My process of setting up a new MacBook

new-mac-setup.md

Process of setting up a new 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
• Xcode: I don't do iOS/macOS dev, but I think sometimes other programs need it
• 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
• 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
• 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.