1. Get iterm2 http://www.iterm2.com/#/section/home http://www.iterm2.com/#/section/home 2. Installing stuff from homebrew is great until you break homebrew. Th

1. Get iterm2 http://www.iterm2.com/#/section/home http://www.iterm2.com/#/section/home 2. Installing stuff from homebrew is great until you break homebrew. Then you will be in a deep and unproductive pit for a while. Read the docs, move slowly and don't run homebrew as root. I've found that for some things ( postgres, redis and nginx ) is that I prefer to build them by hand and stick them in /opt your mileage will vary. 3. Lion at least, has workspaces, and iterm2 and terminal do support tabbed terminals. You can remap keys use the Keyboard panel in settings. 4. Try the different flavors of Vim, do what works for you. I'm an emacs user so I can't comment on what the differences are. 5. VirtualBox and Vagrant http://www.vagrantup.com/ http://www.vagrantup.com/ Don't bother trying to get things running on osx that belong on the server. Run a VM that matches your server environment. Bonus: you can use Salt/Puppet/Chef to manage your VM's in the same exact way you manage your servers. 6. `pip` and `virtualenv` work on osx, don't do python development without them.