Setting up a new Mac for development 2020

So maybe you just switched to mac either from Windows, Linux or just got yourself a new mac and you want to set up your new mac. If you switched from mac or Linux I suggest copying some of the dotfiles over from your home folder to the new mac. Here are some of my dotfiles,

Step 1.

Install Homebrew - the missing package manager for mac, it acts like apt on Debian.

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install.sh)"

If you don’t already have xcode installed yet, the script will prompt you to install the Xcode CLI tools. If for some reason this does not work, then download the Xcode from App store manually.

If you successfully installed brew then the mac is pretty much 80% ready for development 😎. Next up some of my favourite apps for development.

Step 2.

1.Terminal- where real developers spend their time. I prefer Iterm2 over the default terminal which comes with mac. You can download it by typing in brew cask install iterm2. 2. To get most out of the terminal I use a framework called oh-my-zsh, to manage my zsh configurations. So the first thing I do on the terminal is install oh-my-zsh. Apart from multiple themes it comes with, it will also give the developer handy hints like on which branch is the developer currently working on. To install oh-my-zsh, just copy and paste the script below.

sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/master/tools/install.sh)"

3. It is widely known that mac does not have a good window management out of the box. But don’t worry there is rectangle, which takes care of all the window managemant. Install it by tyiping in brew cask install rectangle
4. Since most of the development is going through many files and there is lot of copy and pasting, then I use a clipboard manager for that called maccy. Again downloading the app is simple as- brew cask install maccy.
5. Last but not least the IDE-s. The place were the code gets written. Since I use mostly Jetbrains producst, I will be downloading the jetbrains toolbox, which allows me to easily update and manage installed IDE-s.

Optional steps

Sometimes you quickly want to edit a text file or two from the command line and I prefer vim to do that. Vim out of the box is pretty useless and since I don’t like to fiddle around with the vim configuration I install SpaceVim instead.

curl -sLf https://spacevim.org/install.sh | bash

If you installed Iterm2, then you can have custom themes for your terminal. Inside iterm2, open the preferences by pressing command + , and navigate to the profiles tab and from there to colors. In the bottom right there is a select list for choocing the color theme of your liking. Knock yourself off by installing additional themes from here.

I also like changing the key configurations. Inside the settings->profiles-> keys. From there select presets and choose “Natural Text Editing”.

These days the docker has become the de facto standard for building and publishing the apps. To install docker on your mac, just type brew install docker. This will only download the CLI, which is fine, but I suggest also downloading the GUI version of Docker from here.

Last suggestion. Over time the top menu bar on mac gets cramped by various app icons you have installed on your mac. To relieve this problem I use an app called Dozer, which can be installed by brew cask install dozer.