How Did I Set up a New Mac

Today I get a Mac mini in my lab. Here is how I set up it.

1. Resolve a national network issue.
2. Installed 1Password in Mac App Store. Actually this was ought to be the first step, but the campus network prevents me logging in (I don’t know why). So it became the second step.
3. Swapped the control and the command key in preference panel because I used to press the command key with side of my hand.
4. Bought an extra seat of Setapp. Download and install Setapp. Setapp start install apps in my favorites.
5. Switched region in Preferences to United States. This prevents many softwares and websites offering me a limited version based on my region.
6. Switched the default search engine of Safari to Google.
7. Opened Dictionary.app and turned on New Oxford American Dictionary, Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus, Oxford Dictionary of English and Oxford Thesaurus of English.
8. Downloaded Things for Mac in Mac App Store.
9. Downloaded and installed Figma. To be honest, I’m not a designer. It’s not so important for me but I just did it.
10. Downloaded iTerm 2 and copied into my Application folder.
11. Initiated Xcode download.
12. Copied the install command of Homebrew to the terminal and press enter.
13. Downloaded Google Chrome and Firefox Developer Edition.
14. Downloaded Adobe Creative Cloud.
15. Open Mac App Store and installed WeChat, QQ and Microsoft Office.
16. Downloaded Visual Studio Code.
17. Found that the download of Visual Studio Code and Creative Cloud suffered unexpected termination. Open Folx and retry downloading.
18. Downloaded MonitorControl from GitHub.
19. During the time of waiting download, purchased an USB-C to Display Port cable from JD.com.
20. Found the download of Firefox and MonitorControl terminated. Retried with Folx.
21. Found the download of Xcode and Microsoft Office failed. Sighed.
22. Copied MonitorControl to my Applications folder.
23. Opened built-in softwares in the Dock to make sure that iCloud sync is on and removed them from the Dock.
24. Found that I hadn’t installed One Switch and Paste from Setapp. Installed them.

25. Found that brew installation failed. It gave me the following information. Seems another network connection problem. I had to retry with proxy on.

    Cloning into '/usr/local/Homebrew/Library/Taps/homebrew/homebrew-core'...
    remote: Enumerating objects: 5101, done.
    remote: Counting objects: 100% (5101/5101), done.
    remote: Compressing objects: 100% (4897/4897), done.
    error: RPC failed; curl 56 LibreSSL SSL_read: SSL_ERROR_SYSCALL, errno 60
    fatal: the remote end hung up unexpectedly
    fatal: early EOF
    fatal: index-pack failed
    Error: Failure while executing; `git clone https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core /usr/local/Homebrew/Library/Taps/homebrew/homebrew-core --depth=1` exited with 128.
    Error: Failure while executing; `/usr/local/bin/brew tap homebrew/core` exited with 1.
    Failed during: /usr/local/bin/brew update --force

26. Copied Visual Studio Code to my Applications folder.
27. Opened Bartender and granted privileges to it.
28. Installed Node.js, Yarn and fish shell by brew.
29. Set default shell to fish.
30. Downloaded iterm2-color-schemes and had them loaded in iTerm 2.
31. Installed these extensions in Visual Studio Code: ESLint, Prettier, Rainglow (a theme pack) and Settings Sync.
32. Created a SSH key with ssh-keygen and added it to my GitHub.
33. Copied Chrome and Firefox Developer Edition to Applications.
34. Logged in my Google account on Chrome and turned on sync.
35. Logged in my Mozilla account on Firefox and turned on sync.
36. Downloaded GPG Suite and restored my GPG keys. I do sign with GPG keys on every git commit.
37. Configure git's global settings: email, user name and GPG key.

After these 37 steps, the Mac mini is ready for production. It cost me around three hours. About 1/3 of time are wasted on resolving network-related problems.