Fixing Xcode command line tools on an older version of OSX

This will be of interest to nobody but Future Me when it inevitably happens again.

It has been a while since I did anything approaching proper coding and since I use it as a lifeline when things are getting bad, I thought it was time to make something again. The most* fun part of programming is discovering a problem in the development environment and disappearing into a rabbit-hole for days to eventually bring you to the point where you can actually start.

This time, it was vi not working because rvm had triggered a Homebrew update which hadn't worked properly because of an OSX upgrade and ... argh. Ultimately it was Xcode, then the Xcode command line tools being missing.

This is going to come up again, so here's a note for future me.

For boring reasons I do not (and cannot) run the latest version of OSX or the latest version of Xcode. Consequently, running brew update && brew upgrade gave me:

Error: Xcode alone is not sufficient on High Sierra.
Install the Command Line Tools:
  xcode-select --install

That command is not going to work on older versions of OSX. It triggers another process which (I think) hunts for the very latest version of Xcode in the App Store and its tools. I don't have the latest Xcode so it fails to find anything useful.

After quite a bit of hunting I found I can download the exact version of the tools I need from the Apple Developer site.

Once this is downloaded and installed, everything works ok (although I did have some luck also fixing up Homebrew with brew doctor).


*least

How to Mac - part 2

Well, I'm still making use of a Mac. Four months in I'm starting to get used to the keyboard and some of the oddities (good and bad - I still hate the behaviour of this window management). Time to write some more docs for future-me should I ever have to configure one of these systems again.

Clipboard management

I made the switch to using a clipboard manager years ago and frankly now can't comprehend life without one. I found loads of them on the Mac - mostly expensive and part of much larger packages which I don't need.

The one I settled on is called Flycut. It will only work on text (and will occasionally foul up copying images with a keyboard shortcut) but it works really well for my simple use case and is easily installed via homebrew:

brew cask install Caskroom/cask/flycut

Services

Installing services such as Postgres or Elastic Search via homebrew often writes them into the startup sequence. Sadly, these days I am not coding enough to need these all the time and available RAM is precious so I went looking for an easy way to change what is run when. It seems an easy way to do this is homebrew services, which is easily installed via the homebrew interface and lets me edit the startup sequence and run the services directly without them starting next time I boot the machine. This last command requires a very recent version. Docs on the end of the link, above.

Bash and completion

I took a brief foray into Z shell and found it different enough to bash to irritate me. Given time I think I could configure it to be something I really like, but after some time and rage trying to configure the prompt I decided that I don't have the patience for that at the moment.

The motivator here was improving bash autocompletion - especially for git and homebrew. It turns out the version of bash shipped with OSX is ancient so the first stop was upgrading that via homebrew which then meant changing the bash-completion package (written for bash 3) over to bash-completion2 (which is for bash 4). Next I discovered that both git and homebrew ship with their own completion config which just needed to be parsed when the shell starts.

And thus the fun began.

Homebrew bash autocomplete configuration is hidden in /usr/local/etc/bash_completion.d instead of the more usual /etc/bash_completion.d. I needed to encourage it to parse the contents of this directory instead - which proved surprisingly difficult. In the end I had to add this to ~/.bash_profile:

for bcfile in `brew --prefix`/etc/bash_completion.d/* ; do
  . $bcfile
done

(copied from this Stack Overflow answer because of lazy).

As far as I can tell, bash is supposed to read the contents of the bash_completion.d directory automatically but because homebrew moves it the paths need fixing. There is almost certainly a better way of doing this, but by this point I was bored of this problem and decided to accept something that worked. Then write about it.

I also found I needed to create an empty file at /usr/local/etc/bash_completion because this line was complaining:

[ -f /usr/local/etc/bash_completion ] && . /usr/local/etc/bash_completion

I probably could remove the line, but I had Fear of removing such a standard line of config and ending up breaking something else in the future. Again, probably not the best solution.

And that's it for the moment. Like last time this is mostly my own documentation so I can reproduce these steps in the future written here on the off-chance it is useful to someone else. I certainly don't recommend any of the bash config stuff as the best way of doing things. Think of these notes as a diary, recording my reluctant exploration of MacWorld. End disclaimers...

How to Mac

A while ago I made the switch from iOS to Android and now I find myself needing to make a similar transition - this time from Ubuntu to OSX. I've been using Ubuntu for development for around twelve years and like most developers I use a lot of keyboard shortcuts so to say this new world is scary and unfamiliar is more than an understatement. As before I'm writing this for myself in the future if I have to go through this again, and anyone else who has to do this so you know you're not alone.

Getting started

Out of the box nothing was too painful. Sure, the keys are in the wrong place but that is something I'll get used to eventually. I was shown how to put the mouse scroll the correct way up so that helped with moving around (it's in System Preferences -> Trackpad) and since to start with life was all about Chrome and simple text editing it didn't hurt too much. Except for the loss of function keys and the missing delete key (fn+backspace). Sigh. Still, the hardware is genuinely lovely and I'm very impressed with the battery life. As I type this I've been working all day from the battery and I'm still seeing 41% charge. Now; my Linux laptop has seen some serious miles but I don't remember it ever doing this well. Plus it's really nice having the operating system work 100% including hibernating, sleeping and all the other bits and pieces. That has been getting much better on Linux over the years but if I'm honest it's just nowhere near as good as I'm seeing here.

First shot at some real work

So then I had to start installing tools and getting things set up for actual web development. First up, Chrome. Gone are the days of hitting F12 to bring in the developer tools or a two button shortcut to view page source. Now I have to some weird contortion exercise for the tools and I have to include the command key to view source. Maybe it gets lonely and sad if it isn't pressed often enough? Anyway, my brain will remap this eventually so it's not the end of the world. 

Bring forth the command line

At the suggestion of literally everyone I immediately abandoned the default terminal in favour of installing iTerm2. That involved installing a package manager and a plugin for the package manager. This is weird territory for someone who is used to apt being an integral part of the operating system, but I was still impressed by the screen and battery life so I rode that happy wave a bit longer. First I needed some other odds and ends and eventually a friendly Mac user at work gave me some commands and I typed them in and Things Started Working (because when did just typing in commands blindly ever hurt?). I'm impressed with his wizardly powers, but I'm well aware that one day I'll need to do this again and I may be in serious trouble.

Command history suggests "we" did something like:

1. install xcode to get gcc
2. install homebrew: /usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"
3. install cask: brew tap caskroom/homebrew-cask
4. install iterm2: brew install iterm2

Well, if my memory has failed me it's a problem for future me. In the meantime I have a package manager and now an exciting terminal which is all the wrong colours, but that's hardly the Mac's fault. A few tweaks and I'll be up and ... wait, why is the window split in half? 

What do the buttons do?

The terminal is where the keyboard shortcuts really started to hurt. A combination of some of the shortcuts being different, an entirely new modifier key to contend with and my brain attempting to use CMD instead of CTRL except now apparently not all the time produced many, many frustrating mistypes and resulted in a couple of hours rebinding keys. It's now better - not as good as the default terminal in Ubuntu, but very usable and at least iTerm2 lets me save my profile for future use so I don't have to go through that again. 

I also discovered that OSX uses slightly different environment files to Ubuntu so I had to source my bashrc file from bash_profile to get that read properly. Apparently age-old Mac users keep build scripts so a new machine is just configured for them while they make tea. 

At least git works, right?

Yup - no problems here. Well, until I attempted tab completion at which point I was told that I actually needed to install something to make it work, which in turn needed me to reinstall git via homebrew.

Sigh.

1. brew install git
2. brew install bash-completion
3. git config --global push.default simple

That last is, of course, not a Mac specific requirement and shouldn't be needed since git 2.0 but I don't trust default behaviour since Code Vanished back in my last place of work and mild panic ensued. If you don't know what it does you should probably be doing it.

Installing SublimeText 3

I had already realised I wasn't going to be able to directly copy my old Sublime config to this machine as I had a whole new button to work around. Still, I assumed installation would be straightforward then I could spend some time remapping keys until I was more or less happy. I also wanted to be able to use the subl command on the command line to open files like in the old days, but this was proving difficult so I had to call in help (from a different helpful Mac user as I was already feeling like a moron at this stage). The look of horror he gave me when he saw how I was running Sublime told me I had done something wrong. Again.

It turns out that running a downloaded dmg file runs from a mounted volume. I needed to drag my running application to the Applications option in the file browser and then the Mac did some more exciting magic things and everything was fine. Right, not going to forget that one in a hurry.

Where are my windows?

One of the other things I really miss from Ubuntu-land is the way it handles multiple desktops. Maximising a window in OSX puts it into a full screen mode which moves it to its own desktop and makes it difficult to move around if you're used to ALT CMD+Tabbing around. There is a way around this - it turns out that if you hold ALT and click the maximise button you get the old "make big" behaviour and ALT+Green toggles back again.

If you want a keyboard shortcut (and you do) you need to install Spectacle (brew cask install spectacle) then you can maximise (not fullscreen) with CMD+ALT+f. To go back to normal size you can use CMD+ALT+z (thanks to yet another friendly Mac user for that one).

Fortunately, the CMD+` shortcut to move between windows of the same type still works, although harder to use with the § ` key moving to pastures new.

Is it working now?

I think so - or at least it nearly. RVM installation didn't bring up any nasty surprises and seems to be working perfectly. On the other hand, Finder is extremely odd. If, like me, you're used to moving around files with the arrow keys then hitting enter to open them, you might be surprised to discover that enter in fact lets you rename the selected file. If, like me, you then go hunting for the alternate shortcut you may struggle to find it unless (unlike me) you think to try CMD+Down which for some reason will do what you want. I had to ask. Now you don't have to.

These are the reports of my adventures so far. I may do a follow-up when I have to do battle with virtualisation if it proves tricksy (which is likely because, to be fair, it's hardly trivial on any platform) or if anything else thrilling comes up. After quite a few hours playing with this system I'm in a position where it is doing a fair impression of vanilla Linux. Albeit with the keys in the wrong places.

I hope this helps someone. Happy Christmas.

Edit: behold Part 2.