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Here are some of the best Mac homebrew packages that you can install on a Mac using Homebrew. You may have installed Homebrew because you need a certain language or tool. However, Homebrew can also be used to install other great tools. Homebrew is a macOS package manager. It is one of the first things you’ll need to set up a local development environment for programming on a Mac.
It can be used to install programmes for the terminal, also called the command line. It’s like an app store for tools for programming. Some programming languages and command line tools are already installed on MacOS, but most work needs newer versions of languages and tools that Apple doesn’t provide. Homebrew has almost every useful open source programme, and it only takes one tool to install and manage them all.
Best Mac Homebrew Packages
Cask
Homebrew is set up so that you can only download CLI programmes by default. CLI programmes, which stand for “Command Line Interface,” are apps you use by typing lines of code into the terminal window. Most of the time, they don’t respond to mouse clicks and only have plain text in the terminal.
The apps we use most often these days are called GUI programmes, which stands for Graphical User Interface programmes. GUI apps are programmes like Microsoft Word, Safari, YouTube, and Slack that have buttons, smooth graphics, videos, animations, and more.
Htop
One of the most popular Homebrew apps, htop, is popular for a good reason. It is a resource manager that is based on the well-known top CLI app but has a better user interface and more features. If you have ever used Activity Monitor on your Mac, you know what a resource manager is and what it does.
It just shows how your RAM, CPU, and GPU are being used by different apps. This makes it a great alternative to Activity Monitor for people who always work from their terminal. This is one of the best Mac homebrew packages that you can download from here right now.
Wget
wget is another Homebrew app that every Mac user who uses the terminal should have. It’s a package that lets users download anything with an HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, or FTPS protocol. Since these are the most common protocols, you can pretty much download anything from the Internet.
This means that you can download files, directories, and even whole websites from the command line. It’s one of the quickest and easiest ways to get files from the Internet onto your computer. You can also change the names of files as you download them.
Nmap
nmap is a great tool for checking the security of a network. It can find network assets, find services and hosts on local networks, perform port scans, map a network (hence the name), find operating systems and software versions on clients and servers, and do a lot more.
It’s a great tool for system administrators, network administrators, security researchers, and anyone else who needs to do some network scanning. If you don’t want to deal with home-brew, you can also get nmap for Mac as a disc image in a self-contained binary, but again, this is about home-brew.
Links
Links and lynx are command line web browsers that give you full access to the web from the command line, as long as there is text to navigate. This is useful for many things, like doing research and browsing the web from a terminal window.
It can also be used to test how a website works and if it’s compatible with other browsers and for other uses. Links is our favourite, but Lynx is also good, or you could install both. We’ve talked about lynx before we talked about macports.
Tree
If you know how to use commands like cd, ls, and.. to move around in your Mac terminal, you know that it’s not hard to move around in simple file structures. But when there are a lot of files and directories to look through, it can be hard to find the file you want.
You can use the tree package instead of going through each folder to find what you need. After installing tree, all you have to do is type “tree” in the terminal to see every file and folder on your computer, as well as how they are related to each other.
FAQs
Is Homebrew the best for Mac?
Command-line package management is the way to go if you want to be more productive and do more with a Mac. Homebrew is one of the best free package managers, and if you know how to use Terminal, it’s pretty easy to use.
Is Homebrew free for Mac?
Homebrew is a free and open-source software package management system that makes it easier to install software on both Apple’s macOS and Linux.
What can you do with Homebrew on Mac?
Homebrew installs the things you need that Apple or your Linux system didn’t. Homebrew puts packages in their own directory and then links their files to /opt/homebrew (on Apple Silicon). Homebrew won’t install files outside of its prefix, but you can install it anywhere you want.
Do you need Xcode on Mac for Homebrew?
You need to install either the Xcode Command Line Tools (about 100 MB) or the full Xcode package in order to set up Homebrew (about 10 GB).