My MacOS setup checklist

This week I formatted my macbook, and after many years of keeping sparse notes in too many different place, I decided it is time to put everything together in one place for future reference… and what best place than my freshly restyled blog.

General preference

• Dock: don’t show recent applications.

• Mission control: set hot corners.

• Trackpad/Mouse: Secondary click, click in bottom right corner.

• Keyboard: Use F1, F2, etc. keys as standard function keys.

OS settings

• Show hidden files/folders

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -boolean true; killall Finder

Recently learned a shortcut - CMD + Shift + . - to toggle quickly between two modes.

Fundamentals

• Firefox (make default browsers)

• 1Password

• XCode

• VSCode

  I usually install code command into the PATH directly from vscode.

  Recently had a problem that after exit vscode the command is removed from the PATH. To fix this issue:

  xattr Code.app check wether vscode is quarantined (app installed from Internet usually are).

  sudo xattr -r -d com.apple.quarantine Code.app remove the quarantine attribute.

• Homebrew

Terminal

ZSH is now default shell on MacOS.

• Oh My ZSH!

Git

Git is usually already installed on MacOS, but there’re a couple of things to have it properly configured.

Config

# Committer
git config --global user.name "Bruno Scopelliti"
git config --global user.email "*****"

# Default editor
git config --global core.editor "code --wait"

Alias

In ~/.zshrc define alias for common commands.

alias ga="git add"
alias gaa="git add ."
alias gst="git status"
alias gb="git branch"
alias gbd="git branch --delete "
alias gc="git commit"
alias gcm="git commit --message"
alias gco="git checkout"
alias gcob="git checkout -b"
alias gcom="git checkout master"
alias gpl="git pull"
alias gps="git push"

Configure SSH auth

GitHub is moving away from basic authentication.

1. Generate SSH Key

2. Add the SSH key in GitHub

Configure GPG commit signin

Assure gnupg is installed - brew install gnupg otherwise.

1. Generate GPG key

2. Add GPG key in GitHub

git config --global commit.gpgsign true
git config --global gpg.program gpg
git config --global user.signingkey *****

Recently I got the gpg failed to write commit object error on the first commit; to fix this issue I found I had to export the GPG_TTY environment variable from my .zshrc file:

export GPG_TTY=$(tty)

Node.js

• NVM, to manage multiple Node.js version.

Ruby

• RVM, to manage multuple Ruby version.

MongoDB

I followed these instructions.

Other apps for software development

• Chrome

• Postman

• ngrok

• Robo 3T

• GIMP

• ImageOptim

Other apps

• Google Drive

• Spotify

• VLC

• Stud.io, I am out of dark age

• Signal, Telegram, Slack, Whatsapp 😓