Starting a new Macbook Pro setup from scratch was much less painful than I initially expected. I thought setting up environment variables and various system tools like Docker would be a massive pain, but turns out it took a lot less time than I thought.

On my old Intel Macbook I decided to copy everything over. Somehow it messed up the disk image partition, and almost ~100GB wasn’t usable for some odd reason. It kept thinking it had a duplicate volume or something, and I could never figure it out. This time I’m starting from scratch!

In total I spent about ~6 hours to set up 95% of everything I needed to do work on this machine.

A few things to keep in mind before starting a new setup:

Have good wifi! I set my machine up at the Sydney Startup Hub which had a measly 30mb down and something like 5mb up. My 5G connection wasn’t doing much better (with the Optus outage). Without this issue, setup would’ve taken much less time.

Transfer apps, files and folders with Airdrop! I keep forgetting how incredibly fast Airdrop is

Your old Intel apps might not work, or might work poorly. Some apps complain they run on suboptimal silicon — those have been replaced through new app downloads. I’m still running many old Intel apps moved over from Airdrop; lots of apps are “universal” and don’t have a M-compatible chip, while others just hum along sub-optimally. I’ve decided I’m ok with that.

The CouchDB daemon somehow didn’t run well on M3 on install; the icon in the top bar took ~1 min to open when clicked, and the admin page wouldn’t open. Somehow it fixed itself a week later though…

The following is a list of apps, configs, etc. that I had to do to get my machine to my liking and ready for work.

Mac Settings

I’m weird about my OSX settings

Set up swipe shortcuts in settings

Display path + disk space in Finder

Show hidden files (Just hit shift cmd .)

Uncheck Swipe between pages

Mini & Utility Apps

Here’s a bunch of “mini apps” I like to have around on the toolbar

Setapp Apps

Apparently I only have a single-machine license and need multi computer license. Sigh. The M3 is my main, so I moved this suite of apps over.
Apps: CleanMyMac, Gemini 2, Tape, Superwhisper, Cleanshot

ItsyCal: Nice to have a small calendar in the corner

Ice Menu bar manager

Spectacle: Move windows around with keyboard

Flux: Turns screens orange at dark; better than the built-in Mac app

Dropbox: Offload data to the Dropbox cloud, for backups

Google Drive: Offload data to the Google cloud, for backups

Calibre: For managing eBooks

1Password: Password handling

Bitwarden: More Password handling

Disk Inventory X: I have a TB of space. Will I ever use this (probably, yes)

Omnidisk Sweeper: (refer to above)

FileZilla: Is FTP still a thing?

Folx: Are torrents still a thing?

NordVPN: For pretending to be back home

Cloudflare Warp: Supposedly makes things faster. Been off for the last week; has slowed connection speeds by 1/100.

Handbrake: Video compression; great for video cutting/editing

VLC: Plays any video including weird codecs. Great for video preview / editing

Heynote

OpenAI MacOS ChatGPT App

Raycast — I never find myself using this thing

Cloudflare Warp

Unarchiver

~~Beeper:~~ ~~A multi-platform messenger tool; I don’t really use this, but excited to try the API~~

~~MacGPT~~~~: I haven’t been using this since the new GPTs update~~

~~Obsidian~~~~: I never use this either~~

Didn’t make the cut:

Oversight: Tells you when you’re being watched. Decided to give into surveillance.

Loom: Only good for short videos; trying out Tape instead. Maybe should use screen.studio instead?

Tunnelblick: Using NordVPN right now; no need for a home-VPN.

MongoDB Community: Great tool for managing MongoDB Atlas. Been using Couchdb and D1 though.

Work & Dev Apps

Docker Desktop: Necessary evil to run Docker

CouchDB: Runs Couchdb locally in the background for testing. Useful!

Postgres.app: Runs Postgres locally in the background for testing. Also useful!

XCode: This is a massive install that Node requires. Copy this over from /applications with Airdrop

Sublime Text: A nice text editor

Install Sublime and setup the CLI shortcut (I prefer GUI over pico/vim…)
Setting up Sublime in the CLI: https://www.sublimetext.com/docs/command_line.html#mac

VS Code: A nice code editor

Cursor.sh: A cheat code for programming

CLI Apps & Configurations

Command-line apps and configurations.

Note: on M-series Macs, use ~/.zprofile for configurations and system variables; this replaces .bash_profile — so make sure you copy over any settings

Start by setting up homebrew: /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

Once Sublime is installed, use it to open folders or edit text files, e.g. subl . or subl ~/.zprofile

Python3 & pip:

Install python 3 with brew brew install python@3
Add this to subl ~/.zprofile: export PATH="/opt/homebrew/bin:$PATH"
Restart terminal
Type in terminal: source ~/.zprofile
Pip should now work with pip3: pip3 --version to check version
Note that in Sonoma / home-brew everything python is in opt/homebrew instead of usr/local/

7zip:

Download 7zz
add to subl ~/.zprofile: export PATH="/Applications/7zz.app/Contents/SharedSupport/bin:$PATH"

Github

Install with brew install gh
If Sublime is installed and setup, change to subl on commit: git config --global core.editor "subl -n -w"
Create a new public key for Github signing: None of their documentation worked, but I got GPT-4 to do this for me: https://chat.openai.com/share/6ca7e574-8531-477e-9b67-730b0dc50578

GPT-4 instructions (worked like a charm)

To set up a new Mac with your GitHub public key for SSH authentication, follow these steps:

Generate an SSH Key Pair:

Open your Terminal on the new Mac.

Use the ssh-keygen command to generate a new SSH key pair. You can specify the filename if you want, but the default is usually fine.

    
        mathematicaCopy code
ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C "your_email@example.com"

Replace "your_email@example.com" with the email associated with your GitHub account.

Save the SSH Key:

You'll be prompted to choose a location to save the SSH key pair. Press Enter to accept the default location, which is usually ~/.ssh/id_ed25519 for an Ed25519 key.

Add the SSH Key to the SSH Agent:

Start the SSH agent if it's not already running:

    
        bashCopy code
eval "$(ssh-agent -s)"

Add your SSH key to the agent:

    
        javascriptCopy code
ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_ed25519

Copy the Public Key:

Use the following command to copy the contents of your public key to the clipboard:

    
        javascriptCopy code
pbcopy < ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub

Add the Public Key to Your GitHub Account:

Go to your GitHub account settings.

Click on "SSH and GPG keys."

Click "New SSH key" or "Add SSH key," give it a title (e.g., "Mac SSH Key"), and paste the public key you copied in the previous step into the key field.

Test the SSH Connection:

To ensure everything is set up correctly, test the SSH connection to GitHub:

    
        cssCopy code
ssh -T git@github.com

You should see a message confirming your successful connection.

Now, your new Mac is set up with your GitHub public key for SSH authentication. You can use this key to securely access your GitHub repositories without needing to enter your GitHub password each time.

Fly.io

Install: brew install flyctl
fly auth login

Cloudflare Wranger CLI

They removed the global install; it’s only project specific now. Just install like any other packages in the project.
In a project: yarn add --dev wrangler

Vercel:

yarn global add vercel

Sentry-CLI: decided I didn’t need this right now

Node / nvm

Don’t install Node (brew install node) outright; use nvm instead as it gives you the ability to switch between node versions very easily.
Installing nvm: brew install nvm
Add this to subl ~/.zprofile: source $(brew --prefix nvm)/nvm.sh so nvm is always available
Restart terminal
Install a node version, e.g. nvm use 18 then set it as default nvm alias default 18
To list all versions: nvm list or to see current version: nvm current
Notes: https://collabnix.com/how-to-install-and-configure-nvm-on-mac-os/
Install yarn

brew install yarn

Other Stuff

visidata: for dealing with CSVs: brew install saulpw/vd/visidata

Consumer Apps

Chrome: Do this one first; set up the account to sync

Airtable

Notion: I prefer Apple Notes but multiplayer is terrible on it

Figma

Front: Multiplayer email client

Spotify

Google: Docs / Sheets / Slides

Microsoft: Office / Word / Excel / Powerpoint

Firefox: For backup

Agenda: For journaling / short notes

Sketch: For older projects (newer projects are on Figma)

Whatsapp

Telegram

Discord

Slack

Zoom

~~Webex~~~~: this thing is so bloated, but the NIH and FDA calls required Webex…~~

Didn’t make the cut:

Microsoft Edge: Good to use the new Bing AI features but that’s about it.

PDF Expert: Don’t PDF editing very much, but this is the GOAT product for PDFs.

Opera (and the other browsers): I used to test on multiple browsers, but now they’re all based on Chromium so…

Other notes

It’s been a week, and I’ve been adding a couple of things here and there to this list, but the system’s been humming! A few odd things have been popping up (every time I try to run an old Node project I get some node-gyp about Node not having the right permissions or the wrong silicon. Every bank and other log in requires a new round of 2FA. That kind of thing. But mostly it’s been smooth sailing!

2024 Updates

More things to install:

Cloudflare tunnel cloudflared

Deno + Smallweb

Cursor

LMStudio and ollama