I went through the process of setting up a development Mac today. Before I could even get to the environment, I found I had a huge set of stuff to go through to make the computer respond to my commands in a way that’s familiar. Call it a computer Ikea nesting instinct. Here’s the basic rundown:

  1. Turn it on, user install, whatever normal issues are.
  2. Set up hot corner for screen saver, right command for Expose, right option for Desktop
  3. Quicksilver (set hotkey to Alt+Space)
  4. Chrome
  5. Setup Chrome sync so my bookmarks, history and auto-suggest are what I expect
  6. iTerm (Bookmarks –> manage profiles –> keyboard profiles –> global –> option key as +esc)
  7. TextMate (get haml bundle, alt+cmd+l to show line numbers, soft tabs 2)
  8. Zshell (install brew or macports if neither of them are installed… then zsh)
  9. oh-my-zsh — comment out auto_name_dirs in lib/directories.zsh
  10. Setup zsh plugins, create alias for gpom=“git push origin master” … could Dropbox this, but machines are kind of different, and it’s not a lot of config yet
  11. RVM
  12. Change shortcuts for any app with tabs to Alt+Lftarrow and Alt+Rtarrow (default for Chrome, Textmate, iTerm)
  13. Add Ctrl+s shortcut for Chrome “Find Next” item

I’m sure I’ll find more stuff in the next few days; I’ll keep updating the list. This is mostly for my reference, but maybe someone else will find it interesting.