Top Nine of the Best Homebrew Packages for Mac
Top nine of the Best Homebrew Packages for Mac
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| Top nine of the Best Homebrew Packages for Mac |
Even if you dont have Homebrew installed, this list of some of the more helpful Homebrew packages and tools may inspire you to get Homebrew on your Mac. To get any use from this list youll want to be a reasonably advanced command line user, and youll obviously need to if you havent done so yet.
Then youre ready to go and enjoy the collection. And dont forget to share your own favorite Homebrew packages in the comments too. In no particular order, here are some of the top Homebrew packages for Mac: Cask allows you to easy install Mac OS GUI apps and binaries directly from the command line using Homebrew. First you install cask, and then you can install normal Mac apps directly from the command line.
For example, once you have cask, if you want to install Chrome from the command line, then Cask can do that with with a command like the following: Or maybe you want to install iterm2 so you can have that : Cask can install tons of applications in Mac OS without needing to download them individually from various websites and then going through the typical drag-and-drop install routine.
Note that Cask has some limitations, for example it cant install anything from the Mac App Store, and Cask is not able to is able to, but that doesnt make it any less useful of a tool for advanced Mac users. htop is a system resource monitor for the command line. htop is basically a superior version of top, with a nice visual indicator of process activity, CPU activity, memory usage, load average, and process management.
You can kind of think of it like Activity Monitor for the command line, though many command line users would argue its even more useful than Activity Monitor is. Weve discussed before, its really a fantastic tool that deserves to be a part of any command line toolbox. wget can download data from the web and ftp, making it one of the best tools out there to download anything via the command line.
Whether you want to download just a single file from somewhere, or you want to download an entire directory or even mirror a full website, wget can do it for you. You can also , but if youre reading this article you likely already have Homebrew. nmap is a top notch network security scanner.
It can find network assets, discover services and hosts on local networks, perform port scans, map a network (hence the name), detect operating systems and versions of software on clients and servers, and so much more. Its an excellent tool for systems administrators, network admins, security researchers, and anyone else who needs to dabble in network scanning activity.
You can also as a disk image in a self contained binary if youd rather not deal with home-brew, but again, were talking about homebrew here. Oh and if the concept of nmap appeals to you but the command line is far over your head or too cumbersome, then you can , finger, whois, trace route, , and much more, all from a friendlier GUI app. links and lynx are command line web browsers, allowing you full web access (well, as long as theres text to navigate) from the command line. This is useful for many reasons whether researching and web browsing from a terminal window, or even for testing web site functionality and compatibility with alternate browsers and for alternate use cases. Im partial to links but lynx is good too, or you can install both.
Weve discussed lynx before , and you can also if youre interested, but again if you have Homebrew installed then its a piece of cake to install through the command line. geoip gives you geolocation data for an inputted IP address. This is useful for network and systems administrators, web workers, security researchers, and much more. If you ever wondered where a particular IP is located in the world and to what ISP it belongs, then geoip is for you.
Do you like to chat on IRC? Want to be told to rtfm when you ask a question in #linux? Then irssi is for you, because its arguably the best irc client for the command line (or perhaps in general, sorry ircii, mirc, and ircle). /join away! If you use the bash shell, then bash-completion is likely something youre either familiar with or soon will be since it dramatically improves command completion and is programable. Personally Im partial to zsh which also has great completion capabilities, but bash-completion makes bash much more useful, so if youre a bash fan then check it out if it sounds appealing to you.
Oh and this probably goes without saying but if you then youd want to use bash to get any use out of bash-completion. The watch command is super useful to keep a continuous eye on another process. For example you can use watch to track disk usage or IO, or virtual memory usage, or anything else, updating the command output every few seconds. This is one of those great tools for administrators but its useful for many other purposes too.
Home-brew isnt the only approach for watch, you can also using MacPorts, from source, or as a precompiled binary too. What do you think? Do you have any particularly favorite Homebrew packages? Share your own top Homebrew packages, tricks, installs, and add-ons in the comments below!
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