General settings on Mac

Here are some tips on setting up a Mac for developers. (Avaliable for 10.13.3)

System settings

Reduce graphic effects

Go to System Preferences – Accessibility – Display, choose:

  • “Reduce motion”
  • “Reduce transparency”.

Go to System Preferences – Mission Control, turn dashoboard to “off”.

Enable three fingers drag and four fingers swipe

Go to System Preferences – Trackpad – Point & Click, enable “Tap to click”.
Go to System Preferences – Trackpad – More Gestures – Mission Control, enable “Swipe up with four fingers”.

Go to System Preferences – Accessibility – Mouse & Trackpad – Trackpad Options, enable “dragging with three fingers”

Improve the dock showup speed

Open terminal and type in:

defaults write com.apple.dock autohide-delay -int 0

Change default layout of launchpad display

For example, you can customize the rows and columns of the launchpad springboard, say, into 9 columns and 7 rows 

defaults write com.apple.dock springboard-columns -int 9
defaults write com.apple.dock springboard-rows -int 7
defaults write com.apple.dock ResetLaunchPad -bool TRUE; killall Dock

Or reset it to default columns and rows

defaults delete com.apple.dock springboard-rows
defaults delete com.apple.dock springboard-columns
defaults write com.apple.dock ResetLaunchPad -bool TRUE;killall Dock

Development tools

Install brew

/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

Using zsh shell

# Install
curl -L https://raw.github.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/master/tools/install.sh | sh
# Create config file(Environment variables will be updated in .zshrc)
cp ~/.oh-my-zsh/templates/zshrc.zsh-template ~/.zshrc
# Using zsh
chsh -s /bin/zsh

Enable vim syntax

vim ~/.vimrc
## appending following two lines
syntax on
set nu!