System Preferences

    Also upgrade your OS in case you want to work on the latest 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.

    • Login Options -> Change fast switching user menu to Icon

    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:
    • Preferences
      • Change ‘New Finder windows show:’ to something other than ‘All My Files’ (which is a memory hog)
    • Toolbar
      • Update to add path, new folder and delete
    • Sidebar
      • Add home and code directory
      • Remove shared and tags

    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
    • Add an iCloud account and sync Calendar, Find my mac, Contacts etc.

    User Defaults

    • Enable repeating keys by pressing and holding down keys: (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:
      • Then run the following command:

    How to write to NTFS on OS X Yosemite and El Capitan

    • Instructions

    Update Homebrew formulae:

    • $ brew cask install osxfuse

    Install ntfs-3g

    • Reboot and hold CMD+R to get in recovery mode

    • Open the terminal and type:

    • Reboot normally

    Create a symlink for mount_ntfs

    • Reboot and hold CMD+R to get in recovery mode

    • Open the terminal and type

    • Reboot normally