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Fancy new MacBook Pro

After several years living in the Windows side of the world, I have switched back to the Mac, having gotten one of the new 14“ MacBook Pro M2 models. I am quite pleased with it! Apple has stopped chasing slimness as the one and only goal and have made a nimble, quiet, and fast machine with nice keyboard and a great screen.

I thought I would include here some notes about how I have set things up, in case anyone would be interested. You might notice none of these are art programs. Since moving to the iPad for drawing, I haven’t used any PC-side tools in that process. Perhaps someday that will change. But for now, the laptop is more for goofing off or writing code.

Web browser

The first decision was whether I should stick with the default Safari or get my traditional Firefox going. I wound up picking Firefox for three reasons:

  1. Safari’s content blocking options are less muscular
  2. Safari did not cooperate very well with my password manager, 1Password
  3. Firefox will let me share bookmarks and links with my existing Windows installations

Development environment

The traditional pick here is to go with XCode. I am not currently in the iOS or MacOS development headspace, though. My focus is almost entirely on Rust, and the environment that worked for me in Windows apparently works just as well here. So, in quick order, I installed:

  • Visual Studio Code - the cross-platform development editor from Microsoft. It’s written in something called Electron, which I guess is just web tools, so it should work anywhere. But it’s snappy and flexible and well supported by the communities
  • rust-analyzer extension - this replaced the LSP analysis solution for error highlighting and code suggestions. It is key to getting the compiler to help you actually write the code
  • CodeLLDB extension - this is a wrapper around the LLDB debugger that you can use to debug the native generated code. You use this same thing to debug C/C++ programs built in Clang because both compilers use the same LLVM back-end.
  • Kaleidoscope - just a very pretty and useful file diffing tool

Text editing

I have VS Code, and that probably would probably suffice as a text editor, but in my experience, it’s a little heavyweight for day-to-day tasks like updating todo lists or jotting down a quick note. The landscape of text editors has changed a bit since I was last in the Mac ecosystem. My old favorite, TextMate, hasn’t been updated in much too long. Apple has changed CPU instruction sets since then! I’m still not into Sublime as a daily driver, so for the time being I am using the old-old standby BBEdit, which has apparently merged with its free cousin TextWrangler.

Video playback

Back in the day I used to use something called Perian to expand the QuickTime player’s repertoire for all the more modern formats. Architectural changes to the OS in the name of security (no more kexts!) have disabled Perian, and nothing else really fits the same bill. I wound up with 2 programs to fill in.

  • Iina - a fairly full featured player with a minimal interface and a ton of settings
  • QLVideo - a tiny program that just provides thumbnails and quick look support in Finder

Games

You got a sassy new computer, kid. What kinds of frame rates are you getting? Gotta install some games!

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