I recently purchased one of Apple’s new M1 chip MacBook Airs, and I will say I have been nothing short of impressed.

I moved from a ThinkPad T480 I ran Linux on - which also served me incredibly well - but wow, the screen alone is leaps and bounds ahead.

This post details my setup steps.

Mac Setup

Mac Preferences

Change touchpad to tap to click
Finder view status bar and path bar
Configure Apple ID and TouchID
Set up 1Pass
Login to websites/apps
Set up email accounts
Install homebrew
- sudo chown -R /usr/local/* to fix permissions
Arrange folders by default by kind
- In Finder select ‘Show View Options’ then sort by kind or any other options
- Tick use as defaults
- Delete all .DS_Store files, they contain the icon layouts
- sudo find / -name .DS_Store -delete; killall Finder
Set safari homepage to Start Page
Set screenshot directory: defaults write com.apple.screencapture location ~/Photos/Screenshots
As I store a lot of my data with iCloud, often I need to delete the .icloud files when I have moved them to local storage
- This also means adding .*.*.icloud to the .gitignore file of any repos I clone from iCloud to local storage

Unarchiver
Wipr (ad-blocker)
Magnet
1Pass
- Download from website so Betas can be used
- Preferences > Updates > Beta
Spotify
MS Office & Teams
MPV
Transmission
Chrome
iTerm
VSCode
- vim keybindings
- latex-workshop
- python extension
MacTeX
Mullvad
Xcode
Flutter
NodeJS

VSCode terminal
- Command + shift + p
- Type shell ‘>shell’
- Select ‘Install code in PATH’
- Disable Apple press and hold for VSCode
  - ‘defaults write com.microsoft.VSCode ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false’
  - ‘defaults write com.microsoft.VSCodeInsiders ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false’
Cloud development
- LaTeX does not like the ~ in iCloud Drive paths
- Create a symbolic link in Documents folder pointing to desired folder in iCloud Drive
  - While in correct foler location ‘ln -s ~/Library/Mobile\ Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/Documents/CVs/LaTeX’