📖 Foreword

Have you ever furnished your own house? To be honest, I haven’t, since I always rent. However, I do arrange things in my home. Right now, I’m lying on my sofa and writing this doc. To make it more engaging, I decided to include a picture of my current setup.

I moved to Shanghai less than two months ago, but I’ve already made this place feel familiar. This has allowed me to live happily and somewhat “efficiently” — meaning the room’s arrangement perfectly suits my daily routine.

It’s the same with a computer, especially a work computer. We don’t own our work computers; they belong to the company. But since we spend most of our screen time on them, it’s important to make sure they make us feel happy and efficient.

🔧 Basic Settings

🗂️ Dotfiles

https://github.com/yujiachen-y/dotfiles

Dotfiles can be considered the metadata of your computer. Personally, I use a Brewfile to manage my Mac’s dependencies. As long as an app can be installed via Homebrew, you should add it to your Brewfile. In fact, only a few apps cannot be installed using Homebrew.

I also store my .zshrc and .vimrc files in Dotfiles, so that I don’t need to configure my zsh and vim repeatedly.

Additionally, it’s common practice to store Mac settings in dotfiles. However, you still need to go to System Settings to configure some options that can’t be changed via command lines. BTW, every time I set up a Mac, there are often UI changes and new options in System Preferences. So, the manual setup helps me discover what changes Apple has made lol.

💻 Command Line Config

I use Warp as my terminal emulator. However, I believe the differences between Terminal.app, iTerm2, and Warp are not significant. For me, Warp has 3 main advantages:

  1. Suggestions: I find them better than zsh-autosuggestions.

  2. AI Copilot: In my opinion, all AI copilot products can be replaced by directly asking ChatGPT. (Update: Warp has agent mode too.)

  3. Built-in Shell Prompt: Although it’s not as flexible or functional as p10k, I’m considering reverting to my old .p10k.zsh setup.

Have you ever checked how many lines of code are in your .zshrc file? What do those lines do? I checked mine, and it’s only 15 lines. Typically, a .zshrc file is full of [oh-my-zsh](https://github.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh) configurations, but I only keep a few essential plugins and delete the unnecessary ones. Here are some oh-my-zsh plugins worth mentioning:

  • dotenv: Automatically loads your .env files into environment variables.

  • git: I use commands like gaa (git add --all), gsmsg (git commit --message), and gcn! (git commit --verbose --no-edit --amend) every day.

    • A git tip: please use gcn! to avoid unnecessary commit information in PR.

  • z: Access your most visited directories with very few keystrokes.

As mentioned earlier, I use Warp for its built-in shell prompt, which looks like this:

However, it’s not very flexible and cannot be used in other terminal emulators. If you use Warp’s shell prompt, you might encounter issues in VSCode or other text editors and IDEs. Embedding Warp into VSCode is particularly challenging.

I recommend using p10k as your shell prompt. It’s highly flexible and can be used across different terminal emulators since it’s not tied to any specific one.

I want to mention 2 of my favorite macOS commands here: pbpaste and pbcopy. There are already some useful examples on the manual pages.

⚙️ System Settings

As mentioned earlier, some settings below can be incorporated into your dotfiles.

Implementing these settings will enhance your productivity:

  • Prevent Automatic Sleeping

  • Three Finger Drag

How to select or drag using three fingers on your MacBook track pad

  • Reduce Keyboard Delay Time: Set your keyboard delay time to the shortest possible setting. As coders, we can’t afford to waste time waiting for keyboard delays.

  • Disable Double-Space Period: This feature can be annoying, so it’s best to turn it off.

  • Swap Caps Lock and Command Keys: The keys you use most frequently should be more accessible. Swap the Caps Lock key with the Command key.

  • Disable Press and Hold: This setting can only be disabled via the command line. If you use Vim, you might not need to disable this setting, as pressing and holding a key is not considered good practice in Vim.

defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false

📱 Apps

As I mentioned earlier, all apps listed here should be managed by your Brewfile.

🌟 Raycast

Raycast is an everything store for Mac shortcuts. Here are some shortcuts I often use:

Clipboard History Search Emoji Window Management Music Control Kill Process Search Browser Tabs Reminder

Raycast is super useful with your custom hotkeys.

🌟 AltTab

On a Mac, you can use Command + Tab to switch between apps. However, the built-in app switcher doesn’t allow you to switch between windows within the same application, which can be inconvenient if you need to frequently switch between windows of a single app.

AltTab solves this problem by allowing you to switch between windows across different Mac desktops. This way, you don’t need to use a mouse to switch between windows and desktops.

💾 Backup

There are two types of people:

  • Those who do backups

  • Those who will do backups

Any data you own that you haven’t backed up is data that could be gone at any moment, forever. Here we will cover some good backup basics and the pitfalls of some approaches.

3-2-1 Rule

The 3-2-1 rule is a general recommended strategy for backing up your data. It state that you should have:

  • at least 3 copies of your data

  • 2 copies in different mediums

  • 1 of the copies being offsite

The main idea behind this recommendation is not to put all your eggs in one basket. Having 2 different devices/disks ensures that a single hardware failure doesn’t take away all your data. Similarly, if you store your only backup at home and the house burns down or gets robbed you lose everything, that’s what the offsite copy is there for. Onsite backups give you availability and speed, offsite give you the resiliency should a disaster happen.

From Backups

💭 Reflecting thoughts