How I set up my new MacBook Pro 14"

People used to criticize Apple for not really being that innovative anymore. I mean, who can tell me the difference between iPhone 13 and 14 or 14 and 15? And a similar rut was happening with MacBooks. In fact, it seemed, Apple was making things worse by useful ports and adding gimmicks like Touch Bar.

Apple Silicon is a different story though. These new MacBooks with the M line processors have astounding performance and battery life. Plus, Apple seems to have admitted removing MagSafe and HDMI port were ridiculous and brought those back.

I'm a bit late to the party I know, but here I am. I finally traded in my trusty 2020 Intel MacBook Pro and bought a MacBook Pro 14" with the M2 Pro processor instead.

Let's Change the Defaults

Trackpad

I love Apple's trackpads. They are so versatile and responsive. Out of the box, certain gestures are disabled. So I go ahead and change them:

And a hidden gem: the three finger drag. Instead of tapping and holding to move objects, you can use 3 fingers at the same time to select & move something.

This one is buried in Accessibility > Pointer Control > Trackpad Options.

Spotlight

I make sure to exclude my main "Code" folder (where I store web projects) from Spotlight. I don't want Spotlight wasting any battery juice indexing gigantic node_modules folders. I don't anticipate ever wanting to search them!

Go to "Siri & Spotlight > "Spotlight Privacy" (at the very bottom)

Done!

Making of a Dev Workstation

Here are the things that I install on a brand new workstation.

Terminal

• iTerm2

• Oh My ZSH

• Xcode Software Tools

• Brew

• Laravel stuff:

  • PHP & Composer

  • Valet

  • MySQL

IDE

• VS Code

  • CMD + P -> "Install 'code' in command PATH" You can now fire up VS Code from your terminal.

  • Turn on settings sync in your previous machine. This way, all of your settings and extensions will be automatically ported.

• PhpStorm

Dev Tools

• Docker

• TablePlus

  • You can export all your connections and then re-import them on your new machine.

• Paw (now called RapidApi)

• TunnelBlick (oVPN client)

Productivity

• Spark (I prefer this over Mac's default mail client)

• Slack

• Asana

Misc.

• Rectangle

  • This gives you handy shortcuts for window management. Use your keyboard to maximise windows, or stretch them to fit the left or right 50% of your screen.

• KeeWeb

  • I use this to store encrypted information, such as API keys, private keys, copies of my passport, etc. It will save everything in a single encrypted file, which can be stored on iCloud, Google Drive, etc.