Homebrew, the Mac package manager

I want to throw my hat in the ring with those who have already endorsed Home­brew for the Mac. Home­brew is a fan­tas­tic way to install lots of the pro­grams that you’ll very likely want to use as you get more and more into LaTeX.

For exam­ple, the other day I watched this great screen­cast on para­graph for­mat­ting in Vim, and I was con­vinced that I really wanted to try out the pro­gram dis­cussed there, Par. There are two options for get­ting Par. One is to go over to the main web site, choose one of the seven down­load pack­ages to down­load, and then install it. Here are the instal­la­tion instructions:

On most UNIX–like sys­tems, “make –f pro­toMake­file” will work, but you might want to read the com­ments in pro­toMake­file, or use the auto­conf add-on for Par 1.52 con­tributed by Nel­son H. F. Beebe, or take a look at some hints for build­ing par on var­i­ous platforms.

I’m actu­ally fairly com­fort­able fol­low­ing these instruc­tions, but there was a point in time where I wasn’t. There was a point in time (not so long ago, really), where I wouldn’t have known what this meant at all. Even now, if there were a more straight­for­ward way to do this, I’d take it.

There is! Home­brew makes installing pack­ages like Par a breeze. Instead of doing the above, all you need to do is open up Terminal.app and type brew install par, then hit Enter. If you’ve installed Home­brew, it will down­load the appli­ca­tion and install it for you. And if you hap­pen to need another pro­gram to make the one you want run, Home­brew will install that, too (e.g., I needed Tokyo-Cabinet to make the mail pro­gram mutt run; Home­brew knew this and installed it for me).

Home­brew is the (new) pack­age man­ager for the Mac. It makes installing cer­tain sorts of pro­grams very easy (mostly these are command-line pro­grams; all of them are free to down­load). And it makes updat­ing these pro­grams easy, too. How would you go about updat­ing Par, given the above instruc­tions? I am not entirely sure. But if you installed it via Home­brew, you would type brew update and update all the pro­grams that you’ve installed via Home­brew (I haven’t done this yet, but the doc­u­men­ta­tion sug­gests that this is how this works).

Installing Home­brew is actu­ally quite easy. The main github page for Home­brew explains the instal­la­tion instruc­tions clearly. Lit­er­ally, this is all you need to do:

  1. Copy and paste the fol­low­ing into Terminal.app: 
    ruby -e "$(curl -fsS http://gist.github.com/raw/323731/install_homebrew.rb)"
  2. Install Apple’s Xcode either directly from Apple or via your OS X instal­la­tion disk (you’ll have to reg­is­ter as a devel­oper to do this, but it is free, so there is no rea­son not to). I think installing the devel­oper tools via Xcode installs some of the higher-powered command-line tools you need to run things like git; what­ever the rea­son, you need to install it.

Once you’ve installed Home­brew, you can search for a pro­gram by typ­ing brew search /search_term/, with the slashes included. Then just type brew install program_name to install a pro­gram, brew uninstall program_name to unin­stall a pro­gram, and brew help for help.

MacVim

You can even use Home­brew to install MacVim, if you like. Just brew install macvim and you are good to go. In the ter­mi­nal, type mvim and hit Enter. MacVim will open and the icon will appear in your Dock. Right click on it (or Command+Click) and then under ‘Options’ you can choose ‘Leave in Dock’ to make it stick around after you close it. In the future I’ll talk about git in detail, I hope. You can install git with a brew install git (no real sur­prise there, huh?).

I highly rec­om­mend Home­brew. And if, for some rea­son, you need to unin­stall Home­brew, just fol­low the direc­tions toward the bot­tom of this page. (I know this because some­thing messed up with my instal­la­tion the other day. I sim­ply did a brew list to see all the pro­grams I had installed, fol­lowed these direc­tions to eas­ily unin­stall Home­brew, then rein­stalled using the direc­tions above (though I obvi­ously didn’t have to install Xcode again), and used the list I just gen­er­ated to quickly rein­stall the pro­grams I needed. Very quick and very easy.)

Posted Monday, July 12th, 2010 under git, Mac, text editors.

9 comments

  1. Benedict Eastaugh says:
    16 July 2010 at 9:32 am

    You need to install Xcode because oth­er­wise you won’t have a com­piler (usu­ally GCC) avail­able to build and install Homebrew’s packages.

  2. P.D. says:
    16 July 2010 at 12:05 pm

    Since Mac options are on the table, I’ll add that I’ve been using TeXshop for years and have been very happy with it. Admit­tedly, it doesn’t allow for intri­cate grep­ping of the file; for that, I load the source in some­thing else.

  3. Charlie Tanksley says:
    16 July 2010 at 1:34 pm

    Hi Bene­dict, That makes sense. Thanks for fill­ing me in on the details!

    Hi P.D., I agree that TeXShop is a very nice edi­tor. It is every­thing that a Mac LaTeX edi­tor should be–it is clean and intu­itive and ‘just works’. I think some of the fea­tures (like its use of Sync­TeX) are par­tic­u­larly nice. I also think it has more options and fea­tures than I real­ized when I switched over to another edi­tor. Do you have any favorite TeXShop features?

  4. Kevin Klement says:
    22 July 2010 at 5:50 pm

    Does Home­brew really install pack­ages by com­pil­ing source rather than just installing bina­ries? If so, I won­der why. Of course, nearly all Linux dis­tri­b­u­tions come with a pack­age man­ager like this and they’re great (apt-get for Debian/Ubuntu, yum for Fedora, pac­man for Arch, etc.). They usu­ally just install bina­ries, though, unless it’s some­thing unusual or you specif­i­cally request to install from source (e.g., if you want to change some­thing). Only Gentoo’s portage sys­tem always installs from source. I guess com­pil­ing from source, although slower and less fail­safe, can result in bina­ries more opti­mized to your hard­ware, but since hard­ware for macs all comes from Apple, I wouldn’t have thought that was much of an issue. The biggest prob­lem with com­pil­ing from source is that for com­pli­cated stuff it can take for­ever, which is pretty annoy­ing if you’re not actu­ally chang­ing any­thing about it.

    P.D., what sort of things do you have in mind by “intri­cate grep­ping of the file”? I’ve never used TeXshop, but from what I’ve heard, it’s a lot like TeX­works. TeX­works sup­ports reg­u­lar expres­sion find/replaces, so I would have guessed that TeXshop does too. But maybe you meant some­thing more elab­o­rate. I’m curi­ous about what, if any­thing, TeXshop offers that TeX­works doesn’t, but I guess that’s for another post.

    • Charlie Tanksley says:
      22 July 2010 at 7:56 pm

      Hey Kevin,

      I just looked at the Home­brew wiki FAQ. In response to “Why are you com­pil­ing every­thing?” they say:

      We opti­mise for your Mac. But we try not com­pile stuff that takes ages but the avail­abil­ity of binary pack­ages dic­tates that. We don’t host our own bina­ries to keep costs zero. If you want to donate host­ing to the project, please let mxcl know.

      So there you have it. Free host­ing on github is a nice thing for projects like this, but I guess it has its costs.

  5. Alaa Batayneh says:
    8 March 2011 at 4:54 pm

    Thanks for col­lec­tion all i need in one place :)

  6. Ed Brannin says:
    18 August 2011 at 7:34 pm

    I came across this page look­ing for instruc­tions on how to unin­stall Home­brew: my old setup was a lit­tle borked even before the Migra­tion Assis­tant didn’t quite get the group per­mis­sions right.

    Any­way, you can find the steps I took at this old revi­sion of the Instal­la­tion wiki page; I’m not sure when or why they removed it:

    https://​github​.com/​m​x​c​l​/​h​o​m​e​b​r​e​w​/​w​i​k​i​/​I​n​s​t​a​l​l​a​t​i​o​n​/​1​b​f​5​0​8​3​6​7​d​c​c​1​8​6​a​e​0​f​4​1​c​e​5​d​6​4​d​4​7​7​5​0​1​4​2​7​2d8

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