Setting up a New Mac from Scratch

My trusty 2013 MacBook Pro died over the weekend. Here is everything I installed and configured on my new machine to get it up to speed. Setting up a new machine from scratch is a great way to clear the cruft that inevitably builds up over time.

I’m sure I’ll find a few more things in the next month that I forgot, but this is ~95% complete.

1Password – Without this I wouldn’t be able to get in to anything. First app I installed.

Dropbox – File transfer was going to take a while and I needed it for syncing data for other apps below.

Setapp – One of the best purchases in the last few years. One subscription for tons of apps. Below is what I installed right away.

Mosaic – window management

Bartender – Hide all the shit in the menu bar

Ulysses – My favorite writing app. Saves everything out to .txt files.

Paste – Clipboard manager

Sip – Color selection and organization

CleanShot – screencapture

Forecast Bar

CleanMyMac

InstaCal – Menu bar calendar app

Squash – compression and optimization for web images

Permute – Media converter

TablePlus – GUI for MySQL, Postgres, and more.

Drafts – I installed the Mac beta. All of my text starts here.

Things – My current to-do list

Soulver – Best Mac and iOS calculator

Tweetbot – My fav third-party Twitter client

Copay – Bitcoin wallet

Pixelmator Pro – I’ve completely stopped using PhotoShop and use this instead.

Trello – Project management. I prefer the desktop app to the web client because I like standalone apps.

FruitJuice – Gotta keep your laptop battery healthy.

Amphetamine – Keeps your Mac awake when it needs to do things like download your entire Dropbox. Better than Caffeine, the alternative.

Slack

DaisyDisk – Visualizes your disk space and helps you find giant files

The Unarchiver – Installing a lot of new stuff means unzipping a lot of files. The Unarchiver is the best at it.

Hazel – Automated organization. Renames files I download and stores them automatically, dumps the trash, organizes my desktop, etc.

RescueTime – Time management software that I’ve used since 2010.

Keybase – Security and identity

Notion – Project management, documents, collaboration, publishing. Basically runs my work life.

Zoom – Video conferencing

Rocket – Slack-like Emoju picking for your entire OS

TextExpander – Text snippets + AppleScript automation kickoff

CarbonCopyCloner – I set up weekly drive clones to external harddrives. Saved my bacon multiple times. I didn’t lose a thing this time because I backed up the night before automatically.

Backblaze – Offsite backup. Critical.

WordPress – I like managing all of my sites from this single app.

Adobe CreativeCloud – Primarily for Typekit

Sketch

Spotify

Turbo Boost Switcher Pro – Toggles the Turbo Boost feature on your CPU for better battery life.

Chrome Extensions

Zoom video conferencing – Changes all Google Hangouts links to Zoom links

Wappalyzer – Figuring out what stacks other sites are using & figuring out whether or not things I install are actually activated

DuckDuckGo – My default search engine

Ghostery – Death to all tracking scripts

Stayfocusd – Blocks social media during the workday

What Have You Made Today? – My favorite new tab screen

Larder – My bookmarking of choice

Development Tools

VSCode

iTerm2

oh my zsh

Powerline fonts – Meslo

Agnoster theme

Solarized Dark color

Apple’s command line tools – $ xcode-select --install

Homebrew

nvm

Node

Ember

Yarn

Gulp

Java

Java Development Kit

jEnv

Cask

Quicklook-json

Hub

Composer

Ruby Gems (For managing this Jekyll site)

Jekyll

jekyll-sitemap

jekyll-include-cache

jekyll-archives

s3_website

VMWare

Vagrant

Box: Laravel/homestead

Dash – API documentation

Misc Settings and preferences I set

Hot corners – Can’t live without them since 10.4

Generated new SSH keys

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles YES – Gotta see those hidden files

Apple’s enhanced dictation – The extra suite of dictation tools

True Tone on

Night Shift on