My process of setting up a new MacBook

new-mac-setup.md

My process of setting up a new MacBook

Recently my MacBook Pro mysteriously died overnight. Due to the current epidemic situation, I figured the best option at the moment is to purchase a new one. So, here comes a brand new 16-inch MacBook Pro. I never use Time Machine or iCloud for backup, so now is a great opportunity to document my setup process for a new machine. The applications and programs I would install reflect my day-to-day workflow. Some of these are for my classes and research; some are for general software development; and some are just for working efficiently with a MacBook.

Part 1: applications

• Amphetamine: get it from App Store; it keeps Mac from automatically go to sleep
• Spectrum: get it from App Store; I occasionally use it for web color design
• Slack: get it from App Store and sign in via email
• Kindle: get it from App Store and sign in through Amazon account
• WeChat: get it from App Store; I mainly use WeChat on Mac for backing up chat history
• Xcode: I don't do iOS/macOS dev, but I think sometimes other programs need it
• delete GarageBand: I don't use it and it takes up space
• delete iMovie: I don't use it
• Firefox: get it from https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/
• Chrome: get it from Google; I mainly use Firefox, but Chrome is sometimes useful for web dev
• Intellij Ultimate: get it from https://account.jetbrains.com/licenses through student license
• The Unarchiver: get it from App Store; I forget what this was for
• Skype
• Postman: hackathon essential? get it here https://www.postman.com/
• Spotify: get it here https://www.spotify.com/us/
• LastPass: get it from App Store; but most of the time I just use the Firefox extension
• LastPass Firefox extension
• Dropbox: this is my primary backup system
• Sophos Home: this is school's recommended Mac security software
• Visual Studio Code: I don't know when I would need it
• Microsoft Office Suite: sign in to Microsoft and download the Office 365 apps
• Java
• MySQL: going to need it once in a while for some large web dev
• Zoom: especially now with the epidemic situation and all classes online
• Paragon NTFS: absolutely necessary for writing to NTFS format external drives
• Adobe Creative Cloud and apps under my photography license
• ExpressVPN or NordVPN - depending on which I have an active license for
• Docker: going to probably need it for some serious dev work
• R and RStudio: they are different things; need them for my research work

Part 2: shell set-up

First off, customize Terminal theme and settings. Then,

1. Install oh-my-zsh with curl
2. Install brew
3. mkdir bin in home directory
4. brew install wget
5. ssh-keygen for git (git comes built-in, maybe check version)
6. Add the new ssh key to GitHub
7. git clone my dotfiles repository into ~/bin
8. brew install npm (this also installs node)
9. npm i -g tldr (this is a simpler version of man pages)
10. rm .zshrc and ln -s ~/bin/dotfiles/.zshrc ~/.zshrc
11. Install plugin git-open via oh-my-zsh
12. git config --global user.name and my name
13. git config --global user.email and my email
14. Fix any remaining zsh and .zshrc problems
15. ln -s ~/bin/dotfiles/.vimrc ~/.vimrc
16. brew install lua and download and setup full_screen.* scripts
17. brew install rlwrap
18. Check python versions (both 2 and 3 should be built in)
19. pip3 install --user --upgrade pip
20. Optionally, upgrade python 3 to the latest version
21. brew install tree
22. brew install htop (better visualization than top)

Note to self: Most of the above steps can probably be automated. Write up a script then?

Step 2 requires admin privilege.
This affects Steps 4, 8, 16, 17, 21, 22.
Step 9 is also affected because .pkg installation for node requires admin privilege as well.