Macbook apps for computer science

[Joe]

Hey

For my 18th birthday I was given a Macbook Air, simply for the purpose in September I'll be hopefully studying computer science at uni.

Purely asking for help trying to find the best apps I can get for my studies, bearing in mind I'll be coding Python and generally programming. Also, I'll have to get a decent text editor for html etc. I've read a few websites but they all say near enough the same thing. I'll prefer free things but if you really recommend a paid app I'll look into it.

Thankssss

[Chippiewill]

Definitely get

TotalTerminal is a must have. I use it basically everyday on my course: http://totalterminal.binaryage.com/. Basically means the terminal is always a keyboard short-cut away.

Sublime Text is also a pretty good one to have, it's a great general purpose text editor - once you get around it's nuances it's great for languages like python with its built in build system (Basically I just press cmd+b on any python script and it'll run it inside the editor). atom.io is a close second.

Homebrew is also an extremely good package manager for OSX, especially for any development stuff: http://brew.sh/

Some other situational stuff that I use:

vagrant (/virtual box) - Great for virtual machine stuff, helpful for developing on linux. Some of my course requires linux so it's helpful to be able to spin up a VM for it.

GitHub App - Makes doing git stuff easier, I can never remember the commandline stuff.

Xcode - Mostly use it for C/C++ project work, it's great for *big* stuff, it's pretty crap for editing small stuff though.

Anaconda python - Basically a massive distribution of python which comes with all the useful packages, also comes with a pretty good editor for python (Spyder)

[Drew]

I'd also recommend Sublime Text, I use it a lot. Some other apps I use are iTerm (split pane view, hotkey also available) and FileZilla, for making file transfers between uni servers and my machine easier.

[Joe]

Definitely get

TotalTerminal is a must have. I use it basically everyday on my course: http://totalterminal.binaryage.com/. Basically means the terminal is always a keyboard short-cut away.

Sublime Text is also a pretty good one to have, it's a great general purpose text editor - once you get around it's nuances it's great for languages like python with its built in build system (Basically I just press cmd+b on any python script and it'll run it inside the editor). atom.io is a close second.

Homebrew is also an extremely good package manager for OSX, especially for any development stuff: http://brew.sh/

Some other situational stuff that I use:

vagrant (/virtual box) - Great for virtual machine stuff, helpful for developing on linux. Some of my course requires linux so it's helpful to be able to spin up a VM for it.

GitHub App - Makes doing git stuff easier, I can never remember the commandline stuff.

Xcode - Mostly use it for C/C++ project work, it's great for *big* stuff, it's pretty crap for editing small stuff though.

Anaconda python - Basically a massive distribution of python which comes with all the useful packages, also comes with a pretty good editor for python (Spyder)

Hey thanks for all the help on this, I've downloaded all of them and I'm giving them a look now - all worth keeping for the future anyway. Again, thanks for all your help, especially on command line stuff.


I'd also recommend Sublime Text, I use it a lot. Some other apps I use are iTerm (split pane view, hotkey also available) and FileZilla, for making file transfers between uni servers and my machine easier.

Thanks! Also downloaded all you've said - completely forgot about the ftp stuff which I used to use on my PC. Thank you!

[Drew]

No problem, good luck :)