Pimp my MacBook
I recently started at Google and the first thing that happened on start for me was I was issued a brand new MacBook Air. I just barely missed the newly released version based on the Ivy Bridge and including a slightly sharper display… but I’m not losing any sleep over it because I’ll be using the machine solely as a thin client – accessing services and servers remotely. Every time I get a new machine I make a point of pimping it out and this machine is no exception. The following lists a few things that I did to move in and feel more at home. Before my last MacBook was stolen… I had learned a thing or two about tweaking out a Mac, it’s been a while since I last did this so I figured why not remember all the nuances I love and combine them into a post.
Install TotalTerminal
This one is so important to me that I almost want to post it twice. I used to use a killer app called Visor that adds a Quake style drop down command prompt whenever you press control+`. Having a command prompt everywhere, shared across multiple spaces (desktops?) is very handy. The app has since changed to TotalTerminal and is a little harder to get rolling the way that I like. However, once I figured out a few nits, I was good to go. The nits…
- Transparency in TotalTerminal requires that you have XCode installed
- TotalTerminal doesn’t really “hook” into OS X until the first run of terminal, add it to startup at login
S1="[\[$(tput setaf 1)\]\d \t \[$(tput setaf 2)\]\u@\h:\[$(tput setaf 7)\]\w ] $(tput sgr0) "
- New Tab Clock – helps to reduce noise when you open a new browser window.
- Evernote web clicker is good if you use the app in various forms; with cloud bookmark sync, I stopped using Evernote.
- Invisiblehand is nifty for quick price comparisons.
See Also