Fun with Homebrew casks

One of my favorite utilities for OSX is Homebrew, a package manager that lets you easily install programs from the terminal.

One of my favorite pastimes is thumbing through the Homebrew Cask recipes to find new programs and utilities to install. Some are pretty nifty, like Zotero which manages research bibliographies. Or Electric Sheep which harnesses the power of your “sleeping” devices to crowdsource digital artwork. Or Finicky, which lets you specify which of your web browsers you want to open specific links. (Maybe you use Brave for normal browsing but want to open all google.com links in Chrome.)

Unfortunately the Cask recipe files have no real descriptions, so I usually just fish through them and dig out the homepage links of any Cask recipe file that has an interesting name. It’s kind of like a digital treasure hunt.

To make things even more fun, I cloned the homebrew-cask repo and came up with a simple shell script that will randomly choose a recipe and open its homepage for me.

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find ~/projects/homebrew-cask/Casks -type f | \
shuf -n 1 | \
xargs cat | \
ack homepage | \
awk '{print $2}' | \
xargs open