I recently picked up a 2015 MBP to use as a development machine for my side project, auToDo, since Apple won’t let you make iOS apps without a Mac. I’m not thrilled to be developing on a platform other than my beloved Pop! OS, but it’s at least still a *nix based system.
I was glad to see that, as of Catalina, MacOS uses Zsh as its default shell.
I use Zsh as my default shell on my linux machine so I was excited to simply
drop in my .zshrc file from the linux machine. For the most part that worked,
after installing Oh-My-Zsh and the other usual things, but running flutter
did not.
This was a bit of an issue since the MacBook’s main purpose in life was to be a flutter dev machine. I spent about half an hour verifying that I had all of the proper executables installed for Flutter and that they had the right permissions, only to realize that the issue was very simple but not immediately obvious.
The ~ symbol does not expand to /home/{USER_NAME}/ in a .zshrc file on MacOS
like it does in Pop! OS. I had been using the ~ symbol to point to the location
of the flutter binaries on my PATH, which worked on my linux machine but not
on the MacBook. I changed these symbols to the full /home/{USER_NAME}/ string
in my .zshrc and everything worked fine and dandy for Flutter.
Don’t be like me, use full paths in your Mac’s .zshrc file.