HomeBrew VS pdf-tools

In case you're not not aware of it, virtually all devs on mac use homebrew. I slide nearly seamlessly between WSL and mac depending on whether I feel like using my desktop or laptop at the moment. The differences largely boil down to whether I apt install or brew install things. And as much as I'm loathe to admit it, vscode + vim plugin these days gives emacs + evil a pretty good run for the money when it comes to extensible IDEs.

There’s no practical difference between trusting that a popular GitHub account hasn’t been compromised (see: https://brew.sh) and your distro or other package managers haven’t been compromised when it comes to machine setup. If security is that much of a priority you run your own mirrors and don’t pull from public repositories/registries. IME you want to do that for availability anyways if this is for work. Nothing worse than a failed build for a hot-fix because some package registry is temporarily offline.

Others have offered solutions, but for future reference the actual Terminal commands that failed would be useful; "File not found" sounds like a path error, "Command not found" sounds fixable via Homebrew or Macports

TL;DR, about the section that states software from other UNIX-like OSes is hard to port to MacOS, how about homebrew and macports?

First, you’ll want to install some base dependencies for your operating system. We will use brew 27 for this. If you don’t have brew installed you can do so by running:

Prerequisites: Ensure you have Homebrew installed on your computer. It is a package that enables you to install various applications not provided by Apple.

Get it with Homebrew:

I installed iTerm2 and zsh shell with Prezto and I love my command line on OSX I use homebrew to install any tools that are missing and use pyenv to manage my python version (which I also do on Linux) that and the clang/gcc from the OSX command line tools and I pretty much have a full Un*x shell for anything I need to do

Personally, I like using Terminal to get things done lol. Before you continue reading, please note that I only know how to do this with homebrew and terminal...

homebrew is the most popular package manager on MacOS. It's painfully slow compared to linux package managers but it works. Macports is an alternative and Nix works on MacOS as well. They can be used to download both terminal and GUI applications.

Also https://github.com/politza/pdf-tools/issues/706

I had a similar problem a month or so ago but I think it was fixed in pdf-tools. Perhaps the comments under this issue will help: https://github.com/politza/pdf-tools/issues/708

;; Fix blurry PDFs on MacOS. ;; From https://github.com/politza/pdf-tools/issues/51 (setq pdf-view-use-scaling t)

First things first, install pdf-tools, a great Emacs package for viewing pdfs. The default pdf viewer Docview is very limited so you should definitely get this package.

It looks enjoy pdf-tools got a new maintainer and he already changed the the melpa ⠀recipe, so you can get it via the package manager. I think this is a good development. My impression is, that he is new as an Emacs package maintainer, so please be kind and supportive, so he will stay on it for a while. :)

I have been using emacs pdf-tools lately and really enjoying it https://github.com/politza/pdf-tools

View, annotate PDFs and more with Emac's pdf-tools. There is also the built-in doc-view.

To the best of my understanding, I have followed the installation instructions as outline on https://github.com/politza/pdf-tools:

I think it would also be useful to mention Emacs' speechd-el (and EmacsSpeak) since you can do pretty much everything from Emacs. pdf-view-mode is compatible with OCR'd PDFs and would probably easily be put to the purpose of joining that with readers (it's also packaged as elpa-pdf-tools in Debian).