Aniruddha Deb

Mac Setup v2

My 2015 MBP 13" was giving me some pain over this entire semester, lagging a lot and being very slow overall. I recently upgraded to a 16" MBP, and there have been no complaints so far :) the notch is simply not there if you have a black desktop background, so +1 to apple for that. Although face ID would have been nice to have.

Setup

  1. Basic intro Screen

    • Dark Mode
      dark side meme
    • Don’t set up Siri, or Stage Manager

  2. Home Directory and Username renaming

    • MacOS uses a lowercase first letter, even if you’ve input an uppercase one while making your username. The way to change this is a bit complicated, but follow the instructions here

  3. System Preferences Settings

    • Turn off autocorrect
    • Function keys are function keys, and not ‘do weird stuff’ keys
    • Don’t switch to a workspace which has an open window of the application
    • Make 10 workspaces and activate all the ^(n) hotkeys to switch to them
    • Change the date/time format to Day HH:MM:SS in control center
    • Remove some stuff from control center, put keyboard brightness there
    • Turn off the ‘quick note’ bottom right hot corner

  4. Accounts

  5. Applications

    • XCode CLT
    • Firefox
    • VS Code (don’t use this much)
    • Kitty (with the cuter icon)
    • Calibre
    • TG Pro
    • The Unarchiver
    • Shottr
    • Hidden Bar
    • TinkerTool
      • Hide dock, and delay in showing it
      • Remove ‘recent apps’ section in Dock
    • Rectangle
    • Bandwidth+

  6. Brew Packages

    • Neovim
    • htop
    • gcc
    • openmpi
    • miniforge

  7. Kitty Setup

    • Download the Meslo zipfile from here, and install all the fonts.
    • Copy over the kitty.conf from my previous machine. Works out of the box (just darkened the background a bit more, as the new mac has a brighter display)

  8. Oh my zsh

    • Install Powerlevel10k after this
    • Follow the setup guide for Powerlevel10k according to liking. I use a one- line prompt, with no repeats

  9. Firefox setup

    • Default browser
    • Login to firefox account to sync plugins
      • TabbyCat
      • uBlock Origin
      • Tampermonkey
    • Get UserScripts and load into Tampermonkey

  10. Spaces Renamer

    • Probably the hardest part of the setup.
    • TL;DR follow the procedure here. Requires disabling SIP and library validation, and then loading in spaces renamer. You’ll be asked to download rosetta at this point as well.

  11. Neovim setup

    • Install node for CoC
    • Lift and Shift nvim config directory from previous machine
    • Install packer
    • Do :PackerInstall to install plugins

  12. Blog Setup

    • Clone the blog git repo
    • Instead of using a venv, I used a conda-managed environment this time. Worked out better. Created an environment.yml for the blog.

  13. ML Setup

    • Create a Conda environment for ML stuff
    • Install:
      • torch, torchvision, torchaudio
      • numpy, pandas, scikit-learn, xgboost
      • matplotlib, bokeh
      • jupyterlab, ipywidgets
      • jupyterlab-vim

At this point, you should have a stable system. Move over data from the previous machine (Documents, Pictures, Videos etc.)

  1. Set Desktop Background

  2. Step back and enjoy :)

hehe

nvim+kitty

One More Thing

There’s a difference between .zshenv, .zprofile, .zshrc and other flavours of zsh conf files, details of which I learnt from here. You’d want to alias gcc to gcc-12 and g++ to g++-12 (they dubiously use clang), and vim to nvim in .zshenv (otherwise makefiles won’t pick up on the change. Also, uncomment the lines in .zshrc which export $EDITOR.

Also, name your programming folder Developer to get a nice directory icon.

EDIT (9 Mar): Moved from CoC to nvim-lspconfig and cmp-nvim, and to treesitter-based syntax highlighting. Feels marginally better, and got the chance to hack at my vim config after a long time.