A relatively common OS X based workflow for Ruby development (which could equally apply to Python) is mostly terminal based. Use a full screen terminal and a m

A relatively common OS X based workflow for Ruby development (which could equally apply to Python) is mostly terminal based. Use a full screen terminal and a multiplexer (screen, tmux) or a tiling window manager (dvtm) to make use of the full screen; emacs or vim as an editor of choice (ease yourself in if unfamiliar, don't go all-in right off the bat); and Unix itself as a development tool for everything else. While you may initially think a plethora of GUI apps is better, your growing experience will slowly but surely push you away from that. Within the terminal session you are then exposed to tools other people have written that help you handle deployment, testing, continuous integration, etc. If the CLI is too much for you, OSX has a number of apps that help organise windows (Moom, TylerWM, Divvy), so you can try and keep that under control in any case. The terminal is definitely your best friend in OSX or Linux, though, and understanding that environment, especially moving away from PHP, has few, if any, disadvantages.