How can i get more info about a brew formula before installing?
Nope. Homebrew intentionally lets the web sites serve as documentation of the packages, instead of maintaining a separate copy of it.
You can do a brew home <formula>
to fire up a browser from the command line, or brew edit <formula>
to examine the formula's installation instructions themselves in an editor.
You can get a one-line textual description of a package with:
brew desc FORMULA-NAME
For example, "brew desc terminator" returns:
terminator: Multiple terminals in one window
I use brew [cask] cat [...]
to see the exact formula (without necessarily editing it as other answers here suggest). It shows what gets downloaded, from where, with what checksum, what other formuli/casks it depends on, etc. Here's an example:
$ brew cask cat java
cask 'java' do
version '12.0.2,10:e482c34c86bd4bf8b56c0b35558996b9'
sha256 '675a739ab89b28a8db89510f87cb2ec3206ec6662fb4b4996264c16c72cdd2a1'
url "https://download.java.net/java/GA/jdk#{version.before_comma}/#{version.after_colon}/#{version.after_comma.before_colon}/GPL/openjdk-#{version.before_comma}_osx-x64_bin.tar.gz"
name 'OpenJDK Java Development Kit'
homepage 'https://openjdk.java.net/'
artifact "jdk-#{version.before_comma}.jdk", target: "/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/openjdk-#{version.before_comma}.jdk"
uninstall rmdir: '/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines'
end
try this:
brew cask info [package]