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