I'm getting a new Mac in a few days, and in an attempt to end with a cleaner install, I'm starting from scratch. What settings / apps do HN users change / install when they first set up their computers?
What I have found very liberating recently is to try and keep things pretty vanilla.
No point fighting against the world - just accept anything that seems weird or odd and doesn’t match up with how you think it should work. Just go with the flow.
My computer is just a tool for getting things done - it’s not an expression of my personality.
100% agree! When I switched form windows to mac I basically decided this, just go with the mac ways from day one and forget what you know about windows.. best decision ever
> My computer is just a tool for getting things done - it’s not an expression of my personality.
And this is one of the things that makes me a little wistful as I get older. My computers are like my cars. I remember my first ones, the quest for a bargain or the right parts, and each had its own personality.
Now, they're all blandly similar and are means to an end. Sure, they're better by all objective measures, but I don't have the time to relentless customize them to my liking and imprint them with my personality.
But it's something I use a lot everyday and that brings me much joy. Any small adjustment can be a substantial quality-of-life improvement.
It's hard swimming upstream, but there's a balance.
One thing I'm torn about is Apple's passive-aggressive “natural” scroll direction. It annoyed me a great deal that Apple changed that and chose this word, but it's something I could have adapted to and now have to deal with all Macs that aren't my own.
I am on the opposite end of most of the other responses.
I *NEVER* start from a clean install of my macOS systems. I fact, I consider this one of macOS's super powers. I love having a heavily customized environment and I just want my system to move with me as I get new hardware.
But let me explain what I mean:
* I use a one of add-ons, custom utilities, many applications.
* I have, VS Code, BBEdit, Brew
* 10 third-party apps controlled by Bartender in my menu bar, .
* have full, nodejs and python development environments.
* have Postrges
* I have much of Office 365 installed
* I could go on ...
When I started using Mac's in the mid-1990's I came from MS-DOS, Windows and OS/2. I was amazed that I could simply do a drag-and-drop file copy of a Mac OS 7 Startup Disk to another disk and boot the system. This also worked by attaching a new computer to your old via SCSI Target Disk Mode. So I could copy my old system to my new system and be up and running in an identical environment in almost no time.
Since then, things have gotten more complicated. You would have to use a tool like SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner to copy your system. But it still worked.
More recently, the Apples M-series processor computer mean that you pretty much have to use Migration Assistant. But still you get your whole system migrated. When I moved to an M1 MacBook, I did a deep dive to clean up my system. I found configuration files with creation dates back to 1998
Let that sink in. 1998
I have in some sense been now been using the SAME system for over 25 years. I actually think it would be a few more years, but I think I did a copy operation that reset the creation dates on my files in 1998.
I am not going to say this has always been easy. Sometimes, I have had to use my deep knowledge of the system to keep going. But it has been at least 15 years since I had any significant issues during migration.
I will also say, while my preferred system is macOS, I am a heavy user of Windows, Linux servers and Linux KDE Desktops. I can not imaging keeping a Windows or Linux system running so long.
I’m vaguely surprised not to see bettertouchtool yet. I am too used to three finger middle click on the touchpad and some other custom gestures to have anything else come first. Lots of others, but most covered already here.
How do people usually deal with the lack of middle click?
I only need a middle click for a few applications, and they always support it out of the box. I’m sure there are use cases for the Finder, but I guess I don’t know what they would be.
I maintain a Brewfile (https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-bundle) which contains the majority of the non-project specific applications that I like to install on any new Mac:
What's really nice is the `cask` & `mas` keywords allow you to install .dmg files & directly from the App Store.
---
While its not included in there yet, I've been experimenting with maintaining a private Homebrew tap which contains my ~/bin directory as opposed to shell aliases.
I would say almost the opposite, with the caveat that I don't think MacPorts is much better. I've grown to dread interacting with homebrew because it's increasingly opinionated with none of the benefits of being opinionated. Want to encode h.265 video? Brew still hasn't adopted an up-to-date libx265, so there's no NEON support. Want to use postgis? Welp you're stuck with Postgres 14. Want to do change anything about a package? Welp now you've gotta go track down whatever repository and go down that road instead of using command line arguments.
And bash? bash has one killer feature: readline. zsh has some interesting eye candy but still can't match readline's history search where you can anchor the search from an arbitrary point in the command string.
The only must have app I've found so far is Little Snitch (application firewall).
Beyond that most of the setup I've done on my daily drive is undoing the brain damage Apple's imparted with Sonoma. For all the bugs and enshittification perhaps the most difficult part has been that you simply can't find all of the settings in the System Settings app via its search. The new style keyboard navigation (which involves mercilessly clobbering UI widgets) is available under the accessibility page (where the old style keyboard navigation option used to live), but the less intrusive old style keyboard navigation is now under the keyboard page.
I forget why I disabled "show widgets in stage manager", but it had nothing to do with stage manager.
There are a few things that are worth changing from the command line: e.g. the new text input wigdet / cursor that provides the visual caps lock indication (and worse the occasional input source icon).
Edit: Oh yeah. An up-to-date sqlite is super helpful, as well as a more flexible terminal app (iTerm2 and/or WezTerm for me). And of course some fonts.
I usually maintain a little git repository `.dotfiles` with all my personal preferences and config files. Although it is designed to be made public, I didn't do it - I was too scared I forgot something :-) In this repo I also created subdirectories for automated setup scripts for different operating systems. It looks something like this:
docker
... custom docker files and scripts
etc
git
.gitconfig
.gitignore_global
ssh
hosts.d
config
vim
vimrc
zsh
... (multiple config files and dirs, e.g. powerlevel10k)
linux
artix
setup.sh
fedora
setup.sh
ubuntu
setup.sh
macos
setup.sh
common_functions.sh
All I need to do is install git, check out the repo and run the setup script of the current system - works for linux and macOS, although I don't use macOS that much any more. These Scripts are designed to be run multiple times without damaging anything.
Works out pretty well. For macOS I tried to automate as much as possible (via `brew` and `brew --cask` and for settings via `defaults write`), similar to all these repositories using this technique: https://dotfiles.github.io/inspiration/
As a rule of thumb I don't customize critical software because:
1. Upgrades often break customizations. And modern software upgrades all the time.
2. What I think I want, is rarely what I actually wind up using.
3. I know I won't write comprehensive documentation to guide other users...including my future self. In three years/months/weeks/days/hours I will be wondering what the hell I did. Particularly because of 2.
What I believe, is the skill of adapting myself to playing the software as it lies is more frequently more valuable than the skill of trying to predict how I will use it and the skills of figuring out how to customize it and debugging my customizations.
For me, customizations tend not to be sticky. There are exceptions. I still find the same set of Autocad aliases useful 30 years later...but those are command line (e.g. 'c' for 'copy' & 'cc' for 'circle' instead of 'c' for 'circle' and 'cp' for 'copy' because I use copy much more than circle and because /c is a left hand character and /p is a right hand character and my right hand is on the trackball. Also someone pointed out the left hand right hand thing to me, I'm probably not smart enough to figure that out myself...but I digress. I still have to customize Autocad everytime I use it on a different machine (and over 30 years I have to take off my socks to enumerate them all).
The tldr is that the average case is that customizations come with a promise of more work in the future and that there is little control of when that more work will need to be done.
I should add that other people's customizations are usually worse than the standard behavior because of documentations.
And the default behaviors are the simplest thing that might work.
Readit News
No point fighting against the world - just accept anything that seems weird or odd and doesn’t match up with how you think it should work. Just go with the flow.
My computer is just a tool for getting things done - it’s not an expression of my personality.
Chefs sharpen their knives, right?
Are you still using the same tools and workflow you used in 2003?
The LAMP stack?
Flash?
Java?
Front Page?
Power PC assembly?
Chefs sharpen their knives regularly, not once every five years.
And this is one of the things that makes me a little wistful as I get older. My computers are like my cars. I remember my first ones, the quest for a bargain or the right parts, and each had its own personality.
Now, they're all blandly similar and are means to an end. Sure, they're better by all objective measures, but I don't have the time to relentless customize them to my liking and imprint them with my personality.
It's hard swimming upstream, but there's a balance.
One thing I'm torn about is Apple's passive-aggressive “natural” scroll direction. It annoyed me a great deal that Apple changed that and chose this word, but it's something I could have adapted to and now have to deal with all Macs that aren't my own.
Outbound firewall: https://objective-see.org/products/lulu.html
Stop working as admin all the time (but switch easily): https://github.com/SAP/macOS-enterprise-privileges
I *NEVER* start from a clean install of my macOS systems. I fact, I consider this one of macOS's super powers. I love having a heavily customized environment and I just want my system to move with me as I get new hardware.
But let me explain what I mean:
* I use a one of add-ons, custom utilities, many applications. * I have, VS Code, BBEdit, Brew * 10 third-party apps controlled by Bartender in my menu bar, . * have full, nodejs and python development environments. * have Postrges * I have much of Office 365 installed * I could go on ...
When I started using Mac's in the mid-1990's I came from MS-DOS, Windows and OS/2. I was amazed that I could simply do a drag-and-drop file copy of a Mac OS 7 Startup Disk to another disk and boot the system. This also worked by attaching a new computer to your old via SCSI Target Disk Mode. So I could copy my old system to my new system and be up and running in an identical environment in almost no time.
Since then, things have gotten more complicated. You would have to use a tool like SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner to copy your system. But it still worked.
More recently, the Apples M-series processor computer mean that you pretty much have to use Migration Assistant. But still you get your whole system migrated. When I moved to an M1 MacBook, I did a deep dive to clean up my system. I found configuration files with creation dates back to 1998
Let that sink in. 1998
I have in some sense been now been using the SAME system for over 25 years. I actually think it would be a few more years, but I think I did a copy operation that reset the creation dates on my files in 1998.
I am not going to say this has always been easy. Sometimes, I have had to use my deep knowledge of the system to keep going. But it has been at least 15 years since I had any significant issues during migration.
I will also say, while my preferred system is macOS, I am a heavy user of Windows, Linux servers and Linux KDE Desktops. I can not imaging keeping a Windows or Linux system running so long.
How do people usually deal with the lack of middle click?
Edit: Do most people even use mice anymore? Has the touchpad completely taken over?
A Magic Mouse gives the benefits of both (movable mouse, touch panel) anyway.
I did buy a touchpad for a headless mini but that's just because it can be left plugged in permanently, and doesn't need as much space to be usable.
https://github.com/jonahgeorge/dotfiles/tree/main
What's really nice is the `cask` & `mas` keywords allow you to install .dmg files & directly from the App Store.
---
While its not included in there yet, I've been experimenting with maintaining a private Homebrew tap which contains my ~/bin directory as opposed to shell aliases.
And bash? bash has one killer feature: readline. zsh has some interesting eye candy but still can't match readline's history search where you can anchor the search from an arbitrary point in the command string.
The only must have app I've found so far is Little Snitch (application firewall).
Beyond that most of the setup I've done on my daily drive is undoing the brain damage Apple's imparted with Sonoma. For all the bugs and enshittification perhaps the most difficult part has been that you simply can't find all of the settings in the System Settings app via its search. The new style keyboard navigation (which involves mercilessly clobbering UI widgets) is available under the accessibility page (where the old style keyboard navigation option used to live), but the less intrusive old style keyboard navigation is now under the keyboard page.
I forget why I disabled "show widgets in stage manager", but it had nothing to do with stage manager.
There are a few things that are worth changing from the command line: e.g. the new text input wigdet / cursor that provides the visual caps lock indication (and worse the occasional input source icon).
Edit: Oh yeah. An up-to-date sqlite is super helpful, as well as a more flexible terminal app (iTerm2 and/or WezTerm for me). And of course some fonts.
Zsh is in base. Unlearning bash-isms is good.
At least we agree not fink¿
Little snitch for sure.
Time machine is a bugger but so are the alternatives.
Icloud keychain is good i think. And, never try to export anything except homedir and private data to the next mac.
I kept SIP. I worry about running in an insecure mode.
Works out pretty well. For macOS I tried to automate as much as possible (via `brew` and `brew --cask` and for settings via `defaults write`), similar to all these repositories using this technique: https://dotfiles.github.io/inspiration/
Additionally from time to time I try to lookup hardening guides like this: https://github.com/drduh/macOS-Security-and-Privacy-Guide
As a rule of thumb I don't customize critical software because:
1. Upgrades often break customizations. And modern software upgrades all the time.
2. What I think I want, is rarely what I actually wind up using.
3. I know I won't write comprehensive documentation to guide other users...including my future self. In three years/months/weeks/days/hours I will be wondering what the hell I did. Particularly because of 2.
What I believe, is the skill of adapting myself to playing the software as it lies is more frequently more valuable than the skill of trying to predict how I will use it and the skills of figuring out how to customize it and debugging my customizations.
For me, customizations tend not to be sticky. There are exceptions. I still find the same set of Autocad aliases useful 30 years later...but those are command line (e.g. 'c' for 'copy' & 'cc' for 'circle' instead of 'c' for 'circle' and 'cp' for 'copy' because I use copy much more than circle and because /c is a left hand character and /p is a right hand character and my right hand is on the trackball. Also someone pointed out the left hand right hand thing to me, I'm probably not smart enough to figure that out myself...but I digress. I still have to customize Autocad everytime I use it on a different machine (and over 30 years I have to take off my socks to enumerate them all).
The tldr is that the average case is that customizations come with a promise of more work in the future and that there is little control of when that more work will need to be done.
I should add that other people's customizations are usually worse than the standard behavior because of documentations.
And the default behaviors are the simplest thing that might work.
But YMMV.
Good luck.