Add to Chrome
Add to Edge
Add to Firefox
Add to Opera
Add to Brave
Add to SafariWhen comparing Homebrew vs nvALT, the Slant community recommends Homebrew for most people. In the question“What are the best power user tools for macOS?” Homebrew is ranked 2nd while nvALT is ranked 34th. The most important reason people chose Homebrew is:
Homebrew makes it easy for people to quickly install any open source software (that is contained within the apps repositories) for Mac.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Quick access to a large repository of open source software
Homebrew makes it easy for people to quickly install any open source software (that is contained within the apps repositories) for Mac.
Pro Easy to setup and use
Once installed, you control Homebrew using the brew command. You can find packages using brew search, install them using brew install and remove them using brew uninstall.
Pro Open Source
Pro Less maintenance than Macports
Macports seems to be able to get into a bad state where new packages are unable to be installed, or installed software was unable to be updated. This simply hasn't happened with Homebrew. In addition to not having to deal with corruption problems, Homebrew installs packages in userland. Not requiring root to install software is a big win.
Pro Builds quickly and requires few dependencies
Homebrew as much as possible uses already existing libraries and tools to install software thus making builds quick and requiring few dependencies.
Pro Unintrusive
Homebrew installs packages to their own directory and then symlinks their files into /usr/local. Homebrew won’t install files outside its prefix, and you can place a Homebrew installation wherever you like.
Pro Does not require using sudo
One of the things to like about Homebrew is that it refuses to run things under sudo most of the time. This is a great policy, but it causes issues when you want to create symlinks or install in places that SIP has changed permissions on.
Pro Homebrew tries very hard to use existing tools and libraries
Homebrew’s recipes try very hard to use the existing tools and libraries in OS/X, so they tend to build much faster and require fewer dependent libraries.
Pro Powerful search syntax
nvALT has a simple text box at the top (similar to that of a web browser) and when you start typing inside it, nvALT immediately displays a drop-down box of all the notes that contain the text you are searching for. The more you type, the more the search is narrowed down.
Pro Lightweight
Pro Free
Pro MultiMarkdown 3 support
Has built-in support for MultiMarkdown 3.
Pro Powerful note-taking features
nvALT is not only used for simple text editing but also as a powerful tool for taking notes, TODOs, phone numbers and every other piece of information that can be stored in a plain-text file.
This is because nvALT is not designed only as a tool to write text, but also as a powerful search and organize tool for plain-text files.
Pro Right to Left support
Cons
Con May cause issues when trying to create symlinks or installing in places where SIP has changed permissions
One of the things to like about Homebrew is that it refuses to run things under sudo most of the time. This is a great policy, but it causes issues when you want to create symlinks or install in places that SIP has changed permissions on. (Alternatively, you could install Homebrew somewhere other than /usr/local, but that might break various packages that depend on having stuff in and relative to /usr/local/.)
Con Command line tools for XCode required
Once xcode is installed you can install Homebrew, including new(er)/different versions of most of the build stuff that xcode-select installed, like a newer gcc, newer git, etc.
Con Relies on outdated system libs
Con Not very powerful as far as text editing goes
nvALT's strength is its search feature. It has some basic text-editing features such as cut, paste, find-and-replace and so on. But it doesn't have any advanced text manipulation features available in other editors.
