niels / HardwareSoftware /

Setup

These notes are mostly for myself. Feel free to be inspired.

  • Macbook Pro.
  • Latest macOS or Ubuntu.
  • Change hostname to something sensible.

macOS

  • Homebrew. As nice as macOS is, it’s incomplete without a good brew.
  • AppCleaner has a great Smart Delete feature which ensures no files are left behind when you delete an app.
  • Alfred.

General

  • SyncThing is absolute gold if you want to synchronize anything beyond GitHub.
  • AlDente for better battery management.

Terminal

  • brew install mosh or sudo apt install mosh
  • brew install mtr or sudo apt install mtr
  • Oh my Zsh
  • Auto Suggestions
  • SauceCodePro
  • brew install starship or sudo curl -sS https://starship.rs/install.sh | sh
  • echo 'eval "$(starship init zsh)"' >> ~/.zshrc
  • Solarized Dark (patched)
  • Text: SauceCodePro NF 15
  • Title: disable dimensions, enable command key
  • 120 cols, 40 rows

Coding

  • Laravel
  • Laravel Valet
  • phpmon
  • PhpStorm
    • Source Code Pro, 15, 1.2, Ligatures
    • Laravel-Idea plug-in
  • TablePlus
  • RapidAPI (trying)

Browsing

E-mail & Messaging

  • Apple Mail
  • Element
  • Signal

Tips

mtr

I don’t want to sudo mtr every time I use mtr. This is easily resolved:

brew install mtr
sudo chown root:wheel /opt/homebrew/Cellar/mtr/0.95/sbin/mtr-packet
sudo chmod u+s /opt/homebrew/Cellar/mtr/0.95/sbin/mtr-packet

mosh

Fix mosh by adding export LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8" to .zshrc

Font Smoothing

Current versions of macOS lack the font smoothing setting that older versions provided. Apple has decided that medium-level font smoothing is perfect for everyone.

I disagree and prefer light font smoothing:

defaults -currentHost write -g AppleFontSmoothing -int 1

Then log out and log back in.

(Change to 0 for no smoothing, 2 for medium and 3 for strong).