got: cask, cmocka, gh, gifski, gradle, heroku/brew/heroku, jupyterlab, maven, mysql, nghttp2, numpy, openjdk@11, postgresql@14, python@3.10, python@3.9, redis, scala, wget, xclip, zsh-syntax-highlighting

New system, not much so far:

kevin@Kevins-MacBook-Pro ~> brew leaves

  fish

  maven

  rename

my brew list command gives:

abseil gmp libunistring p11-kit sqlite

autoconf gnutls libuv pcre2 typescript

bdw-gc guile libyaml pkg-config unbound

brotli icu4c lz4 protobuf wget

c-ares jansson m4 python@3.11 xz

ca-certificates libevent mpdecimal rbenv youtube-dl

cmake libidn2 nettle readline yt-dlp

gdbm libnghttp2 node ruby-build zstd

gettext libtasn1 openssl@1.1 rust

git libtool openssl@3 sbcl

even better I just learned from this thread:

brew leaves gives:

cmake

gdbm

git

gnutls

guile

jansson

protobuf

rbenv

rust

sbcl

typescript

wget

youtube-dl

yt-dlp

It's on my profile

I could, but I won't. My mac laptop is 5 years in the closet and covered in a layer of dust. But it'd be a ton of stuff.