Posted by cgrant3d on December 9, 2010 at 5:07pm
I just made the plunge and bought a Macbook Pro - it's my first Mac and as a longtime PC user I'm sure there's a ton to learn. Any development / advice / OSS tools I should know about? First order of business for Drupal dev (I think) is MAMP but I'd rather learn from you all than stumble through this on my own.
Thanks for any advice you can give,
Chris
Comments
XAMPP is better, in my
XAMPP is better, in my opinion, but MAMP is fine. Just keep in mind that if you upgrade to MAMP Pro that all your databases and server configuration files will suddenly be in different places on the file system.
For Drupal development, the world is your oyster. A lot of people like Eclipse, Komodo IDE, NetBeans, etc. and these are also available for OS X. I'm oldschool and use BBEdit. A lot of people I work with like TextWrangler (which is from the same developers and is free, compared to BBEdit's $100 "holiday discount" price) and TextMate ($50).
Kate, Kompare and other KDE tools are available for OS X.
Get XCode so that you have common command line tools like diff and patch. This is also the standard way to install CVS on OS X. You can get Subversion separately (I use the one from CollabNet).
I like the Cornerstone client for Subversion. Tower looks good for Git but I haven't tried it yet.
Path Finder is highly, highly recommended. It's the best Finder replacement I've used (and I've tried them all). I posted a description and discount code back in April:
http://groups.drupal.org/node/59138
iTerm is a much better console than Terminal.
For clipboard history management, I like Clyppan. I used to use Quicksilver for this, but I still use Quicksilver for other things like application launching, text manipulation and showing strings as large text on the screen.
Those are very interesting
Those are very interesting recommendations, Christefano! I definitely want to give some of them a whirl.
I'm less GUI and more of a command line person, so my preference usually centers around CLI tools. I use VIM as my text editor and MAMP for the stack. I must admit, MAMP takes a bit of getting used to in terms of where and how to configure things, but I do like that you can switch between versions of PHP (5.2 and 5.3) if you need to. If I don't use VI, I'm a fan of TextMate because it's relatively light weight and has some convenient formatting functions if I'm trying to examine unformatted web service output.
I also used to use MacPorts a lot. If you are interested in more of a Linux package manager style experience, MacPorts could be an alternative for setting up a development environment.
Quickstart - MAC / Windows / Linux
You might consider Quickstart.
Quickstart is a complete PHP development environment already setup using many best practices and popular tools. Plus its an environment thats the same or similar to where Drupal will be deployed. The only requirement is to install something like Virtualbox (free) - or VMware, etc. plus enough memory/CPU. (aka, most machines bought in the last couple years).
Some of the advantages is zero setup, lots of documentation, plus the cruft of development stays off your machine, is easily backed up, and easily transferable.
--
mike stewart { twitter: @MediaDoneRight | IRC nick: mike stewart }
Xcode on secondary
You can save some time by making sure to run the extra bundle software that came with the machine. Xcode is definitely on there.
Thanks a lot for the
Thanks a lot for the suggestions. This is probably a total newb question but I'm having a difficult time finding a concise answer online...
I used to SSH into my server via Putty on Windows & a keyfile that I had on the hd. I can't figure out what the correct approach is in OSX - do I just provide the key to terminal or is it supposed to be integrated into keychain somehow? I've seen quite a few posts and they all approach it differently.
Thanks again for any help.
Chris
Chris Grant
Senior Visualization Artist | HMC Architects
Portfolio | christophergrant.com
IE Drupal | g.d.o/inland-empire
On UNIX-y systems, SSH keys
On UNIX-y systems, SSH keys belong in the ~/.ssh folder. If cgrant3d is your short username, for example, put your SSH config (if you have one) and your public and private keys in /Users/cgrant3d/.ssh