Notes on macOS

2026-01-16, Fri

This post intends to keep track of problems & solutions I've collected for macOS.

1. No Need for Xcode

Unless you really enjoy the GUI workflow provided by the Xcode IDE, most of the time it's only the CLI tools that you need for development. In this case, this is all you need:

xcode-select --install

2. Symlink of Python3

While trying to make symlink of python3 like this:

sudo ln -s /usr/bin/python3 /usr/local/bin/python

The following error pops up

$python 
xcode-select: Failed to locate 'python', requesting installation of command line developer tools.

In this case, try to link directly from the actual source directlry, e.g.

sudo ln -s $(xcode-select -p)/usr/bin/python3 /usr/local/bin/python

which should get the job done.