I’ve just recently bought a Macbook Pro for myself, after having used a MBP at work for 4 years. I find it to be a really powerful development environment for the development I do, in languages such as Java, PHP, Ruby, Python and JS. Here is what I use day-to-day:
OSX El Capitan
I haven’t found anything not to like about this upgrade. I don’t use a lot of external devices, for which Bruce has found problems with El Capitan’s new restricted driver management for Arduinos and others. I like the fact I can use split screen functionality to side-by-side two windows easily, a feature that I very much like in Windows 10 too.
iTerm 2
This is an awesome terminal, better than OSX’s terminal. Nothing much more to say about it.
Fish Shell
This shell has fast and smart command-line completion which is very handy and I’d highly recommend it if you use the commandline a lot and are not totally won over by Bash. It looks nice too.
Homebrew
This is pretty much essential for command line OSX. It is a package manager which downloads and compiles the latest version of open source packages on your Mac. If you don’t use it already, get used to it.
IntelliJ WebStorm
WebStorm is great for debugging JavaScript applications, which I seem to be doing a lot of lately. I recommend the IntelliJ IDEA family of IDEs, once you get use to them, they are a great help in productive development. There are also vim and Emacs keybindings.
vim
If you are a fan of vim you will know what I mean when I say I can’t be without it. My Dotfiles show my .vimrc and plugin configuration.
git
Thankfully the BBC has moved over to Github, meaning all my coding uses Git. It is so useful, and not just for storing code, you can store anything.
iTunes
I use Apple Music, and iTunes Match, so iTunes is a must. It annoys me at times, but I just have to live with it.
Alfred
Alfred is a replacement for Spotlight search in OSX. It has a lot of functionality that I’m still getting my head around, but it speeds up my OSX workflow a lot when undertaking frequent tasks such as Google searching.
Evernote
Evernote is so useful for making and sharing notes on my phone, mac, work computer.. anywhere
Droplr
This is something someone only recently recommended to me. It seems very useful from what I’ve seen, great way to share images files, screenshots, webcasts.. anything. Also it has as expiry policy for media, like Snapchat, so it doesn’t exist on the internet for generations to come.
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