Learn how to setup your MacBook faster with Brewfiles and macOS defaults.

Heart

Francesco Ciulla

Big Tech

Community Picks is a section on daily.dev where our community members share the most interesting and valuable content they've discovered online. From insightful articles to handy tools, every post is a gem curated by our dedicated coomunity. To contribute to Community Picks, you need to have at least 250 reputation points, ensuring that only active and trusted members can share their finds.

Community Picks

Setting up a new MacBook can be tedious. Learn how to streamline the process using Brewfiles to install apps, command line utilities, and fonts in bulk, and macOS defaults to customize system settings. Enhance terminal productivity with favorite Zsh plugins and aliases.

How I Setup New MacBooks

It’s an interesting idea. I don’t switch computers enough times to justify it. But it is pretty useful when we have to set up 10+ computers for clients for remote kits.
I used Jeff Geerling’s Ansible playbook for some family computers.

I think you may be doing too much, migration assistant works wonders for moving everything across and then a simple POSIX shell script solves the rest. I wrote about the <a href="https://maclong.netlify.app/articles/how-i-setup-a-new-mac" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">process here</a>.

I used to do stuff like this, but now I enjoy just setting it up from scratch since it leaves a lot of the clutter I no longer use behind :)

using this zsh plugin <a href="%5Burl%5D(https://github.com/MichaelAquilina/zsh-you-should-use)" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">you-should-use</a> that suggest existing alias for commands you just typed and found that there are already lots of existing aliases for everyday commands like git, npm, etc…
so maybe you dont have to manually add those aliases