Homebrew — MacPorts driving you to drink? Try Homebrew!. I can only support the call. After using MacPorts for years, I have now switched to Homebrew on the Air, and it is much slimmer. And since it doesn't want to install half of the internet for every little package, you even have a realistic chance of installing the tools on the smaller disk of the Air. It's also nice that you can intervene in many places if you want to (since I am a programmer after all, it is quite a natural desire to sometimes do the configure yourself or something similar). By the way, the recipes are quite up-to-date, for example, Node.js is in the latest version, pypy is also, as well as Scala and Clojure. Fits well with my currently planned experiments.