Setting up macOS

Background #

I recently bought my first MacBook ever. It's a refurbished 13-inch MacBook Air M1 with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of storage (the base model). The device is in essentially perfect state, and it cost me only 560 Euros¹.

As a moderately frugal person, I'm (sort of) proud to say that this is the first personal computer that I have bought in over 10 years. The last computer that I (my mom) bought back in 2011 was a somewhat average gaming laptop that served me very well for about 6 years.

Ever since I got my first job after university, I started relying more and more on the computers that I got from work. They tend to be very well-specced and, more importantly, they're free. I eventually just sold my personal computer and bought a decent tablet for Netflix, online banking, and such. When I was in between jobs, I would sometimes even write code directly on the tablet with a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard.

Now I feel that it is time to go back to owning a personal computer. First, it's the wise thing to do (legally, etc.). But also, I increasingly found it annoying how companies may end up installing software that would bloat my programming environment, or how they would set up things in a way that I wouldn't.

The setup #

I like to keep my setup simple and to minimize personalization. Whenever I can, I'll stick to the defaults. After several years of owning and using computers, I came to the conclusion that I'm better off spending my keystrokes on the things that really matter. I have switched computers several times; I have had HDDs die on me; I have had my computer hacked and wiped²; I have switched operating systems; and so on. I do not want to spend my time heavily customizing something that I'll replace sooner or later.

Here's what I have set up on the MacBook Air:

• System Settings, with:
  • Appearance > Dark
  • Control Center > Sound > Always show in the menu bar
  • iCloud > Saved to iCloud > {Photos, iCloud Drive, iCloud Mail} > Off
• Google Chrome
• iTerm2, with:
  • Profiles > Colors > Color Presets > Dark background
  • Profiles > Keys > Key Mappings > Presets > Natural Text Editing
    • Enables navigating text with:
      • ⌥← and ⌥→ (option + arrow keys)
      • ⌘← and ⌘→ (command + arrow keys)
• Xcode Command Line Tools
  • This is pretty large (2GB), but some development tools rely on it.
• Homebrew, with:
  • git
    • Fresher version than macOS's default.
  • zsh
    • Fresher version than macOS's default.
    • To set up as user's default shell:
      • Add /opt/homebrew/bin/zsh to /etc/shells
      • Run chsh -s /opt/homebrew/bin/zsh
  • ohmyzsh
    • I mainly need command autocompletion.
• Visual Studio Code

I have also installed a few programming language toolchains, but the set of toolchains that I need at any given time may change. So I will not include them in this list.

Whenever I install something significant, I should come back and update this list, for future reference.