Mac Config for Development

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

1.1 System Preferences

My three critical modifications:

1. Mapping CAPS LOCK to CONTROL, because: vim, readline, and it's useless
2. Scroll direction: unnatural
3. 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.

1.2 Finder Preferences

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):

1. Home
2. Desktop
3. Documents
4. Downloads
5. Dropbox | OneDrive
6. Applications

From the menu View | Show Path Bar and View | Show Status Bar.

1.3 Rename Your Computer

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-mbp15

2.1 Homebrew

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 less

My extra utilities:

  brew install ascii hyperfine dust exa xsv ripgrep tokei httpie fzf fd

We'll use the Cask extension for Homebrew to install some Mac apps

  brew install xquartz rectangle alacritty marked

2.2 Rectangle

Rectangle 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.

3. Programming

3.1 Gitconfig

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 "your@email.com"
$ git config --global credential.helper osxkeychain

Programming Fonts

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-font

Alacritty

Use 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.

A better 'ls'

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.

Extras

Formd

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.

Handy Keyboard Shortcuts

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

TextEdit

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

Python

numpy-pandas-python. Need to examine that for some updated tips.

Good Mac Apps to Have

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.

Github

https://help.github.com/articles/set-up-git

git config --global user.name "your name here" git config --global user.email "you@example.com" git config --global credential.helper osxkeychain git config --global push.default simple

ZSH config

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}

Inspired from

• 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

image processing

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)