Homebrew Cask

Homebrew Cask extend Homebrew for OS X GUI applications management. It requires Homebrew version 0.9.5+.

It’s implemented as a homebrew external command called cask(You cloud execute commands like brew cask search/install/uninstall...). In Homebrew-Cask, we call formula as Cask.

Installation

brew tap caskroom/cask
brew install brew-cask

Homebrew-Cask install Casks into /opt/homebrew-cask/Caskroom/. The downloaded installation files are stored in ~/Library/Caches/Homebrew/Casks.

Upgrade Casks

Homebrew-Cask is very good at installing, inconsistent on uninstalling, and mostly-incapable on upgrading. After you update Homebrew-Cask by brew cask update, if some installed casks exist newer versions, brew cask info <the outdated Cask>, brew cask install <the outdated Cask>, brew cask uninstall <the outdated Cask> and other cmds alike will report that the Cask is not installed, and you certainly installed it. Homebrew-Casks' commands retrieve only on the latest Cask versions and detect whether the local Caskroom contains a Cask which its path match the latest version's installation path. Because of the path of Cask contains the version number, Homebrew-Cask can't handle the installed Cask well.

A hard way to upgrade a Cask is re-installing the latest version of the Cask. brew cask uninstall with --force option will uninstall all versions of a Cask. Therefore we cloud combine uninstallation and installation together to upgrade Casks.

In Github Gist, atais/cask_upgrade.sh provided a robust script doing such work. You cloud perform this script in oneline:

curl -s https://gist.githubusercontent.com/atais/9c72e469b1cbec35c7c430ce03de2a6b/raw/1b7b891e6eff3b42edb4ada219764f12aefb04ca/cask_upgrade.sh | bash /dev/stdin

Note: As the official document mentioned, cask uninstall --force is currently imperfect. Read Here.

Tab-completion

Add brew-cask plugin into ~/.zshrc.

Check Zsh plugins: brew-cask section:

Plugin brew-cask for Zsh enables the tab-completion feature.

Versioned Casks

Tap caskroom/versions provide alternate versions of Casks(e.g. betas, nightly releases, old versions).

brew tap caskroom/versions

Font Casks

Tap caskroom/fonts allows you to use the same friendly Homebrew-style CLI workflow for the administration of binary font files on your Mac.

brew tap caskroom/fonts

Font searching is temporarily disabled, one workaround is to use a regular expression search:

brew cask search /source-code-pro/

Reference: https://github.com/caskroom/homebrew-fonts