Mac Setup Guide

Published See discussion on Bluesky

I recently wiped my hard drives and freshly installed macOS Big Sur on my work laptop, and found it incredibly refreshing in a smaller form of starting fresh with my daily tools.

I had been thinking about this a bit only a couple of weeks earlier so I was already kind of prepared to set up my laptop from fresh but there were a few things that I had forgotten about until I needed them. I figured it would be useful to write up some of the things I did so I can revisit this post in the future and remember the things that I like to use on my computer.

Note: This post is still in progress!

CLI Tooling:

I couldn't think of a better title for this section but I consider this to encapsulate my CLI tooling that I rely on for being relatively productive when it comes to working within codebases.

First let's cover some fundamentals:

Configuring My Environment:

Configure Git:

TODO: Move these to a dotfiles repo!

1git config --global user.name "<name>"
2git config --global user.email "<email>"
3# Make sure to install VSCode Insiders and add vscode to the PATH
4git config --global core.editor "code-insiders --wait"
1git config --global user.name "<name>"
2git config --global user.email "<email>"
3# Make sure to install VSCode Insiders and add vscode to the PATH
4git config --global core.editor "code-insiders --wait"

CLI Tooling:

1# The basics: node, yarn, pnpm, fzf, jq
2brew install node yarn pnpm fzf jq bat exa gh fig fnm
1# The basics: node, yarn, pnpm, fzf, jq
2brew install node yarn pnpm fzf jq bat exa gh fig fnm

GUI Tooling:

These are all the "visual" tools that I tend to use on my mac, this software list may change over time but these are the essentials that I use today.

  • Install ChromeCanary
  • Install Mimestream
  • Install VSCodeInsiders
    • Make sure to setup sync and enable the CLI tools so we can use code-insiders to open vscode from the terminal
  • Install Raycast
    • Additionally, go into System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts and disable the Cmd + Space keyboard setting for spotlight and set that to the Raycast keyboard shortcut.
  • Install Rectangle
    • Choose the Spectacle keybinds if you don't want to be confused 😆
  • Install Dropbox
  • Install DropboxCapture
  • Install Arc
  • Install Notion

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