Minimal But Effective Mac Setup For Developers

Treat this article as a checklist to help set up your new MacBook with all the essential things.

Photo by Rich Tervet on Unsplash

Essential Apps

General

• Google Chrome
• Spotify
• Password Manager of your choice e.g. 1Password
• VPN of your choice e.g. Nord VPN
• SketchBook
• WhatsApp Desktop

Collaboration

• Slack
• Zoom
• Jira
• Zeplin

Development

• VS Code
• iTerm
• Postman
• Docker Desktop
• TablePlus

Utility Apps

• Copyclip: A simple & efficient clipboard manager for your Mac.
• Next Meeting: Quickly see your next meeting right in your menu bar with Next Meeting.
• Numi: Beautiful calculator for Mac that blends math with text. Currency, units, time zones, numeral systems, variables, export, notification widget.
• Aerial: a screensaver that lets you play videos from Apple’s tvOS screensaver.

Developer Setup

• Homebrew
• Git
• GitHub CLI
• nvm
• Yarn
• Docker
• Kubernetes
• AWS CLI
• Zsh
• bat: A cat clone with syntax highlighting and Git integration
• htop: A cross-platform interactive process viewer

Google Chrome Advanced

• JSON Viewer

VS Code Advanced

Settings

• Trim whitespace at end
• Add a newline at EOL
• Trim excess newlines
• Open folder in new window
• Set the Line Height to 22
• Window: Title format:

${rootName}${separator}${activeEditorMedium}

• Shell Command: Install ‘code’ command in PATH
• Set “Workbench › Editor: Pinned Tab Sizing” to “Compact”
• Set “Explorer: Auto Reveal” to “focusNoScroll”
• Set “Editor › Minimap: Max Column” to 100

Font

• Fira Code: A very nice looking free monospaced font with programming ligatures

Icons

• Material Icon Theme

Extensions

• Terminal
• Material Icon Theme
• Sublime Text key mappings
• GitLens — Git supercharged
• PHP Intelephense
• ESLint
• Prettier — Code Formatter
• Markdown Preview Github Styling
• ColorTabs
• Prettify JSON
• Laravel Blade Snippets

Git Advanced Settings

• Always push to the current branch

git config —-global push.default current

iTerm Advanced Settings

• Key binding for Option + left & right arrows
• Set Node version when cd to a dir with a .nvmrc

Slack Apps

• Google Calendar
• Zoom
• Jira
• GitHub
• CircleCI