I’ve just migrated to a new Macbook Pro as my primary work machine. As part of setting it up, I installed the following:
- Caffeine to prevent it from going to sleep when I don’t want it to go to sleep
- BetterTouchTool so that I can middle-click (three finger tap) to close tabs and paste in the terminal
- f.lux to reduce eye-strain at night
- Firefox as my web browser
- Chrome so that I can run Authy for two-factor authentication on the desktop
- Ditto for running Google Hangouts
- iTerm2 as a superior, multi-pane terminal
- Atom because it’s handy to have a text editor
- Homebrew as an excellent package manager for installing Unix services and tools
- Divvy for resizing windows to fractions of the screen
Settings
- System Preferences > Trackpad > Tap to Click, so that I can click without mashing the trackpad
- System Preferences > Accessibility > Cursor Size > Larger, so that the cursor is easy to find
- System Preferences > Accessibility > “Reduce transparency” to get a solid menu bar
- System Preferences > Sound > “Show volume in menu bar”, so that I can quickly adjust sound (and configure devices by option-clicking the icon)
Option-clicking the volume icon - Keychain Access > Preferences > “Show keychain status in menu bar”, so that I can quickly lock my laptop
Quickly lock the screen
Leo on Tech 