Computer

This is where I jot down notes about my computer. How it’s configured, what applications I use, and how I use them. It contains a little guide for bootstrapping new computers but mostly this is for documenting how I use my computer; documenting things helps me think.

Gitpod

I do 99% of my development using Gitpod. I use the Dotfiles feeature to load my Gitpod specific dotfiles from mads-hartmann/gitpod-dotfiles.

Arc

I’m using Arc as my default browser

• I disabled the default keybinding of ⌘S to show/hide the sidebar. Turns out I still hit ⌘S quite a lot when using Notion which meant I ended up toggling the sidebar all the time.

CleanShot X

I use CleanShot X as a replacement for the macOS native Screenshot application. The annotation features and flows of CleanShot X are just superb ✨

Karabiner Elements

With my Keychron Q10 I needed a way to have arrow keys in the home-row

• I had to set the Virtual Keyboard to ISO manually
• ⇪ maps to ^
This is something I started doing back when I was a heavy Emacs users and now the muscle memory is stuck with me.
• ⌘^hjkl maps to ←↓↑→ so I can navigate from the home-row. I would have preferred to just use ^ but that would conflict with ^k which I use to delete lines; again, back from my Emacs days.
• Experimental: I'm using it to emulate the Emacs mark functionality. This allows me to hit ^SPC to set the mark and then use the arrow keys to select text.

Sleeve

I have a soft spot for single purpose macOS applications. Sleeve is a perfect example of this.

VSCode

Extensions

This list is not comprehensive at the moment. The extensions are alphabetically sorted.

• Bookmarks
  Really useful way to navigate code.
• GitHub Copilot
  I mostly used this for “advanced code-completion”. I rarely use it for prompting or anything else, really. Maybe in 2024 that will change.
• GitHub Theme
  The GitHub Light and GitHub Dark are my favourite themes at the moment
• Material Icon Theme
  This has been my go-to icon theme for quite a while.
• Center Editor Window This is just to be able to map ^l to re-center the editor window around the current line. I used this all the time when I used Emacs so it’s nice to be able to use it again.

Keybindings

This is the list of keyboard shortcuts I generally use. It’s a bit of a weird mixture of trying to use the VSCode defaults while also accepting that I have a lot of Emacs muscle memory that I might as well put to good use.

Raycast

I adore Raycast. I pay for the Pro plan which, amongst other things, gives me access to ChatGPT through Raycast. I use the AI Chat as my primary interface to ChatGPT.

Built-in Extensions

I use the following built-in extensions

• Search Emoji & Symbols
  I use this all the time. I have this mapped to ^⌘Space so that it overwrites the default Emoji picker in macOS
• Navigation
  I primarily use the “Search Menu Items” command. It’s the best. Allows you to use Raycast to search through the menu items of whatever application you have focused at the time. I have it bound to “⌘.”
• Window Management
  I use this a ton for very basic window management. “Center” is mapped to ⌘⌥C, “Left Half” to ⌘⌥←, “Right Half” to ⌘⌥←, and Maximize ⌘⌥↵.

Raycast Store Extensions

I use the following extensions from the Raycast Store:

• Apple Reminders
  I use the “My Reminders” command get a quick overview or modify the individual reminders and “Create Reminder” to quickly adding new reminders.
• Screenshot
  Really useful for taking screenshots directly to the Clipboard. That way I don’t litter my Desktop with screenshots.
• Color Picker
  Quickest and simplest way to grab the hex code of a pixel on your screen.
• Spotify Player
  Much nicer than the Spotify App. I have enabled “Close window on action”.
• Word Search
  I primarily use this for the “Spell a Word” command which allows me to attempt to spell a word and then pick the correct spelling. It’s connivent when I know I want to write a word that I can never spell correctly in the first attempt.
• ray.soReally easy way to create beautiful screenshots of code snippets.

1Password

I use 1Password for all my personal passwords, credit cards, credentials, and so on. I Install it using the App Store.

Notion

I use Notion for quite a few different things. This site is generated from a Notion document. I use it as a simple database system for books, articles, records, how-to’s, projects, and so on. I use it as an easy way to write interconnected notes when learning new topics.

I use the Notion Desktop App as I find it marginally quicker than opening a tab in Safari.

Setting Up a New Mac

This was from the last time I configured a Mac from scratch. If I were to do it today I don’t think I’d use Nix as the “global” package manager but just rely on Homebrew instead; I haven’t really seen any benefit from using Nix for system-wide packages.

Setting up Nix

To install Nix I do need some basic development tools installed like git, curl and so on:

xcode-select --install

I install Nix using The Determinate Nix Installer

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf -L \ https://install.determinate.systems/nix \ | sh -s -- install

Shell

Don’t show the Last login message for every new terminal session:

touch ~/.hushlogin

Install Starship

nix profile install nixpkgs#starship

Create a basic profile for ZSH (touch ~/.zshrc) and add the following

alias tailscale="/Applications/Tailscale.app/Contents/MacOS/Tailscale" source <(/Users/mads/.nix-profile/bin/starship init zsh --print-full-init) autoload -Uz compinit && compinit

SSH

I use 1Password to manage my SSH keys (docs) and rely on their SSH agent (docs). For the agent to work the following is placed in ~/.ssh/config:

Host * IdentityAgent "~/Library/Group Containers/2BUA8C4S2C.com.1password/t/agent.sock"

To verify it works run the following

export SSH_AUTH_SOCK=~/Library/Group\ Containers/2BUA8C4S2C.com.1password/t/agent.sock ssh-add -l

Changelog

The current version is v3

• v3 - In this version I’ve extended the document to also include macOS application, SaaS services, and so on; everything that I do on my computer. I also switched to using Notion for writing the document and then have a bit of code that produces a static site for it.
• v2 - the major change from v1 is that I now do 99% of my development in Cloud Development Environments (CDE) which means that I install very few tools locally.
• v1 - the original computer.mads-hartmann.com

Logbook

Week 8, 2024

I’m giving Dash a try to see if having the official docs available for the tools I use means I’ll reach for them more often rather than just run ChatGPT or Google every time I need to look something up. I picked Dash because there’s a Raycast Extension for it.