How I set up a new Mac

November 17, 2021

Note: updated August 1, 2026 with Tahoe and more scripting.

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.

Dock

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.

defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-apps -array
defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-others -array
killall Dock

Homebrew

Install Homebrew (only curl | sh I’ll tolerate). I 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. If you want to run Homebrew on a multi-user system, read that first.

After the installation, Homebrew tells you to add eval "$(/opt/homebrew/bin/brew shellenv)" to your ~/.zprofile. I personally prefer to use my ~/.zshenv for this, because it’s sourced all the time whereas .zprofile is sourced only for login shells. Concretely this means that by setting the Homebrew environment variables in .zshenv, I can do ssh me@my-machine brew ..., whereas with .zprofile, I can’t.

Also I don’t like running eval "$(brew shellenv)" on every single Zsh boot, I’d rather hardcode the output of brew shellenv in there since it’s not really supposed to change anyway:

bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"
/opt/homebrew/bin/brew shellenv >> ~/.zshenv

Apps

brew install firefox iterm2 maccy cursor
# brew install firefox@developer-edition
# brew install google-chrome

(Maccy is a lovely super light clipboard history manager.)

Then install DaVinci Resolve and Logic Pro and 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.

Screenshots

I don’t like to clutter my desktop with screenshots like it’s the case by default, so I save them to ~/Desktop/Screenshots instead:

mkdir -p ~/Desktop/Screenshots
defaults write com.apple.screencapture location ~/Desktop/Screenshots

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

System settings

# General > AirDrop & Continuity: Allow Handoff between this Mac and your iCloud devices
defaults -currentHost write com.apple.coreservices.useractivityd ActivityAdvertisingAllowed -bool false
defaults -currentHost write com.apple.coreservices.useractivityd ActivityReceivingAllowed -bool false

# General > Date & Time: 24-hour time
defaults write -g AppleICUForce24HourTime -bool true

# Accessibility > Zoom: Use scroll gesture with modifier keys to zoom (Control is default)
defaults write com.apple.universalaccess closeViewScrollWheelToggle -bool true

# Desktop & Dock > Dock: Automatically hide and show the Dock
defaults write com.apple.dock autohide -bool true

# Desktop & Dock > Dock: Don't show suggested and recent apps
defaults write com.apple.dock show-recents -bool false

# Desktop & Dock > Dock: Remove the delay to show and hide the dock
defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-delay -float 0

# Desktop & Dock > Windows: Tiled windows have margins
defaults write com.apple.WindowManager EnableTiledWindowMargins -bool false

# Desktop & Dock > Mission Control: Don't automatically rearrange Spaces
defaults write com.apple.dock mru-spaces -bool false

# Desktop & Dock > Hot Corners (disable all, bottom right is Quick Note by default)
defaults write com.apple.dock wvous-tl-corner -int 0
defaults write com.apple.dock wvous-tr-corner -int 0
defaults write com.apple.dock wvous-bl-corner -int 0
defaults write com.apple.dock wvous-br-corner -int 0

# Menu Bar: Spotlight (untick)
defaults -currentHost write com.apple.Spotlight MenuItemHidden -bool true

# Keyboard: Key repeat rate & Delay until repeat (fastest possible, I like a snappy keyboard)
defaults write -g KeyRepeat -int 2
defaults write -g InitialKeyRepeat -int 15

killall Dock

Note: log out and back in after running this block. Clock, keyboard and tiling settings don’t take effect immediately.

For Dock delay, see full blog post here.

Thanks to this blog post for disabling Continuity Handoff (prevent Dock icons from apps on other devices).

A few things I still need to do manually in system settings:

In Battery > Charging > ⓘ, set Charge Limit to 80%. Leave Optimized Battery Charging on (should be default).
In General > Software Update > Automatic updates > ⓘ, turn on Download new updates when available, but turn off Install macOS updates (I don’t want macOS to reboot without my permission and lose any unsaved state).
In Displays > Night Shift…, set Schedule to Sunset to Sunrise.
In Keyboard > Input Sources > Edit…, disable everything. Also in Text Replacements…, remove the built-in omw abbreviation. I’m always staggered when I forget to do this and omw gets replaced by On my way!, or when I press space twice and it inserts a colon instead while I code in Cursor! 🤦‍♀️
In Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts… > Mission Control, I enable the Switch to Desktop shortcuts for faster desktop switching.

For all Visual Studio Code based editors, I disable ApplePressAndHoldEnabled for… sanity. And I also force new windows to open as tabs (this can also be configured system-wide but I only want it for those apps).

# Visual Studio Code
defaults write com.microsoft.VSCode ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false
defaults write com.microsoft.VSCode AppleWindowTabbingMode -string always

# Cursor
defaults write com.todesktop.230313mzl4w4u92 ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false
defaults write com.todesktop.230313mzl4w4u92 AppleWindowTabbingMode -string always

# Antigravity
defaults write com.google.antigravity ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false
defaults write com.google.antigravity AppleWindowTabbingMode -string always

iTerm2 preferences

# Appearance > General > Theme: Minimal
defaults write com.googlecode.iterm2 TabStyleWithAutomaticOption -int 5

# Appearance > Windows: Hide scrollbars
defaults write com.googlecode.iterm2 HideScrollbar -bool true

# Appearance > Tabs: Preserve window size when tab bar shows or hides
defaults write com.googlecode.iterm2 PreserveWindowSizeWhenTabBarVisibilityChanges -bool true

# Appearance > Panes > Show per-pane title bars: off
defaults write com.googlecode.iterm2 ShowPaneTitles -bool false

# Appearance > Dimming > Dimming amount: 10
defaults write com.googlecode.iterm2 SplitPaneDimmingAmount -float 0.1

# Advanced > Mouse: Scroll wheel sends arrow keys when in alternate screen mode
defaults write com.googlecode.iterm2 AlternateMouseScroll -bool true

# Profiles > General > Initial directory: Reuse previous session's directory
/usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c "Set ':New Bookmarks:0:Custom Directory' Recycle" ~/Library/Preferences/com.googlecode.iterm2.plist

# Profiles > Terminal > Bell: Silence bell
/usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c "Set ':New Bookmarks:0:Silence Bell' true" ~/Library/Preferences/com.googlecode.iterm2.plist

Note: run this when iTerm2 is not running.

Finally (I couldn’t script this), in Profiles > Keys > Key Bindings, 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

Starts with Xcode Command Line Tools to have git.

xcode-select --install

Then I 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 -t ed25519

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 rg imagemagick ffmpeg ncdu htop jq asdf wget tree watch moreutils yt-dlp

ripgrep is my favorite way to search code.
I probably don’t need to introduce ImageMagick and FFmpeg.
ncdu is a cool tool to monitor disk usage.
htop is an awesome process viewer.
jq, legendary CLI to process JSON.
asdf version manager.
wget, tree, watch basic UNIX commands missing from macOS.
moreutils handy utils, mainly for sponge.
yt-dlp CLI video downloader.

Install the asdf plugins I need and whatever version is in my ~/.tool-versions.

asdf plugin add nodejs
# asdf plugin add python
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.

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.

If you read until there, I hope that you learnt something, or that it inspired you to document your base setup in a similar way. Cheers!

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