even for myself, as much as possible i try to just rely on what's built-in, if reasonable. time is precious!

the mac is shitty in a million ways, but it's still by far the least shitty, for me, out of the windows, linux, mac trinity. tho at this point it's been years since i've spent much time non-mac, so maybe the situation has improved -- i'll probably give it another go once asahi linux matures (or its m1 support is adopted by other distros).

(also the arm mac notebook hardware is just insanely good, imo.)

If you’re not developing native apps for any of Apple’s platforms, all you need (for starters)

[1] Command Line Tools (just type "xcode-select --install” in the terminal)

[2] Install Homebrew (https://brew.sh)

[3] Install GNU Coreutils (just type “brew install coreutils” in the terminal)

Command Line Tools is the package that contains the compiler (clang), Git and all the expected development tools.

Obviously, depending on what kind of development you’re doing, you’ll install the runtime packages and utilities you would have installed on Linux, BSD or Windows anyway.

If you’re a web developer, for example, you'll probably need to install NodeJS, and a bunch of bundlers, linters, pre/post processors, task runners (Gulp, Grunt, Webpack, Parcel, etc.).

No matter which platform you’re on, nobody loves their default terminal emulator, so you’ll need to install iTerm2, Alacrity, Kitty or my new favorite, WezTerm.

Oh and the editor! macOS comes with Vim and Emacs, but you’ll want your favorite distribution/version/fork. (If you’re into VS Code, you can brew install vscodium). Even if the bundled version is what you want, then there’s the plugins, extensions, packages you need. Again, regardless of platform.

The point is, no matter what platform you choose, you need to install a bunch of things to get going. macOS isn’t significantly worse in this regard.

I assume GP knows about Cygwin and elects not to use it.