2021 Macbook Pro setup

I just replaced my 2015 Macbook Pro 13″ with a 2021 Macbook Pro 16″ (M1 Max, 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD).

• I opted set up everything from scratch and not to use Migration Assistant.
• I didn’t install any fancy terminal apps this time; the stock Terminal app works fine.
• No Dropbox client. It’s grown buggy, bloated, and invasive over the past several years.

Gear

I bought a Comfyable Laptop Sleeve in navy, it fits great is very well-made.

I also bought a GhostBlanket microfiber cloth ($10 USD) for placing on top of the keyboard before closing the laptop. This will keep my finger oils from transferring from the keycaps to the screen. I know that sounds a little precious, but my previous MBP had a serious problem with finger oils wrecking the anti-glare screen coating. I’m not going to risk that happening again with this XDR screen.

I tweeted a photo showing the relative sizes of these items:

For my new 16” MacBook Pro, I bought a $10 microfiber cloth for keeping finger grease off the screen (https://t.co/duHCfHegqM) and a $29 Comfyable laptop sleeve (https://t.co/FHmdK7k4ay). More setup info at my site: https://t.co/Xz33xjO4YG pic.twitter.com/9vWgnCEmgY

— Joel 🕯🦴 (@joeld) November 10, 2021

(Disclosure: affiliate links)

Setup steps

• Install Xcode :-P
• Install Marked
• Install Alfred, put preferences in ~/.alfred4
• Compile MacVim (clone repo, ./configure and make, make symlink in /usr/local/bin)
• Clone my vimrc repo into .vimrc
• Compile openssl from source: ./Configure, make -j 8, sudo make install
• Download GnuPG nightly from https://releases.gpgtools.org/nightlies/
• Copy ~/.gnupg and ~/.gitconfig from the old laptop
• Compile and set up OBS (below)
• Compile and set up Emacs (below)

OBS

I was going to try and avoid using Homebrew for anything, but I ended up installing it in order to use this script to compile and install OBS natively for Apple silicon. From what I understand the binaries you can download from the OBS website are still compiled for Intel, and I wanted streaming from this laptop to be as smooth as possible. It worked great.

Doom Emacs

I tried several ways to natively compile a verison of Emacs that in turn supports native compilation. The one that worked was Homebrew Emacs Plus. I no longer recall everything I did to get it working properly (it took a few hours), but it started something like this:

$ brew tap d12frosted/emacs-plus
$ brew install emacs-plus@28 --with-native-comp
$ git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/hlissner/doom-emacs ~/.emacs.d
$ git clone https://github.com/otherjoel/doom-emacs-config.git ~/.doom.d
$ doom sync
$ brew install ripgrep

The last one was needed so projectile would make proper use of .gitignore when searching project files.

My Emacs config is on Github.