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Software Development Tooling! (for mac)
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Alan Leal
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2019-05-23

I came across some really cool tools for development and thought it would be worth sharing.

Iterm2

Iterm is a replacement for terminal. For any developer out there that opens up multiple terminal windows, starts server, ssh into others servers this is perfect. With one command (CRT D) you can split the current terminal window into multiple terminal windows and the best part is it copies all the settings from the original. You can navigate between the terminal windows by pressing CMD+ALT+Arrow so you fingers never need to leave the keyboard. You need to maximize one terminal window to see some logs? No Problem. CMD+Shift+Enter. This is only scratching the surface.

Divvy

Windows has a neat feature where you can drag the current window the left or right and it snaps into place. Where is this on the mac? There are some tools out there but divvy is the best one I have found. You can just click in task bar and you get a neat little overlay and you can draw where you want you app to live. You can also set shortcuts to auto maximize or pin left/right. Definitely worth checking out especially if you have a huge monitor.

Synergy

If you’re like me, you have multiple monitors and multiple computers. Some are linux, windows, and mac. I’m buy a KVM…that will solve my problem! Sure you can shell out $500 for a nice KVM that does DVI and then your next computer doesn’t even support DVI. So now you need to get one with a display port….fun…let’s shell out another $500. Then you get the KVM and it takes a couple second to switch and sometimes doesn’t switch at all. Bah…screw that. Synergy solves the problem. It is a virtual KVM. You setup one computer as the server and the rest as clients. You can then just drag your mouse from computer to computer and it automatically switches control. The best part is you can even copy/paste across computers. The only negative is that is uses your network to do this and I would highly recommend a wired connection.

Z

One letter says it all. Z is amazing especially when you have code in different directories all over your computer. Z learns where you go the most and records it. So if you have code checked out into ~/git/config and ~/workspace/project and you wanted to switch between these directory you either have to enter the FQP or go up down and it is annoying. Especially if you can’t remember the full path. With Z, all you would have to do is type “z config” and it would send you to the right directory.

Freeplane

Taking notes really sucks. We all have to do it and doing it in notepad, sublime, whatever is a pain. It is hard to get things organized as conversations jump all over the place. Welcome Freeplane. Freeplane is a free mind mapping tool. It is very easy to navigate around and put notes where they should go. You can export it out to text and/or images for people who don’t have it. It just helps collect your thoughts from a meeting.

Franz

How many different communication tools do you have? I have way too many. Gtalk, Skype, Slack, Gitter, Gmail (personal and work), ect. The list goes on and on. Some are app based and some are browser based and sometimes I get lost trying to find the right one. Franz let’s you centralize all your communications down to a single app. One single place to go to find what you are looking for.

Docker

I probably don’t even need to mention it as it is probably a staple. Hopefully you are using it the right way for development. I used to go in and download Redis, Mongo, MySQL, Postgress, blah blah blah and run these services locally on my computer. These services take time to start, consume memory and are hard to manage. Now I just create a docker-compose file with all the required service for the project, throw it in the project root and bam…full dev environment with one command.

Homebrew

Again, another tool which you probably already have. If you don’t you will soon. Brew is the mac package manager that probably should be part of the OS. Anyone familiar with Linux package managers will know the power right away.

Well that’s what I got right now. What tools do you have that helps with development?

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