Continuing on my theme of “Will provisions a new laptop” I also (somewhat arbitrarily) decided to use mise to manage all my dev tool versions rather than the usual orchestra of pyenv, nvm (wait no fnm), rvm, etc. So far so good, will report back if I have some awful version conflict with system Ruby or something. I have been impressed by the breadth of the ecosystem.
I am setting up a new machine and decided to try arbitrarily limiting myself to only GUI apps that could be installed via Brew Cask, mostly so that I could easily document everything in a Brewfile.
Previously, I have had occasional weirdness with MacOS’s assumptions about how apps are installed conflicting with how Cask installed them. In the early days it was pretty common to have to remember to do some followup (run some scripts, move some files, whatever) when installing a more “complicated” app because Brew’s abstracts didn’t fully support x or y weird obscure feature. Also, I sometimes just couldn’t find apps I needed, especially commercial apps.
I am here to report that none of that is a problem anymore. Brew Cask and the Brew Cask ecosystem tie in so nicely and so deeply to the modern MacOS ecosystem that it is genuinely easier than jumping through Apple’s stupid hoops to install apps the “right” way. Every app I’ve wanted has been available, every weird edge case has been supported (system extensions and shell aliases to name a few), and everything is now managed in one place and can easily be shared across computers.
My one feature request would be the ability to install and run an app “ephemerally” a la uvx so that I can try new apps without having to remember to go back and clean them up if I never use them again. I will look into forking but I’m sure MacOS’s system integrity bullshit will make this difficult.
One would hope that Apple is secretly funding this behind the scenes, or perhaps the multi-billion dollar tech companies whose employees all use it every day. But that’s probably not happening. So it’s up to us.