When you search for "dotfiles" on GitHub, you'll find plenty of good script examples for setting up a new computer. Since Apple doesn't provide good documentation on what you can configure with "defaults" variables, these examples are a goldmine.

Jeff Geerling has a phenomenal ansible playbook to setup his macs:

https://github.com/geerlingguy/mac-dev-playbook

PSA: "setup" is a noun, and "set up" is the verb you're looking for.

I have https://github.com/rcarmo/ground-init - which I also use for Macs, although via a bit of a hack right now. I should update it to a brewfile-like setup...

Anyway, my $0.02 is that doing fully automated installs on Macs is a fast track to having weird Finder and settings bugs (if not worse), so I mostly just install packages and very seldom (if ever) apply settings via the CLI -- I've had Apple break things across too many OS releases to find that a worthwhile long-term strategy, and most of the time I'd rather just use Migration Assistant (across Macs with equivalent OS versions) or configure settings manually for a new OS release.

Edit: just went and updated the above script to support brew/cask installs on macOS. Settings can go into the runcmd section.

nix-darwin is a thing, and like all nix tools. It tackles this exact problem

The best way to do it!

I have a file that sets my MacOS Defaults: https://github.com/joeyagreco/dotfiles/blob/main/.macos

And a file to remap some keys: https://github.com/joeyagreco/dotfiles/blob/main/.macos_key_...

And apply the remaps: https://github.com/joeyagreco/dotfiles/blob/b5b819c9bcde2e3a...

I used to hand-setup each new Mac, but lately (last decade or so; gosh this M1 Pro is absolutely ancient) I just let the migration assistant do the needful.

Storage is too cheap for me to spend time optimizing it anymore. I’m sure I have cruft somewhere, but it doesn’t bother me.

Just in case anyone is lost in all the `defaults write ...`, I really recommend https://macos-defaults.com/

It's a really nice overview for (almost) all of the options.

I have an open-source script which installs all my conf https://github.com/Frizlab/frizlabs-conf

I use a setup script that installs brew, a brewfile, runs chezmoi to setup terminal and defaults, pulls some secrets/keys out of 1Password, and good to go, other than manually having to log into certain things. Everything in a personal dotfiles repo. I do have to occasionally diff my brewfile and terminal config and push that up, I should probably spend a little time figuring out how to automate that.

The missing magic incantation to create your Brewfile:

brew bundle dump

Is there any shell/bash extensions that just allow you to use LLMs easily from the command line? Basically like warp but just a simple extension instead of a full iterm replacement?

Just use Ansible, it's the best for installing and configuring things