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
- Node
- 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
- nvm
- 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