I spend a lot of time on my computer, and have built up some fairly opinionated ways of how I like my system set up. Nearly everything here is managed through my dotfiles.

My System

$ neofetch 
                    'c.          [email protected] 
                 ,xNMM.          ------------------ 
               .OMMMMo           OS: macOS 13.3.1 22E261 arm64 
               OMMM0,            Host: MacBookPro18,3 
     .;loddo:' loolloddol;.      Kernel: 22.4.0 
   cKMMMMMMMMMMNWMMMMMMMMMM0:    Uptime: 1 day, 1 hour 
 .KMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMWd.    Packages: 172 (brew) 
 XMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMX.      Shell: bash 5.2.15 
;MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM:       Resolution: 1512x982 
:MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM:       DE: Aqua 
.MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMX.      WM: Rectangle 
 kMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMWd.    Terminal: Apple_Terminal 
 .XMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMk   Terminal Font: SFMonoPowerline-Medium 
  .XMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMK.   CPU: Apple M1 Pro 
    kMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMd     GPU: Apple M1 Pro 
     ;KMMMMMMMWXXWMMMMMMMk.      Memory: 3818MiB / 32768MiB 
       .cooc,.    .,coo:.

Installing Tools

For now, I use Homebrew to manage installing as much as possible. I recently had to bootstrap my machine from start and outside of a half dozen commands and installing brew, everything is managed for me.

I leverage Homebrew Bundle especially hard - it essentially lets me generate manifests of everything I have installed in a Brewfile (and accompanying lockfile).

Definitely interested in checking out some of the more fancy package managers, like Nix or Guix, but they seem to have a much steeper learning curve and installation process - for now I’m happy with Homebrew and no build daemons.

Writing Code

For the last few years I’ve been rocking VSCode. I played around with the a full FOSS build of it (VSCodium) but found it was more trouble than it was worth getting extensions installed, and missed some of the propietary only ones. Again, all of those configurations are stored in my dotfiles.

When I first started programming as an intern in college, my boss made me use Emacs - and I definitely still would say it won the editor war ;). I’ve been getting back into it recently and have really figured out all my prior shortcomings were due to not going deep into customization. I just upgrade to Emacs version 29 (unreleased) for a lot of the new builtin capabilities like use-package for package management, native compilation, and tramp-container. The tramp-contaner package is especially powerful with recent tools like DevContainers, which I’m slowly introducing to my workflows.

Emacs customizations has been great to really setup my environment the way I like it, while also not hiding how everything is working. Installing a new package, adding a language server for it, and hooking up emacs to actually run the LSP is super easy. For Rust it was as simple as:

## Install the language server for Rust and ensure it's in the PATH
$ brew install rust-analyzer

;; $HOME/emacs.d/init.el
;; Install rust major mode and configure the built-in LSP server to run!
(use-package rust-mode
	:hook ((rust-mode . eglot-ensure))
)

Shell

I’m a strong Bash purist, although I always make sure to upgrade from the MacOS default of 3.2 to whatever is latest, currently 5.x. I’ve played around with a few of the popular terminal emulators like Alacritty, Warp, and Wezterm, but haven’t found a convincing enough reason to stop using the default Terminal.app.

All installed through Homebrew and in no particular order, some of my must-have CLI tools that I always reach for:

  1. brew - how everything is (un)installed
  2. ripgrep - a better grep
  3. bat - a better cat
  4. starship - a fast shell prompt with sane defaults
  5. stow - symlink manager and how I manage my dotfiles!