Settling In to a New Mac

This is a rather chaotic list of all of the things I do to a new OS X installation to make it home. It isn’t entirely comprehensive; but it does highlight most of the important things. This list is catered for users who do web development and are pretty used to Linux environments.

Installation

• PC Keyboard Hack
• Google Chrome
• Alfred App (Launcher)
• Xcode
• Colloquy
• Adium
• MacVim
• GeekTool
• GitX-L
• iTerm 2
• Sequel Pro
• VirtualBox
• Vox

Configuration

Turn the Caps Lock key into escape

• PC Keyboard Hack – Caps Lock to 53
• Keyboard Preferences – Modifier Keys – Caps Lock = No Action

Use Alfred as the default app launcher

• Spotlight Preferences – Disable Keys
• Alfred Preferences – Set to Cmd Space
• Hide Alfred Hat
• Disable Spotlight icon with:

sudo chmod 600 /System/Library/CoreServices/Search.bundle/Contents/MacOS/Search
killall SystemUIServer

Configure Finder

• Hide “All My Files”
• Show Filename Extensions
• Disable Extension Change Warning
• Preferences | General | Sidebar Icon Size = Small
• Create ~/Applications
• Create ~/bin, chflags hidden ~/bin
• Display Full Path in Finder Title:

defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool YES
killall Finder

Command Line Awesomeness

• Install the Command Line Tools within Xcode
• Install homebrew
• brew install tmux ack node mongodb sshfs
• copy mvim which came with MacVim into ~/bin
• Add ~/bin to PATH variable
• Configure VIM Settings from GitHub
• Copy previous ~/.bash_profile settings