How I Set Up My 2020 Macbook Pro 16

Key Takeaways

if i have an active window selected i can do option shift and i can do h j k l and this will actually let me snap my window to different areas now this is about the extent of the behavior i get i don't get windows stacking like in dwm i'd get any sort of fancy [Music] what's going on everyone welcome back to the channel my name is brian jenks if you're new here on this channel we talk a lot about code programming tech and all things related to programming in tech and today we're going to talk about my new macbook pro i just got a macbook pro 16-inch 2020 version and i am now transferring everything from my arch linux thinkpad all the way over to this machine and certain things do not cross over saying some behavior i'm trying to emulate so let's see how i did all these things so with this macbook i still wanted to try and maintain some of the things i've become used to in my arch linux build certain things like grovebox theme everywhere dark themes in general application launching with just the keyboard such as with d menu and certain other functionality i also wanted to maintain a lot of my workflow in the command line and i've managed to do that on this system although instead of using d menu i'm using alfred and spotlight and the alfred app for using it's kind of like spotlight where it launches applications does web searches or other little things i'm finding some issues with it that i'll get a little bit more into later that it's really not even worth my time to do anything other than spotlight and alfred is a free version but you know you can pay for upgraded versions and there's some really cool stuff you can do with it but for a lot of my use cases i don't really need that much firepower we'll get into that in a little bit one of the most important things i wanted to maintain from my transition from linux to mac during this time was tiling window management i've used the snapping windows in microsoft windows and i didn't like the default behavior that's in mac i think there's a couple small little things you can do with like full screen and maybe a little bit of window expansion but as for like tiling window management behavior if there is any defaults they're not great so one thing i did was i did pay for a single app called magnet it's a 2.299 application that will let you change the hotkeys and emulate when tiling window management behavior it's not as extensible and not as many options and customization options as something like i3 or dwm but at least while on the system i have something that is good enough to get by something important to know is that i recognize that mac and apple are a walled garden and certain things are just not going to be present or at least you have to really hack this machine apart to get it implemented and that's not something i want to do i want to maintain you know my warranty and not ruin the computer itself so i don't expect to have the full range of functionality i had on linux that's why linux is so great it's so very open you can do whatever you want but while i'm on this system using it for the purposes that i use it for i still wanted to have some semblance of those actions those applications that workflow that i had become accustomed to so immediately after unboxing and booting up this machine mac os catalina i immediately put it into dark mode i will always put it into dark mode i'll put everything into dark mode because i absolutely cannot stand light themed anything on this machine i am currently running i term two and on that terminal i am using grav box colors you can see i have my default prompt back and i do have all the colors that i had on my old system so currently i do have my dock hidden but sometimes i do have it up but why do i keep my dock to the left some people like i had somebody tell me you know that looks a little bit like gnome on linux and that that whole look and feel and i have an ubuntu machine so i knew what they were talking about that isn't why i did this i put my dock and when i'm on windows i do the exact same thing with the taskbar i always put it on the left for a very practical reason when you have monitors or your laptop screens you always have more horizontal than vertical space so putting it at the bottom doesn't make sense because now you've even further limited the limited amount of vertical space that you already had whereas you have all this horizontal space that you can fill up with just a single bar and if you want like i did you can even have it hidden when you don't need it so in that case you actually save vertical screen space and that's really the reason that i do it so that's it so i mentioned i'm using magnet for my tiling window management what does this look like so if i open up a window let's just open i term two my magnet key bindings are all dealing with the option key as well as option shift and this deals with movement and general selection on my displays so if i have an active window selected i can do option shift and i can do h j k l and this will actually let me snap my window to different areas now this is about the extent of the behavior i get i don't get windows stacking like in dwm i'd get any sort of fancy resizing behavior with this it's pretty much as good as it's going to get and i have also the corner views which i don't really use too much i mostly just use the half and half snapping and you can change these key bindings i just found the option works best for me but when i have multiple windows open and i want to just quickly you know snap that over there i can just change the font size it works really well for what i'm using it for it's not as great as i3 and what i'm used to it's not as great as dwm but for having a solution that at least lets me have some basic tiling window management behavior it works i don't want to have to click and drag my windows and then manually resize them that's ridiculous i would not want to do that so at least having this ability to just snap it to half the screen or put it down here to see something else put it into the corners you know this this works it works well enough for what i'm going to use it for on this system while i'm using this system so i said i'm using alfred and spotlight spotlight is the default searching bar application launcher that you get when you start using mac os and when i open it up with i think you i don't remember what the default keybinding is but i changed spotlight to option space and alfred is command space for me anyways because i wanted two separate options and i've been playing around with both of them and i'm actually leaning more towards spotlight i don't really use this to just launch a file which alfred can do but what i really find annoying is that i open up my system preferences a lot so if i open up system preferences i can type sys and there's my system preferences in spotlight but when i do alfred and i do sys it's searching for like stuff on the internet it doesn't even think of to search for my system and normally you start off with a single quote to open up a file or something just as you know something else to try maybe i'm missing a hotkey maybe i'm not reading some documentation that i should be but for the most part like alfred is really great for like launching applications but i can do that with spotlight as well so i'm really finding spotlight to be the better one in this instance for a lot of my use cases and i've heard that spotlight used to be really bad but it's gotten a lot better and i mean it can even do math so i might just remove alfred eventually and there are a lot of really powerful things i've seen alfred be capable of and on their website they show a lot of different functionality macros document templates a lot of stuff it kind of covers a lot of different use cases but it's a paid application and it is kind of pricey and you know if you can write shell script you kind of have template documents you have vim you have ulti snips you don't really need all those things you can find plenty of other options and so it looks like i might prefer spotlight until i find something that it really just can't do well so one really cool thing that i have never really used on windows if they even have this type of feature is something uh these these tags i never really used anything like this before on my system but i'm finding one very particular use i actually would like to use this for and in my documents in my research directory i have my actual like research papers and things that i'm reading like in here you can see this one has a green tag on my reading i have a yellow and then in unread i have orange and red so that's way if i was going to just look for something i can just say hey what is currently not done and in this case it would be like these research papers i have not read which one am i reading next it's that one which one am i currently reading that and which ones are done and in this case i found it really cool just to sift through that stuff very quickly even though i do have it in a directory structure that is conducive to this organization but in this case it's also really cool to just do that i'm also doing something similar with my email i'm not going to open up my email because i have private stuff in there but with email i actually do have protonmail so like the protonmail bridge i have to get i had to get set up it was super easy on this machine compared to doing it with neomutt on linux and i'm actually not minding the email in mac os the email application is actually not bad i kind of like it and after being with neomat sure i got w3m setup on that to view html it was still sort of annoying in a lot of ways and there are a lot of graphics and things included in email or certain things that it just became a pain where i still was opening it in the browser i still would use neomut i would still use it if i want to go back to linux but for the meantime i do like a lot of the flagging options in the email application i like just the gesture swipes i can can do for like left and right to mark it unread and delete it it is really convenient one thing i really like about this computer is the touch movements the three fingers to like look at my different workspaces or to burst out all the applications currently open on a workspace is really awesome and then also just being able to do two finger swipes to go forward and backwards in a application is really cool also deleting and making my emails unread is really awesome i just really like a lot of the touch features on the trackpad the trackpad alone is just really nice on this computer and one thing i was really surprised to learn is that some of the same touch motions also work on windows i was actually messing with my work computer this morning and i found out that the three-finger swipe upwards will actually show you all the workspaces you have open on windows and if you haven't seen any of the windows workspace hotkeys where you do control window d to make a new workspace and you can do window control control window arrow keys to shift back and forth through them window control f4 to close them but when you do the three finger swipe up you can actually see all your open workspaces if you're on a single workspace and you're not doing the swipe up you can actually swipe with three fingers left and right and actually scroll through your applications and for which one over one is currently actively selected instead of doing like endless alt tab or window tab to go through and cycle through your current active applications on your workspace so i am using item 2 as my terminal right now on this system as you can see i do have my grub box color themes and how did i get the color theme into you know this terminal it wasn't as straightforward as something like getting into st so what i actually had to do was go to this website so this website item2colorschemes.com i just went to this site i scrolled through or really i just did a search for grovbox found what i was looking for you click the hyperlinked name and then it opens up a basically an xml document and then i just copied this and saved it as you know the name of the file right here grub box dark i term colors dot actually i think that's the actual file path it's just item colors not even xml and so once you do that you have the file saved to your desktop and you're ready to import it into item so with item open you'll now have the menu open up here what we're going to do is go to itunes 2 preferences and you're going to go to i think it's profi yeah profiles profiles colors color presets right here and then you're going to import the actual document which is that dot i term colors document basically it looks like xml and you can see i have mine here grugbox.dark.itemcolors that's it now you have grub box and that's it you can do that with any of those themes i personally will do grub box on all the things because i love that color theme and of course one thing that i will miss dearly on arch is pacman the package manager for arch linux now mac os doesn't come with a package manager by default but there is something i think it's just the open source project brew so i do have brew installed so if i run brew ls it'll tell you like what i have installed right now i have a couple packages i've installed so far not everything that i'm used to because i'm used to the arch linux aur there is everything in in there it's either a community package or somebody or their mother has packaged something to be in the aur so everything's there but brew i'm having issues downloading certain things and certain like x software you know x-org x-libs any of these different things for some of the software i'm used to using is really really troublesome to either get installed get it working and so certain things i'm just having to give up on because i just don't want to put in the time one of the reasons to get the system was that i did not want to have to put in as much time tinkering because i don't have the time right now but some of the things that i can't install with this were incredibly useful you know i got shell check trash cli pandoc all the stuff i needed to do law tech compilation and it's been interesting it's not my favorite i definitely prefer pac-man but you know it gets the job done and of course the first things i installed with it were the gnu core utils so i had all the command line utilities i'm used to using and i also wanted to get the default shell on this the default shell for mac os now is zsh i have never used zsh and now because it's the default on this i figure okay i might as well just learn zsh but in the meantime i just i need to get some stuff up and running until i can now spend some time learning zsh and shift over and really get to know it if there's any nuances i needed to learn those but for the meantime i just downloaded the most recent version of bash made that my current shell so now i'm currently running bash five 5.2 because one of the reasons i've i've said before about the portability issue with mac os is that if you don't know how to do these types of things by default you're running bash 3.2 or some some other number of an older version of bash because of licensing issues so mac os will run an old version of bash which means a lot of the things will break so if you don't have a new the newest version of bash if you get got brew you can easily just install it and then switch your shell with the ch the chsh s command and then list off your shell you know mine is listed at user local bin bash and that's my current shell and that's just bash 5.2 whatever it is and one of the last things that i am kind of annoyed by but at the same time it's still kind of fine is latex compilation so i do have some latex documents and i got one on my desktop and i'll show you what i mean if i open up item i go to my desktop and i do vim notes okay so now i'm in the latex document now if i just try to compile this with my compiler script from linux it doesn't work and it didn't work i had to install mac tech i had to install latex make i had to install bibtex it was kind of a hassle to be honest to just get it to compile and even once it's compiled i still have some leftover files that the tech clear script that luke smith wrote that i still use isn't picking up for some reason and it's mostly just annoying it works but it's annoying but i'm also still having issues with actually getting the references to compile so if i run this and actually compile this document you know it will compile you'll see all these all these things here if i close this weirdly enough these are still here they shouldn't be but i do have the pdf and you know it does render some of this stuff but i actually have issues with it actually rendering the references i get issues with bibtex i've tried things with bible and bibtex that's it's mostly annoying and it's really at this point on this machine just been a maybe i should just write my notes in markdown put them in vimwiki use my tagging system and this was an idea i had about vim wiki is instead of i could use tags saying you know sites like it's citing something sites whatever my bibtex references it is for something like i have a paper like by mold i think 2006 i could say you know sites mold 2006 with an underscore between those two things and actually be able to use tag searching to see which papers cite which other papers or which ones are cited by that one and in that way i could actually make like a web of my research paper references and follow my research trees and that's an idea and it's kind of just been getting that point coming to a head because i'm getting really annoyed with trying to deal with law tech compilation and just the verbose syntax if i want to write a thesis i'm probably just at this point not going to do it in pure love tech i'm probably going to go and use thesis down the thesis down package in r that uses latex templates and fiddle with something instead of making it from scratch but for now i got some of this to work it works okay but for references it's kind of annoying so i hope you found this interesting let me know if you want me to talk about anything in particular or in specific if you're new here and you haven't already subscribed please click that subscribe button and ring the bell so you get notified of any new videos i recently just made a discord channel so you can join that it the links are in above and down in the description below and a quick shout out to the supporters of the channel thank you alberto and devin for supporting me on patreon and for everyone else who donates thank you guys for making this more incentivized for me to make more content i really do enjoy this and i would love to see you all in the discord chat so i will see you guys all on the next one [Music] you