🐢 💨 Speedup your MacOS setup with this fine tuning settings

Repository containing all the automation required to setup your MacOS in just a few seconds after a fresh install.

Feel free to explore the repository and get anything you need 😬

• 🚀 Installation
• ✍️ Repository Contents
  • 💻 Shell dotfiles
  • 🐙 Git dotfiles
  • ⚡ Custom commands
  • 📱 Other apps dotfiles
  • 🤖 Shell scripts
    • 🍎 install_macos_apps.sh)
    • 🎛️ adjust_macos_settings.sh
      • 🤔 How to discover new domains and settings
      • 🏃‍♂️ How to automate settings changes
• ℹ️ About
• 🤝 Contributing
  • ☑️ ToDo suggestions
• ⚖️ License

Execute the installer from your terminal in order to avoid even having to manually install git!

bash <(curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/codelytv/dotfiles/master/installer)

If you want to check out all the details involved in a migration from a legacy to a new PC, you can checkout the installation-guide.md

You'll find some self-explanatory files in this repo containing comments on what they do, however, here you have a brief explanation of each on of them.

• .aliases: Common command aliases in order to save some characters 😬
• .bashrc: Main config for Bash shell (loads common .profile)
• .functions: Common shell functions (key difference from .aliases: functions will receive an argument)
• .profile: Common profile between the different shells in order to have all the functionalities in both of them. This file loads .aliases and .functions
• .zshrc: Main config for ZSH shell (loads common .profile)

• .gitconfig: Different settings for the Git CSV system such as including the following file
• .gitignore_global: Ignore rules to apply to every single repository (usefull to do not mess up the project .gitignore file with particularities of your development environment such as the .DS_Store files or your IDE settings)

These are custom commands defined in binary files with little scripts to boost your productivity in your daily basis tasks:

These binaries are installed thanks to adding the binary files directory to the PATH environment variable in the .profile file.

• bin/docker_connect: Lists your running containers and let you select and open an interactive terminal in one of them

This script will install Homebrew. It's a package manager for MacOS, used to install some tools like htop, ffmpeg, git, php… you get the idea, Command Line Tools, programming languages, and so on.

Homebrew also includes Homebrew Cask. It's a package manager useful to install fully functional OS X applications such as google-chrome, spotify, slack…

With these 2 command line tools, we'll be able to install and upgrade our apps without having to leave the terminal. This allow us to automate the whole setup process while starting clean on a new mac, and also to do not have to open all the different apps we've installed in order to update them.

You can check out the install_macos_apps.sh script in order to see the detailed list of the apps it will install, and modify it based on your needs, and the available packages in Homebrew and Homebrew Cask apps.

This script is intended to create the symbolic links to each application settings in order to avoid having to copy and paste the different files on each case.

The script is self documented so you can check out which apps we're dealing with.

There're some apps pending to automate (Work In Progress):

• JetBrains family IDEs (IntelliJ IDEA, PhpStorm, PyCharm, etc.):
  • Custom VM Options
    1. Open the IDE
    2. Go to Help -> Edit Custom VM Options… menu option
    3. Paste the desired JVM properties modifying them based on your environment resources
• [iStat Menus](iStat Menus Settings.ismp)
  1. Modify the license XML key dictionary values specifying your email and serial
  2. Open iStats
  3. Go to File -> Import settings… menu option

This script will modify system preferences. We would recommend you to take a look at the adjust_macos_settings.sh script in order to know the actual list of aspects it will modify. Here you have a brief list of them:

• Dock: Automatically hide the dock with a fewer delay and animation times
• Mission Control: Add Hot corners behaviour and reduce the animation time
• Keyboard: Reduce the delay for repeating a key while pressed, and the time between repetitions of that key
• Mouse: Increase its speed
• Trackpad: Enable tap to click for the current user and for the login screen. (Don't have to press down on the trackpad -- just tap it.)
• Finder: Disable animations + show extensions + set columns as default view + show pathbar + enable spring-loading directories…
• Safari & WebKit: Allow hitting the Backspace key to go to the previous page + show full URL + disable automatic spelling corrections…
• Others: Disable the sound effects on boot + always show scrollbars + disable automatic capitalization + Avoid creating .DS_Store files on network or USB volumes + Maximize windows with Ctrl+alt+Cmd+f…

You can explore your current settings on all the different applications just with a few commands:

• List all config domains you have: defaults domains | tr ',' '\n'
• List the current settings for a specific domain: defaults read com.apple.finder
• Read the type of the setting you want to modify: defaults read-type com.apple.finder NewWindowTargetPath
• Write your new value for the setting: write com.apple.finder NewWindowTargetPath "file:https:///Users/your-username/"

The problem with the previous approach is that it could be a little verbose while showing you aaaaall the different settings an application has. So here's a quick tip on how to optimize the process for these settings which can be adjusted using the UI:

• Save the output of your current settings into a file: defaults read > defaults_before_ui_changes.json
  • Pro tip: If you already know the domain of the settings you're going to modify, optimize the size of the output specifying so: defaults read com.apple.finder > finder_defaults_before_ui_changes.json
• Modify the settings through the UI
• Save the output of the modified settings: defaults read > defaults_after_ui_changes.json
  • Alternatively: defaults read com.apple.finder > finder_defaults_after_ui_changes.json
• Compare the before and after files to see what settings has been modified: diff defaults_before_ui_changes.json defaults_after_ui_changes.json
  • Alternatively: diff finder_defaults_before_ui_changes.json finder_defaults_after_ui_changes.json
  • Pro tip: If the diff doesn't provide you enough context, you can run it with diff -C 10 option to show 10 lines before and after each difference
  • Pro tip 2: If the diff output is a mess for you, you can open it with VS Code with code --diff finder_defaults_before_ui_changes.json finder_defaults_after_ui_changes.json
• Save the modified keys and construct your write commands in order to automate it the next time. For instance: write com.apple.finder NewWindowTargetPath "file:https:///Users/your-username/"

This hopefully helpful repository has been developed by CodelyTV and contributors.

We've used a lot of different sources to get some inspirations on the things to do, here you have a list of them:

• https://hackernoon.com/personal-macos-workspace-setup-adf61869cd79
• https://pawelgrzybek.com/change-macos-user-preferences-via-command-line
• https://defaults-write.com
• https://wilsonmar.github.io/dotfiles/
• https://github.com/alexramirez/mac-setup
• https://github.com/alrra/dotfiles
• https://github.com/boochtek/mac_config/blob/master/trackpad.sh
• https://github.com/dstroot/.osx
• https://github.com/mathiasbynens/dotfiles/blob/master/.macos
• https://github.com/MoOx/setup
• https://github.com/pawelgrzybek/dotfiles/blob/master/setup-macos.sh
• https://github.com/rgomezcasas/dotfiles
• https://github.com/sindresorhus/quick-look-plugins

It would be awesome to learn from your experience automating the setup of your environment.

So please, feel free to send us your tips and tricks via Twitter (@CodelyTV), or consider opening an issue before starting to work on a Pull Request 🙂

• Move the things already specified in the installation-guide.md to automations. How to procedure:
  • Search for the application plist files. In this repo there're a lot of supported applications which specify the config paths.
  • Move the plist files to this repo in case of not containing sensitive data
  • Create the symlink between the application plist file and this repo
  • Specify the symlink in the conf.macos.yaml file mapping

The MIT License (MIT). Please see License for more information.