System Preferences
First Time Setup
The first thing you should do is update your system. To do that go: Apple menu () > About This Mac > Software Update.
Also upgrade your OS to the latest version to have a more secure OS. macOS upgrades are usually free so you might as well keep your machine up to date.
If this is a new computer there are a couple tweaks you could make to the System Preferences. These settings are all optional, consider them suggestions. Always choose the setting that makes the most sense to you.
Users & Groups
- Login Options -> Change fast user switching menu as Icon
- Set up Password, Apple ID, Picture, etc.
Trackpad
- Point & Click
- Enable Tap to click with one finger
- Change Secondary click to Right corner
- Uncheck Three Finger Drag
- Scroll & Zoom
- Uncheck all apart from Zoom in and out
Dock
- Visual Settings
- Change position to Left and make the size of icons Small
- Other settings
- Remove workspace auto-switching by running the following command:
$ defaults write com.apple.dock workspaces-auto-swoosh -bool NO
$ killall Dock # Restart the Dock process
Finder
- General
- Change New finder window show to open in your Home Directory
- Sidebar
- Add Home and your Code Directory
- Uncheck all Shared boxes
Menubar
- Remove the Display and Bluetooth icons
- Change battery to Show percentage symbols
Spotlight
- Uncheck fonts, images, files etc.
- Uncheck the keyboard shortcuts as we'll be replacing them with Alfred
Accounts
- Add an iCloud account and sync Calendar, Find my Mac, Contacts etc.
User Defaults
- Enable repeating keys by pressing and holding down keys:
defaults write NSGlobalDomain ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false
(and restart any app that you need to repeat keys in) - Change the default folder for screenshots
- Open the terminal and create the folder where you would like to store
your screenshots:
mkdir -p /path/to/screenshots/
- Then run the following command:
defaults write com.apple.screencapture location /path/to/screenshots/ && killall SystemUIServer
- Open the terminal and create the folder where you would like to store
your screenshots:
How to write to NTFS on macOS Yosemite (10.10) and El Capitan (10.11)
1) Install Homebrew and Homebrew Cask
Instructions here.
2) Update Homebrew formulae
$ brew update
3) Install osxfuse
If you are on macOS El Capitan (10.11), install the (3.x.x) from the repo.
$ brew cask install osxfuse
4) Install ntfs-3g
$ brew install ntfs-3g
5) If you are on macOS El Capitan (10.11), temporarily disable System Integrity Protection
- Reboot and hold
CMD + R
to get in recovery mode - Open the terminal and type:
$ csrutil disable
- Reboot normally
6) Create a symlink for mount_ntfs
$ sudo mv /sbin/mount_ntfs /sbin/mount_ntfs.original
$ sudo ln -s /usr/local/sbin/mount_ntfs /sbin/mount_ntfs
7) If you are on macOS El Capitan (10.11), re-enable System Integrity Protection
- Reboot and hold
CMD + R
to get in recovery mode - Open the terminal and type:
$ csrutil enable
- Reboot normally