Installing Necessary Packages on Your Computer

There are a few programs that we will need to install: Homebrew, node, ispell, and gnu-tar.

Homebrew is necessary as macOS’s package manager. This will allow you to install various programs via the command line. Node.js and gnu-tar are needed by the Copilot integration in our configuration — Copilot’s language server runs on Node — and ispell provides spell checking.

To do so, please open your Terminal. (If you don’t know where this is: Finder > Applications > Utilities > Terminal).

• Now run:

  /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

• Press enter and follow the instructions. When it finishes, Homebrew prints two lines for you to run so that the brew command is on your path. Copy them from Homebrew’s own output rather than from here — it fills in your username for you — and run them one at a time. They look like this:

  echo >> ~/.zprofile
  echo 'eval "$(/opt/homebrew/bin/brew shellenv)"' >> ~/.zprofile
  eval "$(/opt/homebrew/bin/brew shellenv)"

Once Homebrew is installed, we can now install the three dependencies in your terminal. One by one, please copy and paste the following lines and execute separately (by pressing return after each).

• brew install gnu-tar
• brew install node
• brew install ispell

You should now be done!

If you run into any problems installing these, please refer to documentation online for Homebrew, gnu-tar, node.js, and ispell.