Used this for macbook air 2020 during the great quarantine of 2020 and for mac mini in Feb, 2025.
- Install chrome — login and do the sync
- Download xcode from App Store and command line tools. Brew needs these.
- Change battery to show percentage
- fix finder sidebar and other finder stuff. I don't know how to programatically do that.
- Removed apps from dock that I don't use
- Change mouse scroll direction
- Change mouse to touch to click
- Download JetBrains Mono font https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/mono/ -> expand the folder and then add it to Documents folder
- Open FontBook -> File -> Add Fonts to current user.
- install homebrew https://brew.sh/
sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/master/tools/install.sh)"
Install plugins you want for Oh My Zsh, for example:
zsh-autosuggestions
I'd recommend cloning this repo because each time I go through it, I kind of change stuff so you can keep this README open and just update it as you go along.
Go through setup-a-new-machine.sh and brew.sh and install the parts you want manually.
If you want Ctrl+R fuzzy history search:
You can run move-in.sh to set up symlinks from this repo to your home directory.
# create the necessary home directory bin folder
mkdir ~/bin
# copy helper scripts from this repo into your bin
cp bin/* ~/bin/
This symlink file is pretty nice too for moving the files to the dotfiles repo and symlinking them
bin/symlinkToDotfilesRepo.sh
Install postgres using brew. This should let you use postgres for a Rails app.
brew install postgresql@16
# for some reason mac M3s or whatever need this
brew install libpq
# this tells bundler that you want to use this special config (globally)
bundle config --global build.pg --with-pg-config="$(brew --prefix libpq)/bin/pg_config"
# this will ensure it starts when you start your computer
brew services start postgresql@16