[Osmium]

This article is so opinionated. Just some counter-options:

Enabling apps from everywhere: Don't disable this. It's actually a good security feature. If you want to run an app that isn't signed, right-click and click "Open" and confirm you really want to run it and the OS will remember that choice for that app in future.

Terminal: The default Terminal is actually pretty solid. Much better than it used to be. Two common complaints (lack of tabs, lack of colours) are now moot.

Oh My ZSH: Or you could use fish – a new Mavericks compatible build (2.1) should be coming to the homebrew package manager literally any time now.

Also, for Python specifically (i.e. the title of this post), you can install a new version of Python via homebrew (and then place /usr/local/bin above /usr/bin in your PATH). This has the advantage of being able to run pip without superuser privileges. Though if you're using virtualenvs, it's probably not that big a deal anyway.

[jamesjporter]

+1 for installing python from homebrew; letting the default OSX installation be used at all has caused me mad problems in the past.

[thearn4]

Homebrew is definitely the way to go for installing python for development on Mac

[zachlatta]

A while ago I tried fish. Unfortunately I ran into quite a few issues because it isn't POSIX compliant. When I wasn't running into issues, it was great! I now use zsh.