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Setting up my new Machine

Laurie on April 09, 2021

I started my new job this week, and that meant setting up a new machine. I have a set of tools that I'm comfortable with, so choosing what to downl...
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sylwiavargas profile image
Sylwia Vargas

Thank you for this blog post.
I was setting up mine two weeks ago and wished that I had written this down the last time. I am in the middle of writing a post on this as well! I think I still may publish it and link it to yours 💕

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Laurie

Publish it and don't worry about linking to mine! It's yours after all :)

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Sylwia Vargas

lol what I meant to say is that I want to link it because yours is great too! ✨ I always like to see "read more" section in other blogs.

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Ambriel Goshi

This is really great timing for me as I'm about to have my new Mac arrive. Thank you!

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Andy Parsons

Just had the opportunity to get a new setup last week myself!
Rig is the M1 MacBook Air
I daisy chain a couple of monitors at work, but use just the MacBook at home.
Keyboard & Mouse are the Logitech MX series, vastly prefer the mouse over the Magic Mouse, I’m a sucker for the per app key bindings.
I’ve got the same iTerm setup! I copied over my zsh config as-is, could really do with reviewing it. Open to other people sharing a gist or two!
I run PhpStorm for my IDE, even though I’m mostly writing in TypeScript these days.
I dockerize my local instances, and use traefik to host multiple container setups concurrently.
Happy to talk more if anyone’s interested.

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lepinekong

Magnet ... "Download on the Mac App Store." I'm crying not for Windows :)

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Laurie

Ya, I suspect windows has some window managers though?

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Tyler V. (he/him)

docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/p...

It looks like Magnet might have a bit more flexibility with shortcuts, but otherwise PowerToys should cover your needs :)

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lepinekong • Edited

Ah yeah thanks forgot about this one : in the old days I don't remember that there was a window manager :)

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cblte

Powertools Are nice but sometimes get in the way of other tools like free shot and Nvidia recording.
And they are slow. Especially the Alt+Space that we all love from MacOS.

The other tools are super nice. I heavily rely on the renamed and image resizer. The window manager is ok but not needed. I do have around. 20 windows all the time. No help here from window managers.

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YusufAdel

Thank you for sharing such wonderful tools.💕
and consider adding a new tools provided by websites out there like this one i talked about >> search engine for code over million open source projects.
dev.to/yusufadel/search-engine-tha...

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Dan Wood

Hey Laurie!

I see you're using nvm. It's a great tool, and I used to use it too, but when I went about trying to make my terminal startup time better I found that it was the cause of a lot of start up lag. I found a tool called fnm which does the same thing but is much quicker on startup. You might like to consider switching.

I also switched from oh-my-zsh to a custom setup using antibody which was another big speed up, but that requires a little more of a time investment (not too bad though!).

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Iain Freestone

I love getting a new machine but dread the setting up part it always takes a while to feel "just right" again.

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cubiclesocial

I use portable apps for just about everything except for software that doesn't have a "portable" flavor available. Usually requires hunting for a ZIP/tar.gz file instead of a formal installer.

Portable apps let you "install" an isolated copy of software to a secondary drive. They were originally designed for use on USB thumbdrives, but I put them onto a SSD. The main OS goes on one SSD and my data and portable applications go onto a second SSD. All settings and application data travel with the second drive. Makes reinstalling the OS and switching machines much, much easier, safer, and faster. Doing things like setting the default web browser to point at a portable version can be a tad tricky and require manual intervention (e.g. editing the registry on Windows) because those sort of OS level features tend to make incorrect assumptions about software applications.

Before portable apps, reinstalling the OS took about 2 weeks to achieve normalcy. With portable apps, my last OS reinstall + a few select apps took about 1 day of lost productivity. Nothing goes on the OS drive except temporary data I won't mind losing, the OS (of course), and apps that just have to be installed (e.g. Visual Studio). Everything else goes on the second drive.

Portable apps are self-contained. That means no registry settings, no funky directory layouts, no shell extensions that slow the machine down, no monkeying with system PATHs, etc. My computer runs almost as fast as if it had no software installed on it because, from the OS' perspective, there isn't much of anything installed on it. You didn't hear this from me but [glances sideways] portable apps are also useful for bypassing corporate IT restrictions regarding installed software to use your favorite tools.

Once you use portable apps and understand how incredibly powerful the concept is, you'll be annoyed at any software company (mostly Microsoft) that only releases packaged installer versions of their software.

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cblte

I do either choco install or brew install.
Have scripts for all of them. After installation of OS run. That’s it.
Portable apps are nice but not really needed. Who wants to keep his browser cache anyway. Hahah 😜

The thing with corporate is nice, but if you bypass security you might get fired. And if you are able to run software outside programs dir, you have not one of the smartest admins or security guys.
Group policies for the win!

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Madza

Is 2019 13" Macbook Pro good enough as the main station? Or do you connect it to external monitors and chose it due to portability?

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Laurie

I have a single external monitor. I chose it for portability.

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Kori Roys • Edited

Seeing as you use Indent Rainbow...

Indent Rainbow using rainbow colors

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john

You made a mistake !
VS Code: My IDE of choice. I'll dive into this more in a moment.
Vs code is a text editor , not an IDE ! Many people make this simple mistake since its really powerful :)

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Laurie

No, I haven’t. It can be both depending on how it’s used and the extensions you’ve installed.

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john

Yes you have. It's really not that important, Visual Studio Code is a code editor redefined and optimized for building and debugging modern web and cloud applications. Visual Studio Code is free and available on your favorite platform - Linux, macOS, and Windows. I am pretty sure the would say its an IDE, But it isn't an IDE

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Laurie

This question is closed on stack overflow as an opinion fwiw.

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john

Its not a question. You are the one who doesn't know the diff between IDE's like pycharm and code editors like Vscode

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Kasper Mróz • Edited

Thank you for this blog post Laurie, now I have lots of new tools to play with!

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Eduardo Cookie Lifter

At least you weren't shifting to a Windows machine. Congratulations.

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Ben Selby

Great post. I hadn't seen Peacock or Bracket Pair Colorizer before, these are fantastic. Thanks for sharing.

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Julian Garamendy

+1 for Peacock

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Andrew Baisden

Cool setup.

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Gedalya Krycer

Congratulations on your new job!

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