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Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

lapwinglabs.com

101–110 of 267 posts

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#101
post #16

i personally think Boxen is the easiest way to setup a brand new machine. it can also easily be distributed and updated the only downside is that it requires Xcode + command line tools. https://boxen.github.com/

Boxen always seemed pretty heavy-handed to me for a single developer as opposed to an IT team managing workstations for a team of developers. Is this not the case? A dotfiles repository always seemed like enough to me.

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#102
post #3

Anybody have any suggestions on how to do this on a Windows PC? I like Ninite[1] a lot but I would prefer something more customizable. [1]: https://ninite.com/

For dotfiles deploying I wrote my own script that works on both *nix and windows:

https://github.com/berdario/dotfiles/blob/master/deploy.py

On windows I'm forced to do some nasty tricks (i.e.: reloading the script with admin user, and if any exception happens I output the stacktrace on a tkinter textarea, since the terminal is not available anymore)

(to actually install software, I use chocolatey, but it's really hit and miss...)

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#103

> allowing you to setup a new Mac in a matter of hours, not days Wow, it takes days for people to set up their Macs? I would be interested in something that would make this take minutes, not hours. It's already pretty easy to setup a Mac for development in a few hours.

I recently received a new MBPr from a work laptop and I would totally agree it takes days to setup from scratch.

* It takes hours to download Xcode

* It takes hours to download OSX Updates

* Setting up Homebrew, Zsh, Vim, Browsers, GitHub, Dropbox, Mail, Rbenv, Rubies, Cloning work repos

* Getting those other smaller things you were tinkering with, Z, Go

Everyones dev setup is different. So I'd agree it takes days to get set up.

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#104
post #99
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the opaque pre-compiled blob that installs other pre-compiled blobs is somehow better than a collection of scripts that lets you build from source? I don't think so... As an update is something that is done occasionally and in the background "slow" is not exactly a reason to change.

actually the "src" in pkgsrc means that you have the choice of using binary packages (pkg) or building from source. The best of both worlds! Give it a try, you might like it (because it rocks!)

Homebrew does both as well for popular packages; 'bottles' are binary packages, with the option (--build-from-source) to build it yourself.

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#105

This "cool hacker settings for your Mac" script turns off your laptop's power saving features (sleep, display dimming, hibernation even though sleep was off(?)), removes at least three kinds of backups for data loss (MobileTimeMachine, Resume, hibernation file), and changes AppKit settings in a way your customers will never be using (by turning off Automatic Termination, which is pretty harmless). Please don't run sc…

Just like PC's, Macs have entered the world of, what I call, "car guys." Car guys are always fiddling with things for a tiny performance or perceived security boosts without really thinking things through. In the Windows world you'll hear them tell you how you must disable the UAC, must install registry 'cleaners', must use $av_vendor_x because $av_vendor_y sucks, fiddle with some obscure registry change, use drivers…

Yeah, people still recommend automatic task killers for Android and it has never been useful, just harmful on speed and battery life.

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#106
post #42

I do not wants to flame, but is there a reason people dislike Macports so much. I tried Homebrew when it was 1-2 years old, but stuck with ports bc it was so stable, compiles from source, and I never heard a serious problem. I heard the opposite complaint on the net, but almost all Macports hate was from many years before. I am the only one who chose not to rely on Homebrew!?

I am absolutely no kind of programmer but I prefer to compile from source on my own, when I can. For example, the first thing I did yesterday after clean installing Yosemite Beta 4 was to compile Scrypt.

Can I perhaps ask why? Is it a trust issue that you don't like accepting a prebuilt binary from some random on the internet?

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#107
post #46

Do any of you use Dock replacements? I'm faster with the Windows-style taskbar and uBar ( http://brawersoftware.com/products/ubar ) was the sponsor of the last episode of John Gruber's podcast.

I use a auto-hidden dock which has nothing in it. It is populated by running programs and is not used as a launcher.

For launching I use a tool like Quicksilver or Alfred of Spotlight.

This way I get more screen realestate, I see no point staring at a dock icons all the time.

My dock resembles Command-Tab.

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#109
post #46

Do any of you use Dock replacements? I'm faster with the Windows-style taskbar and uBar ( http://brawersoftware.com/products/ubar ) was the sponsor of the last episode of John Gruber's podcast.

Years ago I thought DragThing (http://www.dragthing.com/) was the coolest thing around. I went around making all sorts of clicky things to litter my desktop with. It's apparently still developed though I don't think I've seen any screenshots of it from this decade, so it might be wishful thinking that it would've kept up with OS X UI styling. uBar looks interesting though and it's nice to see people working on this kind of tool.

Re: Hacker's Guide to Setting Up Your Mac

#110
post #46

Do any of you use Dock replacements? I'm faster with the Windows-style taskbar and uBar ( http://brawersoftware.com/products/ubar ) was the sponsor of the last episode of John Gruber's podcast.

Thanks for linking to this, I just picked up a copy. I switched to a MBP retina two months ago, and have made an effort to keep it fairly vanilla and figure out how to do things in OS X... without diving into OSXvsWIN, let's just say I'm super glad to have found this add on. It'd be even better if it updated to mimic Windows 8's taskbar (popup previews of windows, mostly), but I'll take what I can get for now. Easily worth the $20 it normally sells for to me, but I could only pay the $10 sale price. Sold!

On one hand, I feel so much more aware of what's currently running on my computer, but on the other hand, I feel a bit like the kid I mocked in the 2000s who would move his Windows task bar to the top of his screen because he missed using his Mac.

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