Macbook Setup

You learn a lot about new tools and automating setup when you setup a new laptop. This is an attempt to document some key features, and nice-to-haves that can be replicated in future setups.

  1. Increase Mouse Pointer Speed: I do this on all laptops to avoid pain associated to scrolling in my fingers.

2. Enable Point to Click: Allows clicking without pressuring my fingers

3. Enable App Expose: Enables seeing which tabs of a software are open with a 4 finger swipe down gesture.

4. Enable 3 finger drag: I don’t like clicking and dragging, as it offers less control and puts more pressure on my fingers and thumb. This makes the whole dragging experience a lot smoother.

5. Install Homebrew: The most popular package manager on Mac

6. Install Iterm2: A very powerful alternative to the default Mac Terminal. I just use rudimentary features such as splitting terminal, the easy copy and pasting it offers etc. But people use a lot more complex features.

The remaining steps are inside iterm2

7. Install zsh: A powerful alternative to bash with additional features and support for plugins and themes.

8. Install oh-my-zsh: The most popular plugin framework for zsh

9. Install IntelliJ Community Edition: World’s most powerful IDE

10. Install Visual Studio Code: World’s most versatile IDE

11. Install Sublime Text: Simple and clean text editor. It can be used as an IDE also, but I use it plainly as a text editor.

12. Add sublime CLI to path

13. Change iterm2 theme:

14. Enable autosuggestions for oh-my-zsh. This keeps giving you suggestions from history. Makes using the terminal a much nicer experience.

15. Enable natural editing in Iterm: This allows word skips in terminal just the way we do in text editors by pressing Alt/Cmd and Right/Left Arrow.

16. Install Auto Jump: This is a powerful tool with many features. I just use one feature — type j and the name of the folder you want to go to. Auto jump takes you there based on the history of folders used in the terminal. While installing, choose the manual setup.

The installer will then ask you to add 2 lines to .zshrc. Do that and restart iterm.

17. Install JumpCut / Flycut (jumpcut fork): These are clipboard managers which remember what has been copied, and allow pasting any of those copies.

18. Install Open JDK 11: Since I’m going to be working on some JVM Ecosystem Language or the other.

19. Enable git plugin on oh-my-zsh: In the list of enabled plugins for oh-my-zsh in ~/.zshrc, add git. Search for the word plugins=(<enabled plugins here>). Add git to the list. The list of plugins is separated by spaces.

20. Add the following aliases: The git plugin (and any plugins you enable on oh my zsh gives you loads of aliases). I add these 3 aliases on my machines —

21. Install Postman: Install postman from their official website : https://www.postman.com/downloads/

22. Install Docker: You can do this by directly going to the docker website, or using the following homebrew command —

Credits:

  1. https://medium.com/ayuth/iterm2-zsh-oh-my-zsh-the-most-power-full-of-terminal-on-macos-bdb2823fb04c

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Educator, Founder @ Interleap

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