Personalize the mac beyond what System Preferences offers. I talk about quick-look plugins, spotlight extensions, terminal configuration, and brew tricks.
Note that 1) I keep updated this list with the things that I actually use on my Mac, and 2) I work close to the OS guidelines: these are not ugly hacks but (what I think) more or less correct ways of achieving stuff.
Quick-look plugins
Quick-look is the preview window of Mac that appears when you press spacebar on a file in
Finder. In this page you can get plug-ins
that allow you expand the number of files you can quick-look. I have the
following: brew cask install qlcolorcode qlstephen qlmarkdown quicklook-json qlvideo.
Search in JSON, Markdown… using spotlight
You can upgrade Spotlight to search more file types, for example Markdown, YAML, or JSON.
- Download this zip file from Bretter Pstra's post, which is a base extension for Spotlight.
- Unzip it to
~/Library/Spotlight/(create the _Spotlight_folder if it does not exist). - Edit with a text editor like nano
~/Library/Spotlight/Markdown.mdimporter/Contents/Info.plist. You will see a line with the following:<string>net.daringfireball.markdown</string>, which is inside an<array>. You can add more<string>elements to this<array>defining file types that you want to be searcheable. For example, I have<string>public.json</string>and<string>public.yaml</string>. Find other typesin here.
As the post from Pastras
says, execute mdimport -r ~/Library/Spotlight/Markdown.mdimporter to load this new configuration.
5. Execute sudo mdutil -E / to re-index (with the new configuration). This will take time.
Terminal
Enhancements to the default bash terminal. Many of them can be performed to any Unix with bash ( like debian).
Personalize the terminal
The default _bash_terminal in the Mac is just too plain and too white. You can upgrade the expierence by personalizing bash, for example changing colors or the information it displays (ex. the path you are in, username, name of active virtualenv...). To achieve this:
- (Mac only): download a terminal theme from macos-therminal-themeand follow the instructions of the website.
- To personalize what bash prints on screen you will need to make some bash code. This bash code
must be placed in your
~/.bash_profile. What I do is have this code in a file in a sync folder in the cloud, and then write the following in bash_profile:. /path/to/my/file.sh. Here you have a WYSIWYG that auto-generates the code for you.
Set locale to UTF8
Mac messes with your locales in the terminal, which caused me some problems. For me has proven good to just do the following at every mac installation and forget about it.
- Go to _Preferences_in the terminal > Profiles> select your profile > Advanced> untick set locale environment variables during startup.
- Paste the following in your
~/.bash_profile:
export LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8
export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF
Mac does not have nanoas the default terminal text editor. Add the following to
your ~/.bash_profile: export EDITOR=nano. Softwares like git
[note]Reference https://superuser.com/a/504561[/note] select an editor from this variable.
Brew
Interesting stuff with the defacto package manager of Mac, brew.
Execute packages installed with brew
Brew installs packages in a way that it doesn't mess with your system, meaning that you cannot do
something like (imagine we installed postgres through brew): $ psql–it will print a
nice command not found.
Write something like the following in your ~./bash_profile (in this example we want to access
_node_and postgresql:
OPT='/usr/local/opt'
PATH="$OPT/[email protected]/bin:$PATH"
PATH="$OPT/node@8/bin:$PATH"
export PATH
Managing brew services
Managing other services, like databases as Postgres, with brew is easy with brew services.
Use brew services list to list the installed services, brew services run to run a service...
execute brew services to get a list of commands.
Using postgres again as an example, to run it just do brew services run [email protected].
Install fonts using brew
Fonts that are open-source or free to use (like from google fonts) are usually inbrew's cask fonts:
brew tap homebrew/cask-fonts
brew cask install font-hack-nerd-font
Happy configuring :-)