I recently started working on mac OS for my work. I have to agree that shifting from Linux to MacOS was a real pain. But considering most of the tools that I write are for linux I had to configure a proper development environment on my macbook.
Getting started with the Macbook was a little difficult for me but then i did a few things to make my life simpler on Mac. Writing them down so if you happen to face something similar someday, this might bail you out .
First up was this link : https://github.com/nicolashery/mac-dev-setup It was extremely useful in terms of getting information of what changes I might have to do. I went through the whole article and kind of cherrypicked what worked best for me.
Before you do anything on your macbook do the 4 things mentioned below, trust me it’s gold. It was taken from mac-dev-setup article.
In Apple Icon > System Preferences:
- Trackpad > Tap to click
- Keyboard > Key Repeat > Fast (all the way to the right)
- Keyboard > Delay Until Repeat > Short (all the way to the right)
- Dock > Automatically hide and show the Dock
First thing was to make brew work. For those shifting to from linux to mac – brew is something similar to apt-get in Debian. It lets you easily install applications form the terminal. Fix permission issues related to brew https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16432071/how-to-fix-homebrew-permissions
Installed iTerm2 because it’s much better than the pre installed terminal
I love rails so I wanted make sure that it had the perfect environment so I used this link for that this: https://www.moncefbelyamani.com/how-to-install-xcode-homebrew-git-rvm-ruby-on-mac/
Oh My Zsh : Thankfully it is available for mac too. The inbuilt shell environment of mac sucks – like literally. So I followed up this link to setup a nice shell environment for myself. http://sourabhbajaj.com/mac-setup/iTerm/zsh.html
Next up was docker and VirtualBox Installation. The installation of docker and Virtualbox was fairly simple on Mac. Just go to their official website and download the .dmg file. Install them just like you install any other mac application.
UPDATE:
So after being annoyed with the key bindings in MAC I almost decided to shift to Dell Latitude but then I came across this tool: https://pqrs.org/osx/karabiner/ , This allowed me to change the Fn key behaviour to that of Ctrl key. That has helped me a lot. Now next up I am trying to map copy paste to Ctrl + C and Ctrl +V, once that works out I think I will be fine with Mac.