Five Homebrew Favorites

For true App Addicts, even the ones who don't spend a lot of time at the command line on their Mac, exploring the Homebrew universe can still be rewarding. Simply put, Homebrew for Mac is a package manager that simplifies the installation of software on macOS. It allows users to easily install, update, and manage software packages through the command line. Some of these programs install right into your applications folder as regular apps with a GUI, indistinguishable from an app from the App Store or that you extracted from a DMG or ZIP file. Other Homebrew packages are CLI (command line interface) programs where you have to learn the commands to type in Terminal to make them work their magic. Don't worry, the documentation is usually sufficient to get you started.

This post isn't intended to be a guide to installing or configuring Homebrew. Head to YouTube and Google to jump that hurdle. Instead, this is a chance for you to download a few helpful Homebrew apps that I've found to be helpful and relatively easy to use.

YT-DLP

yt-dlp is a feature-rich command-line audio/video downloader with support for thousands of sites, most importantly, YouTube

TOPGRADE

Using TOPGRADE, one command upgrades Homebrew itself, all of your Homebrew packages, your Mac App Store apps and any updates made available by the operating system (it will ask you first). Set a reminder and run this once a week to update all the things.

OCRmyPDF

You can use OCRmyPDF to perform Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on PDF files. This tool can be helpful in converting scanned PDF files into searchable and editable documents.

FFmpeg

FFmpeg is a powerful multimedia framework that can decode, encode, transcode, mux, demux, stream, filter, and play almost any type of media files

Tesseract

Tesseract is an open-source optical character recognition (OCR) platform. OCR extracts text from images and documents without a text layer and outputs the document into a new searchable text file, PDF, or most other popular formats.