How I spend my first 15 minutes with a new macOS.
Last tested on macOS Big Sur (Feb 2021) I've been working on this document for 11 years.
I'm a touch typist. I avoid the mouse whenever I can for speed. So some of my configuration on the Mac is geared around that.
Renamed master --> main: steps to update on your local clone
git branch -m master main
git fetch origin
git branch -u origin/main main
git remote set-head origin -a
My three critical modifications:
- Mapping CAPS LOCK to CONTROL, because: vim, readline, and it's useless
- Scroll direction: unnatural
- Key repeat fast, with little delay
Hit the Apple menu, click System Preferences...and have at it:
Keyboard Keyboard Key Repeat → fast
Keyboard Delay Until Repeat → short
Keyboard [Modifier Keys...] Caps Lock ⇪ Key: ^ Control
Shortcuts† App Shortcuts → [+] title: "System Preferences..." keys: ⌘⌥,
trackpad point & click ✓ Tap to Click
point & click‡ ✓ Silent clicking
scroll & zoom × Scroll direction: natural
more gestures ✓ Enable App Exposé
accessibility zoom ✓ Use scroll gesture with modifier keys to zoom (^ control)
pointer control◊ trackpad options... ✓ enable dragging (three finger drag)
dock - position on screen (left)
- ✓ Minimize windows into application icon
- × Animate opening applications
sound sound effects ✓ show volume in menu bar
sound effects Select an alert sound: Boop
spotlight search results × Siri suggestions
siri - × Disable Ask Siri
Note:
† ⌘, for app preferences; ⌥⌘, for system preferences.
‡ Added in macOS Mojave (v10.14).
◊ Hold down control and zoom in/out with the mouse wheel, it's magic.
Launch Finder and go to Preferences ⌘,
| Tab | Option |
|---|---|
| General | ✓ Show (Hard disks & External Disks) |
| Sidebar | × All My Files† |
| Sidebar | × AirDrop |
| Sidebar | ✓ (your home) and drag to the top in the finder menu |
| Sidebar | ✓ Hard Disks |
| Advanced | ✓ Show all filename extension‡ |
| Advanced | ✓ Keep folders on top |
| Advanced | When performing search (Search the current folder) |
Note:
† AirDrop and AllMyFiles are accessible from the Finder "Go" menu. They're used too infrequently to deserve a top spot.
‡ CMD + SHIFT + . will toggle hidden files on and off
Favorites order in the Finder pane (you can drag to re-order items):
- Home
- Desktop
- Documents
- Downloads
- Dropbox | OneDrive
- Applications
From the menu View | Show Path Bar and View | Show Status Bar.
Open Terminal.app.
By default, your computer probably has a name like Dutch Morgan's Computer. Rename it easily from Terminal using
scutil
I use my initials then some indicator of the machine type, like ss-mbp15 for my 15" MacBook Pro.
sudo scutil --set HostName ss-mbp15
sudo scutil --set ComputerName ss-mbp15
sudo scutil --set LocalHostName ss-mbp15Brew is apt for Mac.
Homebrew is the App Store for the command line. Instructions located at http://brew.sh
Do all this from Terminal.app; we'll swap out to iTerm2 later.
/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)" path=(/opt/homebrew/bin $path[@])
brew install bash git coreutils jq wget htop tree tmux neovim zsh lessMy extra utilities:
brew install ascii hyperfine dust exa xsv ripgrep tokei httpie fzf fdWe'll use the Cask extension for Homebrew to install some Mac apps
brew install xquartz rectangle alacritty markedRectangle is a keyboard-based, window tiling app. It's MIT licenced and
installable from https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle/releases (look
for RectangleX.XX.dmg). Or with brew:
brew install rectangle
Configure the settings as shown below. I don't care for the defaults. My thinking is: just mash all three of the keys in the lower left, then use arrows to throw the windows around.
Home page: https://github.com/rxhanson/Rectangle
Ensure it is set to Launch on login.
Assuming you have a github.com account, tell your Mac about it. Follow these instructions.
$ git config --global user.name "your name here"
$ git config --global user.email "[email protected]"
$ git config --global credential.helper osxkeychain
I use Meslo with the Nerd Font icon patch.
brew tap homebrew/cask-fonts
brew install font-meslo-lg-nerd-font font-jetbrains-mono-nerd-fontUse alacritty instead of iTerm2 or Terminal. It's configured in a single file: ~/.alacritty.yml. Easy to version control, it's fast and cross-platform.
The 'ls' version built in to tcsh will display folders and files in color when you use the flag "-G". But it sorts the folders along with the files. I wanted the folders displayed first, then the files. Turns out the GNU 'coreutils' package includes 'gls', that does just that.
But to enable color, it requires you to set a variable 'LS_COLOR' that is strangely set by running another utility, gdircolors. And that returns a string that is incompatible with tcsh LS_COLOR.
The solution is to give gdircolors an initialization file, which is pulled from a https://github.com/seebi/dircolors-solarized. Thank you seebi for bringing Solarized colors to GNU utilities!
$ brew install coreutils
Note: consider mkdir ~/lib and clone this repo into there
$ cd ~/lib
$ hub clone seebi/dircolors-solarized
Now edit your .cshrc to put the coreutils in the path, and to initialize the LS_COLOR variable with the output of dircolors using the solarized version. This is a lot of work to get color and sorting. Basically tcsh is put together with so much string and tape. I'm guessing you don't have to do this with zsh.
eval `gdircolors -c ~/lib/dircolors-solarized/dircolors.ansi-universal`
setenv LS_OPTIONS "--color=auto --group-directories-first -F"
alias ls 'gls $LS_OPTIONS'
Log out, then back in.
There's a great Python command-line tool called formd that keeps
Markdown links looking clean. Notice how all my links are at the bottom? That's
formd in action.
Readline / EMACs
ctrl+a beginning of line
ctrl+e end of line
ctrl+w delete backwards by word
Cmd + Space Spotlight
Cmd + Tab Just like Alt-Tab in Windows
Cmd + +/- Most apps make text bigger or smaller
Cmd + H Hide or Minimize
This is your basic text editor. For some reason, it defaults to RichText, which is stupid. Launch, display its Preferences dialog and change:
Format to Plain text
Plain text font to something larger if you want
Turn off *all* the Options
Reference: http://zsh.sourceforge.net/Guide/zshguide03.html
numpy-pandas-python. Need to examine that for some updated tips.
MacDown is an open-source Markdown editor that handles Github-flavored Markdown (GFM) nicely.
Dash gives you offline access to 150+ doc sets like vim, markdown, css, html, python, etc.
https://help.github.com/articles/set-up-git
git config --global user.name "your name here" git config --global user.email "[email protected]" git config --global credential.helper osxkeychain git config --global push.default simple
instead of rehash, try setopt nohashdirs
There's some weirdness with the way Apple setup the zsh config files. Read more here: sorin-ionescu/prezto#381 Fix it with the following command
$ sudo mv /etc/{zshenv,zprofile}
- My collegue Matt Carrier and his excellent dotfiles
- Thoughtbot's laptop setup.
- Mark H. Nichols excellent writeup on configuring ZSH from scratch
- zshuery, a one file good .zshrc config
- Moncef Belyamani has a guide for Mavericks.
- And finally, Top Eight OSX Utilites Developers Should Know
I'm using Monosnap to capture and annote the screenshots. Then ImageMagik for a smart rescale down to 75% size:
mogrify -path img -filter spline -resize 75% -unsharp 0x0.75+0.75+0.008 ~/Pictures/Monosnap/*.png
Finally ImageOptim to compress down to virtually nothing (Lossy with PNGCrush)