When you have MacOS on your work computer, Arch Linux on your home computer, and Ubuntu on your home server, you might enjoy using pkg, a thin wrapper around brew, pacman, and apt respectively, that will offer you a common interface and save you some keystrokes.

$ wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/vinc/pkg/master/pkg.sh
$ sudo cp pkg.sh /usr/local/bin/pkg
$ sudo chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/pkg

Let say you use Arch Linux on your local computer and Debian on a remote server.

You would type pacman -Ss foo on the former to search a package named foo and apt search foo or apt-cache search foo on the latter.

And you would type sudo pacman -S foo to install it on Arch and sudo apt install foo or sudo apt-get install foo on Debian.

With pkg you can search a package on both systems with:

$ pkg search foo

And install it with:

$ sudo pkg install foo

Or you could even type pkg s foo and sudo pkg i foo to save a few keystrokes.

You may use some language package managers, like npm or pip, in addition to the system one. No worries, pkg go you covered:

$ pkg --with npm install foo

With pkg you won't have to remember to type npm uninstall foo with npm but yarn remove foo with yarn, or sudo pacman -R foo on Arch Linux but sudo apt remove foo on Ubuntu. Just type the most obvious command and it will get corrected or passed on.

Copyright (c) 2017-2018 Vincent Ollivier. Released under MIT.