Applications path

[keith]

Changed the installed applications path to /Applications instead of the user specific ~/Applications

[phinze]

The homedir installation path was intentional - to avoid the need for elevated privileges for installation. I want to follow Homebrew's "never sudo" adage.

Though I suppose since /Applications is group writable by admin, this might be okay.

drwxrwxr-x+ 46 root  admin   1.5K Oct  8 10:39 /Applications

Let me think about it a bit more and I'll follow up.

[keith]

Thanks, for multi-user machines it seems better to have the Applications be installed for everyone.

[rgieseke]

Maybe separate commands would be an option?
brew cask linkapps
brew cask linksystemapps

I'd prefer ~/Applications to be the default.

[phinze]

Thanks for the feedback folks - I'll take a stab at making system/user linking optional this weekend.

[ghost]

+1 for optional. I prefer home directory as much as possible (even as my homebrew prefix), but ~/Applications is rare since people (and apps and even the OS) prefer to dump everything in /

[passcod]

+1/-1 I personally prefer ~/Applications but I understand why you might prefer /Applications (for multi-user and/or consistency).

[jroes]

I like ~/Applications, except I can't get Alfred or Spotlight to find anything I install there, even when I add it to my Spotlight prefs. Maybe I'm doing something wrong though.

[jedahan]

Homebrew proper symlinks to /usr/local/bin , not /usr/bin. I'd prefer cask to have as similar behavior as possible (i.e. symlink to ~/Applications). If global linking is a wanted feature, why not first get it added to homebrew proper, then cask?

[shelbyKiraM]

Applications are a different mode of thinking than command-line binaries. Where it's rather easy to set the PATH variable in a shell, there's no such representation for a GUI. Things in ~/Applications don't show up in /Applications as links or something, so a launcher that relies on things being in /Applications won't work entirely properly.

[hobbs]

This worked for me (obviously use with care):
rm -rf ~/Applications; ln -s /Applications ~/Applications

Courtesy of @chadkouse

[dergachev]

@hobbs symlinking didn't work for me. Are you sure that spotlight picks up symlinks?

I just installed Alfred, and it's really amazing. Can't see myself switching back. (Adding /usr/local/Cellar to Search Scope in Alfred was tricky; required typing CMD-SHIFT-G in the path chooser dialog)

That being said, the fact that cask isn't compatible with Spotlight out of the box is a major problem for many. For example, see this: https://github.com/pivotal/pivotal_workstation/issues/97

[phinze]

Hi folks - I haven't lost track of this. I've just been lurking and gathering the varied feedback you've all been providing, which has been great.

(Adding /usr/local/Cellar to Search Scope in Alfred was tricky; required typing CMD-SHIFT-G in the path chooser dialog)

I'm a big fan of pressing / or ~ on OS X file choosers and just typing the path I'm interested in. I'd sort of forgotten that by default it's confusing to navigate around those blasted things. #finderhate

That being said, the fact that cask isn't compatible with Spotlight out of the box is a major problem for many.

Spotlight support is indeed important. I'll spin off another issue for that.

For example, see this: pivotal/pivotal_workstation#97

Thanks for pointing me over to that issue! I'll jump in on the conversation there and make sure they know I'm around.

As for this, I'm definitely going to add configurability whatever the interface ends up being. I'll follow up with a more concrete proposal.

[dergachev]

@phinze, thanks for being so responsive... I'll be keeping track of #99 from now on.

[keith]

Seems like this was resolved in the mentioned pull requests. Thanks!