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Comment by thayne | Hacker News Reader

Whenever I use the CLI on a mac, I am frustrated by the absense of all the GNU extensions that aren't there when I use the core utilities, and that the version of bash is ancient.

I mean I still prefer it over windows, but it is not the same experience as linux.

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This is really a non-issue and easy to get around. You can easily install the GNU utilities which take precedence in your PATH. I installed them all with Homebrew in a few minutes, including bash5. You can follow this guide[0] as a start.

[0] https://gist.github.com/skyzyx/3438280b18e4f7c490db8a2a2ca0b...

It is an issue if I need to rewrite my scripts specifically for macOS and they are no longer cross-platform.

Yeah, you can alias all utilities called g<something> to <something>, but you can't reasonably expect all users of your scripts to do so as well.

Using macOS is PITA.

If you're using GNU extensions, then you are not writing cross-platform scripts in the first place.

I’m not well-versed enough to know how well it measures up, but Mac switched to ZSH as default shell about a year ago.

I think zsh might well be more powerful than bash but it's extremely opinionated about how it does stuff (unless you want to go down a configuration rabbit hole) - for me, coming off 20+ years of bash muscle memory, it was unusable and I switched back.

It is the same experience as UNIX though, including the fact that each flavour has its own way of doing stuff.

The last time I used a Mac I remember the absolute headfuck that was all the different ways to make it "more unixy"

"Oh just use Macports!"

"No macports is trash, use Homebrew!"

"Homebrew sucks, use Gentoo/kMacOSX!"

Of course none of them were particularly interoperable at the time and all had extremely arcane invocations and setups. It was very lipstick on a pig

I haven't used homebrew but I use macports all the time without any issues. shrug

Not much more of a headfuck than the flavours of Linux distros and their package managers and guis. "More unixy" is also a bad pun, there's nothing more unixy about it, just a package manager - pick one and use it. Been using homebrew without much of a problem almost for a decade.

I'm very happy with Homebrew. I find the model way easier than Linux packages.

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