organising applications in Monterey

[filbert42]

In *NIX, I always used to put added programs in /usr/local/bin

MacOS just dumps everything in /Applications, as far as I can tell. On my old MacBook, I had a folder ~/Applications (missing in the are Mac) but I hardly used it and I ended up with a jumble of Apple apps and all sorts of other stuff I'd added in /Applications.

How do folks organise their applications? I see some old threads on this but nothing related to later versions of MacOS.

 

[casperes1996]

In *NIX, I always used to put added programs in /usr/local/bin

MacOS just dumps everything in /Applications, as far as I can tell. On my old MacBook, I had a folder ~/Applications (missing in the are Mac) but I hardly used it and I ended up with a jumble of Apple apps and all sorts of other stuff I'd added in /Applications.

How do folks organise their applications? I see some old threads on this but nothing related to later versions of MacOS.

.app bundles available to all users go into /Applications
Applications specific to your user goes into ~/Applications. The directory does not exist on new installations but some program installers create it if they want to be available to just the user and not the system.

Binaries that are not .app bundles follow other *NIX philosophies and really the best advice there is to let your package manager place things. Which will generally for me be
/use/local/Cellar/*/*
first wildcard being program directory, second wildcard being program specific bin structure
symbolically linked to
‘user/local/bin
for the actual binary