I’ve been using linux (fedora/arch) + i3 for a few years by now.

Then I got a mac for work.

To be fair, I >asked< for a mac because I wanted to experiment the whole arm hype. Spoiler: it’s quite good indeed. Worth it disrupting an existing flow? Don’t know yet.

But anyway, I had a whole setup in linux that I had to adapt to this new machine. Some of it it’s just second-system syndrome (like keeping track of installed tools), some of it are indeed things I had to adapt.

As always, primarily intend is my own documentation, therefore I may overlook certain aspects.

tl;dr

Brew

Bit a of a no-brainer, everybody uses it and I had no problems using it when I had a mac.

One thing I am doing now is using a Brewfile to keep track of my installed tools. Preferably with a comment reminding me why the heck I installed that.

For comparison, in my Fedora desktop I haven

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> sudo dnf list installed | wc -l
5818

Although this is not a fair comparison, since it also show dependencies (ie packages I have not >actively< installed). Those are:

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sudo dnf history userinstalled | wc -l
764

Source: DNF Command Reference — dnf latest documentation

I may go back and use brew with linux as well.

yadm

For managing the dotfiles, there’re plentiful of tools. I decided to use yadm for a few reasons:

• written in Bash. I mean this is not a good reason, it’s just that I have a preference for it over tools written in python.
• git-like interface. In the end I am still modifying raw text files. One thing that particular annoyed me with chezmoi is the use of chezmoi edit to edit files. I want to just vim MYFILE.txt!
• support for alternative files, which is just like “if linux use this file, if mac use this other file”
• support for templates in case you want to use more or less the same file with slight differences. I started with alternative files and once I see the patterns emerge I may merge the files back into a template.

yadm bootstrap

running yadm bootstrap allows you to execute a script/binary when {first cloning/pulling} the dotfiles repo.

It’s a good idea to make it idempotent.

In my case, I made it run brew bundle Also made it run our next tool, ansible

ansible

Ideally everything would be setup using brew + config files. But it’s not always possible. So I added ansible to run some stuff like cloning the tmux plugin manager repo, or hiding the dock.

yabai/skhd

To get the most similar experience to i3, we need both koekeishiya/yabai: A tiling window manager for macOS based on binary space partitioning and koekeishiya/skhd: Simple hotkey daemon for macOS. yabai is the tiling manager, and skhd is a hotkey daemon.

One slightly inconvenience is having to disable System Integrity Protection.

I won’t go over my hotkeys, feel free to check the dotfiles repo.

statusbar

Installed cmacrae/spacebar to have an indicator for the workspace.

Looking at my notes I found that was the first moment I was required to install rosetta.

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sudo softwareupdate --install-rosetta --agree-to-license

Keyboard setup

Mapped certain keys:

The Caps lock is a classic one for vim users. Option / Command it’s just that I am already used to use $mod key (normally command), since I run arch (btw) in a old Macbook air. However if I mapped skhd to CMD, lots of things would break since OSX uses it quite a bit (as opposed to alt).

Also set up key repeat / delay until repeat to the fastest option available. I tried setting this up with ansible but it didn’t work.

Wrapping up

Of course there are plenty more things to be configured or things I’ve omitted. Feel free to explore the dotfiles repo here: eh-am/dotfiles