Nearly a year has passed since I transitioned to the Apple ecosystem, and I have no plans to revert. After abandoning Windows in 2017, I embraced Manjaro Linux with i3 on my Surface Book, despite its limited Linux support. My switch to Apple was driven by the impressive line of ARM-based MacBooks and Apple’s focus on end-user experience, which has resulted in superior hardware and software integration. While I still appreciate Linux for servers and development, MacOS has become my personal OS of choice.
Previously, I managed my development setup through GitHub-hosted dotfiles. However, I’m still figuring out the best way to track my MacOS configuration. This note serves to document my current tools and setup. I frequently experiment with new tools each month, retaining those that fit my workflow and discarding others when storage becomes an issue.
Raycast has become indispensable, enhancing MacOS’s Spotlight with deeper integrations like Todoist, and a robust clipboard manager through Raycast Clipboard. Other notable tools include Gemini, Phind, Perplexity, and VSCode.
I missed the tile window management of i3, but Amethyst for MacOS has filled that gap effectively. Although there was a learning curve, I no longer miss i3. For Vimium-like navigation, I’ve adopted Shortcat.
One limitation of the MacBook Air M2 is its native support for only one external display. I’ve resorted to using DisplayLink technology with an expensive adapter to overcome this, though it introduces some lag. The ARM-based processor is excellent, and I appreciate the quiet operation without fan noise. I’ve also set up SSH configurations to run VSCode on Northeastern’s slurm-based HPC clusters for tasks requiring additional compute or memory.
Choosing a MacBook with only 512GB of storage was intended to prevent data hoarding, but in hindsight, it may not have been the best decision due to frequent storage issues.