The project page for Homebrew, a package manager for macOS created by Max Howell.
HN commenters recommend it as the closest thing to apt-get on OS X and a good alternative to MacPorts, praising its command line and community.
1. iTerm2 is great. I haven't used the Mac terminal since it became available. Thought I will say that I have never experienced any performance problems with either. iTerm 2 just has a richer feature set.
2. Say hello to the homebrew (http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/) package manager. While apt is more robust, I don't think you will be let down by homebrew. I recommend following the "advanced" instructions for installing it into your home directory rather than mangling the /usr/local permissions.
3. The keyboard iTerm 2 shortcuts are highly customizable. Mac Terminal does not appear to be as configurable.
4. vim in the Mac terminal works wonderfully. MacVim adds clipboard integration, native keyboard shortcuts, and other Finder integration niceties. I use both interchangeable. Per my response to question 2, the latest versions of vim and MacVim are available through homebrew.
After a adjusting to Finder, I don't think you will find a productivity loss. The biggest issue I have found for folks coming over from Linux are the lack of real virtual desktops. Spaces is a joke by comparison.
> Essentially I think, my question is, is the experience on a MBP so much better, that it's worth having to learn the MacOS platform?
Shortly, yes. Mac as a platform (hw & sw) is really solid and beautiful, letting you to focus on your work, instead of configuring your machine. I used various Linux distros (Redhat, Debian, Gentoo, Ubuntu) as my primaly OS from 1998 to 2006, until switched to Mac with no previous experience. It took few months before it felt like home, but after that I have never considered to swithing back.
Your Linux skills will be in great use on server side.
> Do I easily get all the software I'll need (svn, git, django, python, vim)?
No problem. You can have even apt-get. Check out these:
http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/ &
http://www.macports.org/
PS. As a FOSS advocate, in my wildest dream the FOSS community will some day come up with something as elegant as OS X, but unfortunately it's hard to see that happening.
OS X users, I advise using
brew install rlwrap
instead of downloading the tarball in the link. You may feel tempted to download a tarball and compile readline. But I experienced the problem mentioned in rlwrap-0.37/BUGS:
49-On recent OS X sytems, libreadline is not the real thing, but a
50-non-GNU replacement. If the linker complains about missing
51:symbols, install GNU readline and try again.
This may then lead you to attempt compiling and installing GNU readline, which will ultimately lead you to try to solve more problems you're having in compiling readline. You might find this fun. But if you just want to get things over with, there is an easier way. Homebrew[1] to the rescue:
brew install rlwrap
Perhaps this is just obvious to others. Would've saved me a few minutes to hear this, though.
[1]: http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/
The moment an OS maker requires signed apps (on desktop) is the moment I jump ship. They know it's the death knell for desktop OSes though. I'd be really surprised if it happens.
I'm not sure what you mean about Xcode though. It's the same toolset (minus private headers) that Apple uses to build their own OS X and iOS apps. There's one extra step to put all of the command line tools on the path for you (install the Command Line Tools package). Then just get Homebrew and you're all set.
Open source components of Xcode (parsers, compilers, linkers, command-line tools) here: http://www.opensource.apple.com/release/developer-tools-45/
Homebrew: http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/
I agree, and to go further, even _if_ a non-developer did on github (maybe higher in the search rankings), for many popular projects you can generally find the consumer facing url via the "homepage" link.
Example:
https://github.com/rack/rack homepage url points to http://rack.rubyforge.org/
https://github.com/tenderlove/nokogiri => http://nokogiri.org/
https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew => http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/
https://github.com/joyent/node => http://nodejs.org/
etc, etc.
It also seems fairly common to put the 'consumer' url near the top or bottom of the README.
I think what he means is that you can actually design a site for your project and host it on Github. For example:
http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/
Are there any non-google sites that do this on google code? As far as I can tell, all of them look like this:
http://code.google.com/p/waf/
Which is fine, but I'd hardly say that a new user would find that less daunting than the Homebrew page. There's a lot going on, and it's trying to cater to both people who want to use waf and people who want to work on waf.