How I set up a new Mac

November 17, 2021

As I recently blogged, I just upgraded to macOS Monterey taking it as an opportunity to start from a clean, fresh, pristine system. This means I had to set up everything again, which is not a big deal, but for the sake of remembering it and making it even faster next time, I figured I’d write about it.

This is the kind of blog post that’s mostly for my personal interest, but if you got there somehow, you might take inspiration from my settings, who knows!

But first, let’s ask the following question.

Why start fresh?

While I could totally have migrated all my data from Big Sur, I like to start from a clean slate every year or two, to get rid of all the unnecessary garbage that accumulated over the years.

Wait, what garbage? Well, let me explain.

Every time you update a software (including the OS), there’s no guarantee that the state you’ll be in after the update would be the same as if you installed the new version directly on a fresh system. Actually, the opposite is pretty much guaranteed.

Most of the time this is not a big deal. Maybe you’re stuck with the default settings of the version you originally installed instead of the ones that would otherwise come with the latest version (i.e. Git always defaults to master and you have to explicitly configure it to use main, or any small things like this).

Or maybe some commands or tasks might run slightly slower because of accumulated “bloat” related to things you don’t use anymore and forgot about (keys, passwords, certificates, trusted IP lists and whatnot from stuff you connected to once or at least stopped connecting to ages ago, the list of known Wi-Fi networks and ~/.ssh/known_hosts being a typical example).

While the above are pretty inoffensive cases, this kind of undefined state drifts might cause more sneaky bugs, and “works on that machine” kind of answers when you try to figure them out.

The same is also true when you uninstall a software; there’s no guarantee that the state you’ll be in after the removal will match the one you would have been in if you didn’t install it in the first place. And again, the opposite is pretty much guaranteed.

NixOS solves some of those issues, but in the real world, you’re likely gonna want to use many programs that are not designed and packaged to be stateless, deterministic, reproducible and purely functional, and using wrappers (or wrapping them yourself) often comes at a tremendous cost in time and convenience.

My tradeoff so far? A fresh reinstall every other year, or whenever I feel like I’ve fucked around enough with that system’s state to be worth a clean start.

New system setup

Here’s the things I do when I log in the first time on my freshly installed system.

Get rid of all the garbage in the dock. I just leave the Finder and the trash, because you can’t really remove them anyways (did you try dragging the trash to the trash?), but I happen to use them so that’s fine.
Open Safari to download Firefox. Very similar to how one would use Internet Explorer (oh wait, Edge) to install a real browser on Windows. This comparison might sound like a joke, but Safari effectively became the new Internet Explorer regarding how far behind they drag web standards, so this is sadly far more accurate than I’d like it to be.
Download and install iTerm2.

Note: I could have installed Firefox and iTerm2 with Homebrew (which I add later) but for some reason there’s a few programs I kinda like to install on their own. Don’t ask me why.

But now I think about it, it’s probably because Homebrew became so ridiculously slow to update its repository and the installed software that I’d rather keep the ones I want to be the most up-to-date separate from Homebrew.

I’ll otherwise update Homebrew once a month or two, or when I need to install something new with it, and it forces me to upgrade everything else at the same time.

As a general rule of thumb, everything graphical I tend to install on its own, and all the CLI stuff is with Homebrew.

Install Adobe Creative Cloud and the apps I use with it (Lightroom Classic, Photoshop, Premiere and After Effects). In Creative Cloud preferences, turn off file syncing and launch at login.
- On a multi-user system, you’ll need to sign in to Creative Cloud for every single user to turn off file syncing and launch at login, even the ones who don’t use Creative Cloud apps (because the preferences pane is only accessible to logged in users). Now all my users have an empty Creative Cloud account just for the sake of disabling it. I fucking hate the current state of technology. 🙃
Install Logic Pro an download the full sound library. Sadly a fresh Logic installation can’t reuse an existing sound library directory (I like to keep mine on my hard drive instead of my limited size SSD), so we need to download the whole 60 GB from scratch. Did I say I hate the current state of technology already?
Press Command + Shift + 5 to open the custom screenshot interface, where I can change the screenshot directory to ~/Desktop/Screenshots. I don’t like to clutter my desktop with screenshots like it’s the case by default.
I download and run patch-edid.rb to patch the EDID of my screen because since Catalina, macOS wants to communicate with it over YCbCr instead of RGB and that causes colors and contrast to be fucked up. This is extremely specific to my own screen.

Now I’m ready to configure the system preferences, iTerm2 settings and my terminal-environment.

System preferences

In keyboard I set “key repeat” and “delay until repeat” to the fastest possible. I like my keyboard to be snappy.
For the dock & menu bar, I leave only Time Machine and fast user switching if I’m on a multi-user system, and I set the clock to 24 hours format.
I enable Time Machine backups to my usual drive after configuring my exclude list (very specific to my data so not included here).
In energy saver I disable Power Nap because I don’t need my machine to resume from sleep to check emails and run backups (after all if I’m not using my machine there’s not much to back up anyways).
In displays I turn on Night Shift form sunset to sunrise.

iTerm2 preferences

In appearance, windows, tick hide scrollbars.
In profiles, general, select reuse previous session’s directory as working directory.
In profiles, terminal, tick silence bell.
In profiles, keys, key mappings, load the natural text editing preset (allow it to remove whatever is already there), and remove Command + Left and Command + Right which otherwise shadow the shortcuts to navigate between tabs.

Terminal environment

First, install Homebrew with whatever is the current recommended way. Install it in the default place because otherwise it won’t be able to leverage many prebuilt binaries that hardcode the default prefix in them, and it’s utterly slow to compile everything. I’d be running Gentoo if that’s what I wanted FFS. Also if you want to run Homebrew on a multi-user system, read that first.

Then, make a SSH keypair or copy an existing one in ~/.ssh. I usually run ssh-keygen either way just to let it create the directory with the proper permissions, even if I’ll override the key later.

ssh-keygen

Clone my dotfiles directory and install my Mac preset (mainly my Zsh, Vim and Git settings).

git clone git@github.com:valeriangalliat/dotfiles.git
cd dotfiles
make mac
cd

Edit my default ~/.zshrc and ~/.zshenv templates and comment or uncomment some of the stuff there that I may need, mainly enabling my asdf helper (see below).

vim ~/.zshrc ~/.zshenv

Install whatever software I pretty much always use with Homebrew.

brew install gpg ag fzf imagemagick ffmpeg ncdu

GPG is required for the asdf Node.js plugin I’ll add later below.
Ag (The Silver Searcher) is my favorite way to search code.
fzf is an awesome fuzzy finder.
I probably don’t need to introduce ImageMagick and FFmpeg.
ncdu is a cool tool to monitor disk usage.

Install the asdf plugins I need and whatever version is in my ~/.tool-versions. My ~/.zshrc automatically installs asdf on the first invocation so no need to do that manually.

asdf plugin add nodejs
# asdf plugin add python
# asdf plugin add ruby
# asdf plugin add elixir
# asdf plugin add erlang
asdf install

Wrapping up

That’s pretty much the gist! This is a fairly straightforward and not very time consuming checklist, and the main things that need to be automated (my dotfiles) are.

I don’t think it’s worth automating my macOS system preferences somehow as they might change in future versions anyways. Same thing for iTerm2, where I definitely don’t want to copy over my whole configuration file from an old installation, I’d rather start from the latest and greatest defaults and just tweak what I need on top of it.

Everything else is very specific to the current machine I’m setting up and I leave them to my discretion at the time of installing.