Guides Homebrew

Homebrew

For how Homebrew itself works, what taps and casks are, and why this pipeline is shaped the way it is, see homebrew-internals.md. This page is the command reference.

Casks/edith.rb is authored in this repository, next to the source it installs. The release workflow rewrites its version and checksum from the disk image it just published, then mirrors the file to pulkitxm/homebrew-tap, the tap Homebrew actually clones. That repository is generated output; never edit it by hand.

Install

brew install --cask pulkitxm/tap/edith

There is no separate tap step. brew install resolves the fully qualified user/repository/token form and taps pulkitxm/homebrew-tap for you before it installs. The tap exists as its own repository because Homebrew only accepts the short brew tap pulkitxm/edith form for repositories named homebrew-<name>, and because cloning a few kilobytes of cask beats cloning this repository.

The cask installs Edith.app into /Applications and links the two command line tools that ship inside the bundle:

ed      the full CLI, everything the UI can do
edh     the same binary under its short name

Both land in Homebrew's bin directory, which sits ahead of /usr/bin on the default PATH. ed therefore shadows the POSIX line editor of the same name; run /usr/bin/ed when you want that one. Nothing is copied into ~/.local/bin, so ed install is only needed when Edith was not installed through Homebrew.

Requirements are declared in the cask and enforced by Homebrew: macOS 14 or later on Apple Silicon.

Update

Edith updates itself through Sparkle, so the cask is marked auto_updates true and a routine brew upgrade leaves it alone rather than fighting the in-app updater. Refresh the tap and force Homebrew to reinstall the newest release with:

brew update
brew upgrade --cask --greedy edith

brew update alone only refreshes the tap; it changes nothing on disk. To reinstall the version the cask currently names, without waiting for a new release:

brew reinstall --cask edith

Inspect

brew info --cask edith          version, checksum, what the cask installs
brew list --cask edith          the paths Homebrew put on disk
brew outdated --cask --greedy   whether a newer release exists

Uninstall

brew uninstall --cask edith

That removes the app and the two symlinks, quitting Edith, its menu bar helper and the Files helper first. To also delete settings, caches and usage history:

brew uninstall --cask --zap edith

Stop tracking the tap entirely with:

brew untap pulkitxm/tap

Releasing

Nothing about the cask is hand-edited. The publish job in .github/workflows/release.yml hashes the built Edith.dmg, rewrites the version and sha256 lines, and commits the cask together with the versioned plists and release tag. It then publishes the assets and pushes the same cask to the tap repository. CI ignores that release commit, so it cannot loop.

Pushing to the tap needs a TAP_PUSH_TOKEN secret on this repository: a fine grained personal access token scoped to pulkitxm/homebrew-tap with read and write access to contents. Without it the release is blocked before a version is cut.