My 2024 New Mac Setup

I set up my new Macbook Pro (14 inch, 2023 M3 Max 36 GB RAM 1TB HD) today. Here’s everything I use on a Mac.

Previous versions of this post: from 2018-2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023. If I update this post in future, these contents will be archived but this URL will remain.

Scroll all the way to the bottom for lists and other Mac setup tools from friends!

diffs i’m making this year

i tried fish shell. however, because most setups assume bash/zsh, this dooms you to a life time of translating readmes

life is too short for this.

don’t install python the normal way. no conda, no brew python. use uv for python management.

curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh
source $HOME/.local/bin/env.fish
uv python install 3.12

• raycast instaed of alfred https://www.raycast.com/swyxio

• https://github.com/ollama/ollama

ollama run llama3.2
ollama run HammerAI/llama2-tiefighter
ollama run vanilj/mistral-nemo-12b-celeste-v1.9
ollama run qwen2.5-coder:14b

https://huggingface.co/spaces/DontPlanToEnd/UGI-Leaderboard

• superwhisper
• chatgpt desktop
• ghostty instead of warp? not sold yet. but this config is helpful https://x.com/TheAnirudh/status/1869379182008193313

New setup docs from others

• https://eugeneyan.com/writing/mac-setup/