New MacBook Setup

I need to setup new machine from time to time, and I always forget all the things that need to be set up. So, here it goes.

Hardware

Make sure to buy MacBook with the ISO International English (kansainvälinen englanti):

It has big “Enter” key when compared to ANSI
Don’t go for British English: it has GBP character in place of #
At least 36 GB of RAM and 1 TB of disk space, because of VM

During installation

Make sure to enable encryption: turn on FileVault during the installation, or afterwards. Also,

Enable Location services, but only share the location with Home, Maps and Wallet.
Disable Siri

Initial setup

Then, make sure both the OS and the apps are up-to-date; turn on everything in Settings / General/ Software Update / Automatic Updates.

System Settings:

Mouse: turn off Natural scrolling
Trackpad:
- Scroll & Zoom / Natural scrolling: turn off
- Tap to click
- Tracking speed: 4th fastest
Accessibility / Pointer Control / Trackpad Options / Dragging style: Three-finger Drag
Keyboard
- Keyboard Shortcuts / Function keys / Enable “Use F1, F2, etc”
- Text input / Edit… / All Input Sources:
  - Disable “Correct spelling automatically”, “Capitalize words automatically”, “Show inline predictive text” and “Add period with double-space”
Control Center
- Sound: always show in Menu Bar
- Battery: Show Percentage
- Spotlight: Don’t Show
Enable Desktop & Document folder syncing over iCloud
Desktop & Dock:
- “Dock” / Minimize windows using: “Scale effect”
- “Dock” / “Position on screen”: “Left”
- “Desktop & Stage Manager” / Click wallpaper to reveal desktop: set to “Only in Stage Manager”
- Hot Corners…: disable all hot corners

Finder / Settings:

General: Show “Hard disks”
- Drag’n’drop the “Macintosh HD” from desktop to Finder favourites

Install from the App Store:

Parallels (+activate)
- Note that when installing Parallels from App Store (so-called Parallels Desktop App Store version), it’s not possible to install guest MacOS. But I don’t really mind.
- Alternative download of Parallels Desktop 18 for Mac.
Commander One
UTM
Libre Office
Slack

Install Firefox from the Firefox download page.

Commander One

Go into its settings > Hotkeys:

“Go to enclosing folder” : Backspace
“Compress file with options”: ⌘P
“Extract file”: ⌘U
“Equalize Panels”: ⌘=
“Go to Home”: ` (back tick)
“Change drive in left panel”: ⌘F1
“Change drive in right panel”: ⌘F2
“Search”: ⇧⌘F

Then, enable “Show all files”.

Parallels

In Parallels Desktop Settings:

Shortcuts
- macOS System Shortcuts / Send macOS system shortcuts: Always.
  - This not only enables Alt+Tab to work properly in your VM, but also enables Ctrl+Left/Right arrow to properly skip words in IDEA.
- To stop Parallels interfering with IDEA shortcuts, go to Application Shortcuts and disable shortcuts for:
  - Preferences
  - Toggle Coherence
  - Toggle Full Screen
  - Toggle Modality
Devices: set to ‘Connect it to my Mac’ to stop interfering with common work

Additional keyboard shortcuts I found for Parallels but work for UTM too:

Home = Fn+ArrowLeft
End = Fn+ArrowRight
PgUp = Fn+ArrowUp
PgDown = Fn+ArrowDown
Delete = Fn+Backspace
Insert - couldn’t find any Fn combination for this. Press I to insert in vim.

Even better: get the Magic keyboard with Numeric Keypad; don’t forget the “International English ISO” layout.

To make sure that Alt+Insert works with IDEA: go to Parallels Desktop Preferences / Shortcuts / Virtual machines, select any linux box to edit the “Linux profile” and add the following mapping:

Cmd+Backspace -> Win+Insert (remember that we swapped Win with Alt in Gnome).

Linux VM settings

Options
- Sharing: disable everything except “Share custom Mac folders”. Then Manage Folders and select one specific folder to share.
Hardware
- CPU & Memory: Advanced and check “Adaptive Hypervisor”
- Mouse & Keyboard: Don’t optimize for games
- Shared printers: turn off
- Sound & Camera: disable everything

Fixing Keyboard Backtick/Tilde

The ISO English International keyboard has one huge disadvantage: the tilde/backtick key is located above “Option” ⌥ instead of below “Esc”. We’ll fix that using Ukelele:

Install Ukelele and run it
File / New from current input, and make sure the “English / ABC” keyboard is selected. This creates a keyboard bundle which may host multiple keyboards, but we’ll only need one. The “ABC Copy” keyboard name is OK.
Double-click on the +- key below ESC, and type in the backtick character.
Press shift, then double-click on the +- key below ESC, and type in the tilde character.
Save the bundle.
Using Finder, copy the bundle to /Library/Keyboard Layouts

Reboot, and add the “ABC Copy” keyboard.

Uninstall Ukelele.

Fixing Home/End/PgUp/PgDn keys

Create the file ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict with the following content:

{
    // Option+uparrow moves 30 lines up, emulating pgup
    "~\UF700"  = (moveUp:, moveUp:, moveUp:, moveUp:, moveUp:, moveUp:, moveUp:, moveUp:, moveUp:, moveUp:, moveUp:, moveUp:, moveUp:, moveUp:, moveUp:, moveUp:, moveUp:, moveUp:, moveUp:, moveUp:, moveUp:, moveUp:, moveUp:, moveUp:, moveUp:, moveUp:, moveUp:, moveUp:, moveUp:, moveUp:);
    // Option+downarrow moves 30 lines down, emulating pgdown
    "~\UF701"  = (moveDown:,moveDown:,moveDown:,moveDown:,moveDown:,moveDown:,moveDown:,moveDown:,moveDown:,moveDown:,moveDown:,moveDown:,moveDown:,moveDown:,moveDown:,moveDown:,moveDown:,moveDown:,moveDown:,moveDown:,moveDown:,moveDown:,moveDown:,moveDown:,moveDown:,moveDown:,moveDown:,moveDown:,moveDown:); // page down - move down 30 lines.
    // The same, but with selection
    "~$\UF700"  = (moveUpAndModifySelection:,moveUpAndModifySelection:,moveUpAndModifySelection:,moveUpAndModifySelection:,moveUpAndModifySelection:,moveUpAndModifySelection:,moveUpAndModifySelection:,moveUpAndModifySelection:,moveUpAndModifySelection:,moveUpAndModifySelection:,moveUpAndModifySelection:,moveUpAndModifySelection:,moveUpAndModifySelection:,moveUpAndModifySelection:,moveUpAndModifySelection:,moveUpAndModifySelection:,moveUpAndModifySelection:,moveUpAndModifySelection:,moveUpAndModifySelection:,moveUpAndModifySelection:,moveUpAndModifySelection:,moveUpAndModifySelection:,moveUpAndModifySelection:,moveUpAndModifySelection:,moveUpAndModifySelection:,moveUpAndModifySelection:,moveUpAndModifySelection:,moveUpAndModifySelection:,moveUpAndModifySelection:,moveUpAndModifySelection:);
    "~$\UF701"  = (moveDownAndModifySelection:,moveDownAndModifySelection:,moveDownAndModifySelection:,moveDownAndModifySelection:,moveDownAndModifySelection:,moveDownAndModifySelection:,moveDownAndModifySelection:,moveDownAndModifySelection:,moveDownAndModifySelection:,moveDownAndModifySelection:,moveDownAndModifySelection:,moveDownAndModifySelection:,moveDownAndModifySelection:,moveDownAndModifySelection:,moveDownAndModifySelection:,moveDownAndModifySelection:,moveDownAndModifySelection:,moveDownAndModifySelection:,moveDownAndModifySelection:,moveDownAndModifySelection:,moveDownAndModifySelection:,moveDownAndModifySelection:,moveDownAndModifySelection:,moveDownAndModifySelection:,moveDownAndModifySelection:,moveDownAndModifySelection:,moveDownAndModifySelection:,moveDownAndModifySelection:,moveDownAndModifySelection:,moveDownAndModifySelection:);
}

You’ll need to restart individual apps for them to pick up the new configuration.

Links:

List of keyboard key codes: osx keybinding
Supported commands
Tips for DefaultKeyBinding.dict

Activity Monitor

View / Dock Icon / Show CPU Usage (need to re-check this after reboot)
Press ⌘3 to show CPU history window, ⌘4 to show GPU history
Switch to “Memory” tab, to see the memory pressure chart.

Global Keyboard Shortcuts

Open “Settings”, “Keyboard”, “Keyboard Shortcuts”:

“App Shortcuts” and add:
- “Show Help menu” set to ⌥⌘/ (can’t use ⇧⌘/ since some apps launch help with ⌘?)
- “Zoom” set to ⌘M (aka Maximize). This kills Minimise but I’m not using that one anyways.
Modifier Keys
- Caps Lock as ^ Control

Safari

General
- Safari opens with: All windows from last session
- New window open with: Empty page
- New tabs open with: Empty page
- Homepage: blank
Tabs:
- Always show website titles in tabs
Search:
- Search engine: DuckDuckGo
Advanced
- Enable “Show full website address”
- Default encoding: UTF-8
- Enable “Show features for web developers”

If you want to go all crazy and completely unify Linux+Mac shorcuts, see Unifying Mac+Linux keyboard, or making Mac work like Linux.

Written on March 14, 2024

Martin Vysny