Mac Studio – Day One

The Mac Studio I ordered the day after launch finally arrived, and it’s been so worth it. It’s been an incredibly fast and responsive desktop, and I love that there’s now an Apple desktop that makes sense if the iMac doesn’t suit your needs (like if you own a Pro Display XDR). I decided to set it up from scratch as a new machine and document all of the things I did on day one to get it configured for my daily workflows, and wanted to write it all down.

Here it all is, in list form.¹

• Installed Launchbar and replaced Spotlight as the default action for ⌘+Space
• Installed Bartender and hid as many of the system menu bar items as possible
• Changed the trackpad settings to my preferences (enabled tap-to click, enabled silent clicking, changed “Swipe Between Pages” to three fingers)
• Enabled full disk access for Terminal
• Enabled iCloud Syncing for iMessage
• Enabled iCloud Drive for Desktop and Documents folders
• Authorized the computer for iTunes Apple Music
• Installed iStat Menus (woah, so many CPU cores!), and fiddled around with the menu bar items some more
• Installed Xcodes, started downloading the latest version of Xcode
• Installed Sleeve and set it up the way I like it (album art pinned to the bottom right corner of the desktop, floating on top of all windows when a track changes)
• Installed Tweetbot and authorized my account
• Installed Reflect and signed in
• Installed Slack and signed in to the appropriate workspaces for this machine
• Installed Nova and configured the command line tool
• Installed Fish shell, set it to the default shell, copied over my fish config from my MacBook Pro and fiddled with Terminal settings
• Installed the Operator font and set it in Terminal and Nova
• Set up my global git author/email information
• Copied over my global git ignore file (be gone .DS_Store!)
• Set up some SSH keys for various things
• Installed Kaleidoscope
• Installed Pastebot
• Installed Things

By this point I felt like the machine was in a pretty good spot, and I’ve definitely needed to tweak and install things since then, but now I have a playbook for the next time I need to set up a new machine from scratch.