Homebrew announced a new 3.0.0 of the package manager on Friday. Its most significant change adds support for M1 Macs.
Homebrew M1 Support
Homebrew is a tool that lets you install various tools, called formulas, via Terminal (command line). Formulas can be things like music notation software, IRC clients, arcade machine emulators, and a bunch more. From the blog post:
Apple Silicon is now officially supported for installations in /opt/homebrew. formulae.brew.sh formula pages indicate for which platforms bottles (binary packages) are provided and therefore whether they are supported by Homebrew.
Homebrew doesn’t (yet) provide bottles for all packages on Apple Silicon that we do on Intel x86_64 but we welcome your help in doing so. Rosetta 2 on Apple Silicon still provides support for Intel x86_64 in /usr/local.
You can get started with Homebrew by opening Terminal and typing:
/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"
The Mac Observer’s Jeff Butts recommends another tool called Cask.