macOS 10.15 Basic Configuration

Make sure you have macOS 10.15 installed.

A quick guide on how to configure your Mac machine with *all* important tools for academic work.

Open a terminal and update your installation

softwareupdate -i -r

Install zsh

on macOS using Homebrew

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install.sh)"
brew install zsh

on Linux using aptitude, curl and git

sudo apt install curl git zsh

Install oh my zsh, zsh-autosuggestions, zsh-completions and zsh-syntax-highlighting

sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/robbyrussell/oh-my-zsh/master/tools/install.sh)"
git clone https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-autosuggestions ${ZSH_CUSTOM:-~/.oh-my-zsh/custom}/plugins/zsh-autosuggestions
git clone https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-completions ${ZSH_CUSTOM:=~/.oh-my-zsh/custom}/plugins/zsh-completions
git clone https://github.com/zsh-users/zsh-syntax-highlighting.git ${ZSH_CUSTOM:-~/.oh-my-zsh/custom}/plugins/zsh-syntax-highlighting

configure it using nano (or vim)

nano ~/.zshrc

make it look like this

for Linux comment brew and osx and uncomment debian

# Which plugins would you like to load?
# Standard plugins can be found in ~/.oh-my-zsh/plugins/*
# Custom plugins may be added to ~/.oh-my-zsh/custom/plugins/
# Example format: plugins=(rails git textmate ruby lighthouse)
# Add wisely, as too many plugins slow down shell startup.
plugins=(
  brew
  composer
  # debian
  gem
  git
  bundler
  docker
  dotenv
  macos
  pip
  python
  rake
  rbenv
  ruby
  rsync
  zsh-autosuggestions
  zsh-completions
  zsh-syntax-highlighting
)

Install command line tools

better cat Bat,
download tool cURL,
containerization with Docker,
better ls exa,
faster find fd,
process viewer htop,
image tool ImageMagick,
Node,
OCR tool OCRmyPDF,
text conversion tool Pandoc,
PDF suite Poppler,
Python,
faster grep ripgrep,
shell script linter ShellCheck,
language support for Tesseract which powers OCRmyPDF,
TLDR pages
LaTeX suite TexLive,
download tool Wget,
CSV tool xsv

brew install bat curl docker exa fd htop imagemagick node@12 ocrmypdf pandoc pandoc-citeproc poppler python ripgrep tesseract-lang tldr wget xsv

Install desktop and GUI tools

privacy first browser Brave,
open source browser Firefox,
image editor Gimp,
image compression tool ImageOptim,
drawing tool Inkscape,
still omnipresent Java,
GitHub gist editor Lepton,
favorite office suite LibreOffice,
LaTeX distribution MacTex,
Spotify,
code editor Visual Studio Code,
multimedia player VLC,
text editor Zettlr,
citation management tool Zotero

brew cask install brave-browser firefox gimp imageoptim inkscape java lepton libreoffice mactex-no-gui spotify visual-studio-code vlc zettlr zotero

Install 1Password, Keypass or Lastpass (or another good password manager)

brew cask install 1password 
brew cask install keypass 
brew cask install lastpass

Add CC Search, Decentraleyes, Open Access Button, Wayback Machine, Zotero Connector to your Brave installation

Add CC Search, Decentraleyes, Privacy Badger, uBlock Origin, Zotero Connector to your Firefox installation

Add Beautify, Docker, DotENV, Git History and Python to your VS Code installation

Add Better BibTex and Zotfile to your Zotero installation

There you go!

PS: If you want to learn more about Bash check out Introduction to the Bash Command Line.

more basic configurations

macOS 10.15, Linux Ubuntu 21.10 & Windows 10