For those who are interested, my latest post for OWC Rocket Yard shares more detail about Ghostty, a modern terminal replacement for macOS. I have Ghostty installed on all three of my Macs, and working within its environment has been a delight. So much so that I can’t fathom the thought of using Apple’s staid Terminal app.
The image below shows a comparison between Ghostty (top) vs Apple’s Terminal (bottom). Notice how sharp and crisp the text appears in Ghostty, compared to Terminal. Unlike the Terminal, Ghostty does a great job of displaying content within smaller window sizes.
Using Ghostty has been a pleasant experience. It feels modern and clean, making the Terminal.app seem dated by comparison. Similarly, adding Homebrew has made the command line experience much more enjoyable. One big benefit with Homebrew is that I can quickly install and remove apps right from the shell.
Some of my favorite command line apps are:
1) eza. (This command is a modern replacement for ls.) My favorite command is eza’s built-in tree command, which lets me view the structure of my folder hierarchy.
2) btop is a more modern and visually parsable implementation of the classic top command. Invoking btop lets me glance at Mac’s memory, CPU usage, battery charge level and more.
3) bat is a modern spin on the venerable cat command. I use bat for quickly viewing the contents of a text file from the command line. Below is the output when running cat.
And now, the same result when running bat. The information appears in a much clearer format, complete with line numbers and color coding.
With Homebrew installed, these apps were all easily added by typing:
brew install <app>
This go around, I’m reallly focusing on keeping an organized, annotated and manageable.zshrc file.
MarsEdit – this application has become essential to my blogging workflow. Blogging with MarsEdit is easy, and if it’s easy, I can do it more often.
NetNewsWire – with my new Mac, I’ve limited the number of RSS feeds I follow. This isn’t to say I won’t add any new feeds at some point in the future. With NetNewsWire, I can easily keep up with my favorite blogs. It’s fast and free. It also offers iCloud syncing, but I’m not ready for that just yet.
1Password – I haven’t found a better password management application, so I’m sticking with this Electron app for now. Apple’s Password app, while serviceable, doesn’t have a key feature I really need (saving attachments). There was a time when 1Password was best in class as a native Mac app.
macShot – a powerful, free screenshot and screen recording utility that competes quite favorably against the subscription-based CleanShot X. I haven’t spent too much time using this app, save for making the screenshots that accompany this post. I plan to test its screen recording capabilities soon. If it succeeds on that front, I may be able to ditch CleanShot X once and for all.
Remember to turn off Screenshot keyboard shortcuts if you plan to use them with macShot.
Hyperkey – a simple, free app that turns the (rarely used) Caps Lock key into a Hyper key. Pressing Caps Lock with Hyperkey is like pressing Shift Option Command Control simultaneously, without the awkward finger gymnastics.
Ghostty – My post on Apple’s Terminal software led to a suggestion on Mastodon to check out this advanced terminal application. So far, in my very brief usage, it feels modern and fast. Without my current command line utilities, I really can’t gauge how it will perform over time. (On this new laptop, I have also installed Homebrew because I need a proper package manager.)
BBEdit – a proper text editor that blows the doors off of TextEdit. I have paid for earlier versions of BBEdit, but I want to see if the free version will suffice for my usage.
Still left to install: a properMac launcher app. I’m leaning towards Alfred, but I want to examine other options before committing.
