23 Essential Tools For Web Development on a Mac

15 years ago, my CS202 professor was asked:

Q: "Dr. Anasastio, can you recommend a different editor from emacs? It's so hard to work with. Can we use pico or jot?"

A: "No. Emacs is THE editor. If you plan to work in computer science, you have to know it."

Though I personally use TextMate for most coding these days, I can certainly see his point. 15 years later, emacs is still relevant and powerful (and free).

Find me another editor you can say that about, and I'll pay you $5. (vi doesn't count: it's only relevant because sysadmins could fit it on a floppy, and now it's vim anyway.)

Pretty much every desktop virtualization package supports setting up shared folders to facilitation moving files between the host and guest OS. I know for a fact that VMWare Fusion on OS X does this, though the preference tab to enable it did take a little bit of searching to find.

That being said, if your goal is to develop in an environment more like your production system(s), you're going to need to work out your automated deployment model sooner than later, anyway. You may as well do it locally, where the cost of a screw-up deployment is effectively nil.

You can mount your VM locally by running something like Samba on the VM side, then open stuff normally with TextMate or whatever.

It's a bit slow and has some quirks with huge projects, so I stopped doing it, personally. Mounting with ExpanDrive or MacFuse(SSH) were slower when I tried.

This sort of setup is great for working out server configuration kinks during development. To do it right, you need an editor with remote file support and a way to interact with a remote process.

Lisp development in Emacs supports this setup.

http://bc.tech.coop/blog/051227.html

Just about all of the text editors on the Mac that are oriented towards web development have support for automatic sftp/ftp/scp of files to a server, so use that route. The virtualization tools also support sharing folders/directories with OS X, so you could use that path but since the eventual goal is deployment to another server using the sftp option means that going from testing to deployment consists of changing the name of the server you are pushing to.

I'm doing some kernel development at work right now, so I test my code in a virtual machine (VMWare Fusion). I use SSH to both copy files (via SCP) to the VM and run things on it, and automate those actions with a Bash script or Makefile rule.

That way, the only direct interaction I have with the VM is to to click "revert to snapshot" whenever I mess it up.

You could use subversion or git, or if your a man you could cvs or perforce. that last bit was just a joke. Even though you can setup a shared drive between the two, I found that checking out a subversion repo is a lot easier then moving files around.

But why? I don't know of anybody that deploys by copying files to their server manually. There's always something else that needs to be done and it ends up getting scripted away. Even the most basic deployment usually involves a copy and telling the server to restart or refresh itself.

I guess if you're shy of scp/ssh from the command line, but it's quite useful to get used to using it. It's everywhere.

Cyberduck does all that for free.