I wrote a comment up on macOS tools for neteng. Thread was locked. Here you go instead.

By the time I was done writing the comment, the post was locked. I hope these recommendations are helpful to someone. They reflect a small glimmer of years of careful tool crafting.

Generally, prefer learning standard UNIX tools over OS-specific ones unless there's a clear advantage.

macOS-specific tools:

1. iTerm2 - much nicer than terminal. Learn its features
2. Serial App - Great serial console. You can use screen or other CLI tools, but I so rarely need to use a serial console that having a GUI makes it a lot less mental burden.
3. Homebrew - A package manager. Purists may want to use macport instead.
4. Copy 'Em - A clipboard manager with paste history, search, and favorites. I have it set to always strip formatting when I paste.
5. Magnet - A window tiling tool. Map it to easy-to-remember shortcuts and use it to position your windows different ways to use up all the screen.
6. Not a piece of software, but remap the caps lock key to escape (no software required, it's in system preferences). You need to use the escape key in vim and lots of other places, but rarely benefit from caps lock. Even if they hadn't taken away the physical escape key, I would still do this.

UNIXy stuff:

1. brew install vim arping coreutils fping git ssh-copy-id pwgen tcptraceroute telnet nmap watch mtr
2. Learn to configure you ssh client and shell environment to make routine things easier
3. Use zsh + oh-my-zsh
4. Learn vim. Start configuring vim. Start using vim plugins.
5. macOS has a builtin TFTP server. Plop files in /private/tftpboot and launch the server
6. pbcopy and pbpaste are built in. Use them

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# traceroute with ASN lookup and pipe output to clipboard. BSD-only option for ASN. traceroute -A example.com | pbcopy # iterate over items in your clipboard (e.g., a list of hostnames # you copied from your NMS for host in $(pbpaste); do nc -v $host 22 || echo "Can't connect to $host" done