You may want to check out https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-bundle which will allow you to do a bunch of that in a single file. https://github.com/mikemcquaid/strap and https://github.com/benbalter/plister may be of interest too.
In MacOS High SierraHomebrew
homebrew-bundle
OPEN SOURCE2016–2026
Homebrew / homebrew-bundle · Archived
homebrew-bundle
💀 Homebrew/bundle (merged into Homebrew/brew)
22Distinct people
25Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
5.4KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
💀 Homebrew/bundle (merged into Homebrew/brew)
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
- mikemcquaid/strap · linked in 2 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 4:01:40 AM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year25 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2016-06-20 14:40:47 UTC to 2026-01-02 14:19:20 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 0 | 4 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 2 | 3 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 1 | 3 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 1 | 3 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
From the project README
An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.
Read the project’s introduction
Homebrew/bundle (merged into Homebrew/brew)
This tap provided Bundler for non-Ruby dependencies from e.g. Homebrew, Homebrew Cask, Mac App Store and Visual Studio Code. It has been entirely merged into Homebrew/brew. brew bundle still works as before, it just isn't in this tap any more.
Read the full README on GitHubWhat Hacker News says
2 sourcesI've been using Homebrew for a few years now, but I've gotta admit that recently I've been intrigued by MacPorts. Can anyone that has tried both extensively share their thoughts, and possibly explain why they're using one or the other? I read up a few comments online from having googled around, but I'd love something more recent.
One of my complaints with Homebrew (and most system package managers) is that it treats all dependencies as equal. If I install X, which depends on Y and Z... I'd expect Y and Z to be removed when uninstalling X. If anyone else is frustrated by this, I'd suggest checking out homebrew-bundle [0]. The idea is simple: you create a Brewfile and you use that to track dependencies. Instead of installing stuff from the CLI, you add entries to your Brewfile and run "brew bundle --global". Sadly it won't do any automatic
Read the rest
cleanups, so you have to run "brew bundle cleanup --global" to get a list of extraneous packages and remove em manually.
Another obvious benefit to using a text file is that you can annotate it with reminders. "What did I install this foobar tool for?"
I think migrating towards a shell environment which gets configured using idempotent scripts can help reduce bugs and lower the barrier of entry to people less familiar with the ecosystem, as well as make it easier to get your own system up and running. In the last few weeks I started toying around with nix [1], which seems to promise that... Although I'm still finding my way through their ecosystem.
I'd like to think I'm a fairly pragmatic user, so I'm willing to accept some hacks here and there. A few days back I put up a repo [2] to show what my macOS + fish shell setup looks like. It won't track configs to clean-up garbage or anything fancy like that, so if you make any change you might need to clean up manually. But it should make bootstrapping a new system a bit easier, and it encourages you to configure all universal variable definitions in a single place so you can add notes for why you're doing whatever it is you're doing. One of the biggest benefits of maintaining an idempotent fish config is that it has great performance. Since fish shell persists environment values in a single file and it lazy-loads function definitions, starting a new session happens almost instantly.
[0] https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-bundle
[1] https://nixos.org/nix/
[2] https://github.com/cesarandreu/dotfiles