Table of Contents
Another installation of my personal notes for setting up a new (or cleanly installed) MacOS computer. The process changes just a bit with each new OS version. This time I will try really hard to reproduce the steps in order.
I definitely carry some things over from my old computer, but it's pretty minimal. Here's the command to gather up what I need to transfer.
tar -cf dotfiles.tar .Xmodmap .gitconfig .gnupg .pypirc .ssh .aws .saml2aws
It's also handy to know all of the projects I'm working on:
cd ~/src for dname in */.git; do git -C $(dirname $dname) remote -v; done > remotes.txt
Note that none of these steps require an Apple ID - I held off on signing in until the very end just to see if it was possible.
system settings
turn off spelling autocorrect
System Preferences --> Keyboard --> Text tab --> unselect "Correct spelling automatically" and others
unmap Control + left,right
I use Control plus the left and right arrow keys to move between windows in emacs and tmux.
System Preferences --> Keyboard --> Shortcuts --> uncheck mission control: move left/right a space
Turn on FileVault
System Preferences --> Security & privacy --> FileVault
I used a recovery key option rather than iCloud for my work machine, iCloud for personal
Developer tools
Pretty much the first thing that needs to happen. This can be done from the command line:
xcode-select --install
homebrew
Homebrew no longer requires user-ownership of /usr/local, so things are pretty easy now:
/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)" brew doctor
homebrew API token
Apparently lots of requests to GutHub via homebrew can hit a rate limit. There's a higher limit if you create an API token. See https://gist.github.com/christopheranderton/8644743
Here's the url for the token creation dialog:
https://github.com/settings/tokens/new?scopes=&description=Homebrew
Make sure that all 'scopes' are unchecked. Once you generate the token, add to your shell profile:
export HOMEBREW_GITHUB_API_TOKEN=token_here
CLI applications
Many packages are installed later with additional elaboration or in as dependencies for other applications; here are some more or less standalone packages that I routinely install.
brew install git && \ brew install wget && \ brew install autojump && \ brew install gcc && \ brew install graphviz && \ brew install latex2rtf && \ brew install pandoc && \ brew install tmux && \ brew install tree && \ brew install fd && \ brew install xsv
desktop applications
Homebrew installs desktop apps too!
brew cask install dropbox brew cask install sizeup brew cask install dash brew cask install google-chrome brew cask install java brew cask install mactex brew cask install texmaker brew cask install firefox brew cask install docker
Some of the above (eg, sizeup, dropbox, dash) require licenses and credentials that must be installed interactively.
packages in 3rd party taps
saml2aws
brew tap versent/homebrew-taps brew install saml2aws
iTerm2
The homebrew version gave an error on launch with a message about not being supported on Catalina, and rather than fight with it, I just downloaded an installer from the project site.
Update a few settings.
Preferences –> Profiles –> Keys and do these things:
- select "Left/right option key acts as": +Esc
- + –> Keyboard shortcut "OPT+<left arrow>": Send Escape sequence "b"
- + –> Keyboard shortcut "OPT+<right arrow>": Send Escape sequence "f"
Default appearance:
- Preferences –> Profiles –> Colors –> Color Presets –> Light Background
- Preferences –> Profiles –> Text –> Change Font –> 14 point
python
My version of Catalina provided Python 2.7.16 and 3.7.3, so let's use homebrew to get recent version of python3.
I try to limit packages installed to the system to utilities that are very frequently used outside of the context of a virtualenv.
See https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/blob/master/share/doc/homebrew/Homebrew-and-Python.md
dependencies
Run brew info python for required and optional dependencies
for pkg in sphinx-doc pkg-config readline sqlite gdbm berkeley-db@4 tcl-tk xz; do brew install $pkg; done
Note that "python" corresponds to the python3 homebrew recipe.
brew install python /usr/local/bin/pip3 install -U pip wheel
A limited selection of packages - better to use virtualenvs!
pip3 install --user ansible
emacs
Install latest emacs binary from http://emacsformacosx.com/
Emacs needs a few homebrew packages
brew install libressl brew install aspell brew install gpg
Check out my .emacs.d and run setup scripts.
cd ~ git clone git@github.com:nhoffman/emacs-config.git .emacs.d
Run setup scripts:
cd ~/.emacs.d
zsh
Install zsh with Homebrew
brew install zsh
Change shell to zsh
sudo -s echo /usr/local/bin/zsh >> /etc/shells exit chsh -s /usr/local/bin/zsh $USER
Install my dotfiles (relevant only to me)
cd ~ git clone git@bitbucket.org:nhoffman/dotfiles.git ~/dotfiles/mac/install.py
R
I had to give up on installing R with homebrew because it seemed to result in an interpreter that always wanted to install packages from source. So I used the binary from https://cran.r-project.org/bin/macosx/
Some packages that I know I'll need:
R --slave << EOF
packages <- c("lattice", "RSQLite", "latticeExtra", "argparse", "data.table", "tidyverse")
install.packages(packages, repos="http://cran.fhcrc.org/", dependencies=TRUE, clean=TRUE, Ncpus=4)
EOF
Wow, this takes a long time!
Also:
brew cask install rstudio
postgresql
brew cask install postgres
This installs multiple versions of postgres. You'll need to add the path to the CLI for the version you want to use to your PATH, eg:
export PATH=/Applications/Postgres.app/Contents/Versions/9.6/bin:$PATH
X11
install Xquartz
brew install caskroom/cask/xquartz
X11 key bindings so that the option key is used for Meta. Not so relevant any more now that I rarely use emacs via X11 for remote sessions.
cat > ~/.Xmodmap <<EOF clear Mod1 clear Mod2 keycode 63 = Mode_switch keycode 66 = Meta_L add Mod1 = Meta_L add Mod2 = Mode_switch EOF