macOS Setup

I want to use this post as reference for setting up my macOS environment from scratch. Things like default settings, modifications, installations, etc. Time will tell, but hopefully I captured everything.

Desktop

System Settings

iCloud
- Sign into iCloud account.
- Disable iCloud Drive backup for Desktop and Documents folders.
Notifications
- Turn off notifications for everything.
Appearance
- Show scroll bars: Always
- Click in the scroll bar to: Jump to spot that's clicked
Control Center
- Hide everything.
Accessibility
- Display: Shake mouse pointer to locate: Disable
- Display: Reduce transparency: Enable
Apple Intelligence & Siri
- Disable Apple Intelligence
- Disable Siri
Spotlight
- Help Apple Improve Search: Disable
- Disable Spotlight for everything except Applications, Calculator, and System Settings.
Desktop & Dock
- Position: Left
- Minimize windows: Genie Effect
- Double-click a window title: Do Nothing
- Minimize windows into application icon: Disable
- Automatically hide and show the Dock: Enable
- Show suggested and recent apps in Dock: Disable
- Disable Desktop & Stage Manager: Show on Desktop
- Click wallpaper to reveal desktop: Only in Stage Manager
- Stage Manager: Disable
- Widgets: Disable
- Hot Corners: top-right: Mission Control, bottom-right: Desktop
Game Center
- Disable
Keyboard
- Key repeat rate: fastest
- Delay until repeat: shortest
- Press fn key to: Do Nothing
Mouse
- Tracking speed: 70%
- Natural scrolling: Disable
- Secondary click: Right Side
- Smart zoom: Disable

Finder Settings

Toolbar: Back/Forward, Path, Search
View as columns
Sort by name
Hide folders with chflags hidden ~/foobar
General
- Show these items on desktop: External disks
- New Finder windows show: $HOME
Tags
- Turn off everything.
Sidebar
- Show these items in the sidebar: AirDrop, Applications, Desktop, Downloads, $HOME, External disks
- Recent Tags: Disable
Advanced
- Uncheck everything except
  - Show all filename extensions: Enable
  - Keep folders on top: In windows when sorting by name
- When performing a search: Search This Mac

Software

1Password: Password manager
Acorn: Image editor
AppCleaner: App uninstaller
Firefox: Web browser
ForkLift: FTP client
Ghostty: Terminal emulator
Hidden Bar: Menu bar manager
IINA: Media player
Itsycal: Menu bar calendar
Keka: Archive manager
Little Snitch: Network monitor
Meta and Mp3tag: Audio tagger
Mimestream: Email client
Mullvad VPN: VPN service
Notable: Notes manager
Pimosa: Media editor
Radiola: Menu bar internet radio
Rectangle Pro: Window manager
Spect: Image viewer and organizer
Swinsian and Tiny Player: Music player

Terminal

Install Homebrew packages:

1password-cli: Command-line interface for 1Password
b2-tools: B2 Cloud Storage Command-Line Tools
bat: Clone of cat(1) with syntax highlighting and Git integration
catimg: Insanely fast image printing in your terminal
duckdb: Embeddable SQL OLAP Database Management System
exiftool: Perl lib for reading and writing EXIF metadata
eza: Modern, maintained replacement for ls
fastfetch: Like neofetch, but much faster because written mostly in C
ffmpeg: Play, record, convert, and stream audio and video
fzf: Command-line fuzzy finder written in Go
gh: GitHub command-line tool
git: Distributed revision control system
imagemagick: Tools and libraries to manipulate images in many formats
lftp: Sophisticated file transfer program
magic-wormhole: Securely transfers data between computers
neovim: Ambitious Vim-fork focused on extensibility and agility
nnn: Tiny, lightning fast, feature-packed file manager
pandoc: Swiss-army knife of markup format conversion
taskwarrior-tui: Terminal user interface for taskwarrior
wget: Internet file retriever
yadm: Yet Another Dotfiles Manager
youplot: Command-line tool that draw plots on the terminal
yt-dlp: Feature-rich command-line audio/video downloader
zola: Fast static site generator in a single binary with everything built-in

Programming

Ensure Xcode is installed: xcode-select -p
Disable accented character when holding down keys: defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false
Docker: Container platforms
Go and R: Programming languages
MarkEdit: Markdown editor
Quarto: Publishing system
Sublime Merge: Git client
uv and ruff: Python tools
Zed, Visual Studio Code, Sublime Text: Code editors
Go tools
- VS Code > Install Go tools
Python
- Versions: uv python install
- Shell autocompletion for ruff: ruff generate-shell-completion zsh > ~/.zfunc/_ruff
Tools to install via uv tool install
- pre-commit
- spotdl
Add the PATHS to /private/etc/paths.d.
- Go: /usr/local/go/bin

SSH Key and Github

Generate a new SSH key and store in 1Password.
Add the SSH key to the ssh-agent
Add public key to Github (both Authentication and Signing key types).
Test connection with ssh -T git@github.com.

Firefox

Enable Firefox Sync for bookmarks, addons, and settings.
Adjust privacy and extension settings.
Optional: Setup Density, Github Dark, and use dark theme template for Stylus.

Configs

My user settings are either synced in the program or through yadm, which is stored on my private Github repo.

Clone the yadm repo for dot files and other configs (notes, .vimrc, .zshrc, .config/, etc).
VS Code user settings restored through account login.
1Password for keys, tokens, etc.

Themes

Here are the usual themes I switch between: