I have a tip for M1 Mac users (who spend time in the terminal). You know how up until you got your new Mac, you could always count on your command line utilities being in /usr/local/bin? But now Homebrew installs to /opt/homebrew/bin instead? And all of those scripts that hardcoded /usr/local/bin/utility have to be updated, and the PKG installer for tools like Gather leave it outside of your PATH? Never fear, symlinks are here.

I was a little nervous about doing this because it just seemed like the kind of thing that would eventually get me in trouble, but I did it a year ago and haven’t had a single problem. Basically, you’re just running a mirror of /opt/homebrew/bin in /usr/local/bin. You can use either willy nilly this way.

To set it up:

  1. If you do have a /usr/local/bin folder, move all of its contents into /opt/homebrew/bin (mv /usr/local/bin/* /opt/homebrew/bin/). Then delete the directory (rm -rf /usr/local/bin)
  2. Symlink /opt/homebrew/bin to /usr/local/bin with ln -s /opt/homebrew/bin /usr/local/bin. If everything worked, you should be able to run ls /usr/local/bin/ and see all of your Homebrew binaries there.

Now if something does install to /usr/local/bin, it will actually go into /opt/homebrew/bin, and everything in /opt/homebrew/bin will be accessible at /usr/local/bin.

This has solved many problems for me. So many that I often forget that not everyone has /usr/local/bin anymore…