The definitive macbook guide for new users

I bought a macbook in Jan 2026. It was a pretty ballsy move back then, for me atleast. I was in this duressing part of my life where the next few months i needed to be this high performance employee at my company while also simultaneously absolving my academic sins, redoing my backlog courses. It was clear that I needed the most portable and also powerful machine as possible to deal with this double life. Hence the macbook. I did my research, since I had never used macOS before in my life, and here are all the things ive found that has had a positive net improvement on my productivity since i installed them and other niceties which make my life using the macbook better.

Applications

Things to install (non negotiables)

Raycast

I am a total evangelical for this app. I could write an entire blog post about this app. It’s the swiss army knife you need in your macbook. It is a collection of a lot of small things, which combined, and over time make your life so easy in retrospect. The countless hours this app has saved me is insane.

Features I use:

• Clipboard manager linked to cmd + shift + v
• Snippets HOOLY FUCK you have no idea how much i use this (linked to opt + s)
• App macros (capslock + m opens spotify for music, capslock + w for whatsapp, capslock + t for terminal, capslock + b for brave browser, capslock + f for finder)
• Quick google/youtube/amazon search (quicklinks) with ctrl + option + g/y/a, i also have quicklinks for dashboards and stuff i don’t want to remember. Its better than making bookmarks
• Quick dictionary lookups with ctrl + option + m
• Window management with (ctrl + option + cmd + h/j/k/l/c/m) (h - split half and move right, j - split half move down, k - split half move up, l - split half move left, c - center window middle of screen, m - maximize window to screen size without fullscreening the app)
• Quick notes (opt + n)
• Coffee in raycast to keep the macbook awake during overnight agent runs
• random timezone clarifications, inr to usd conversions (clutch), checking calendar for meetings
• speed test, kill process
• and so many more things i cant even recall because its muscle memory atp. Their youtube channel is a dearth of awesome usecases for raycast which you couldn’t even come up with but you’ve needed them all along. Raycast is the definitely the app that has made my experience with MacOS better than what it was with my prev setup on Arch

WisprFlow (or some open source alternative)

It is basically just a whisper model linked to a keypress on your MacBook. I use the function key (that lets you speak anything in your natural cadence) that it converts it to text, complete with the proper punctuation, replacements, grammatical corrections, whatever the fuck. It is hella accurate, picks up your slang, programmable with your vocabulary and replacements (you can say my linkedin and it would replace in real time with your actual linkedin link). The main reason I use it a lot is because it is such a high bandwidth way to communicate with AI agents. I can input words upto 150 wpm sometimes in to prompt fields explaining what I want and that lets me move fast and infodump context with ease. The subscription is damn worth it imo.

Ghostty terminal, supacode agentic terminal manager

Ghostty is like the first thing i install on any system regardless of OS because of how fast it is as a terminal emulator and also how customizable it is with themes. I set it up on my macbook with a slight translucency and JetBrains mono font and it looks amazing.

Supacode is basically a terminal extender with agent management and git worktree ease of use features. Lets you run a lot of multiple agents at the same time and helps you keep track of them all with pings and notification noises whenever an agent needs your input or if its done. Very very good if you are in the same line of work as I am.

IINA media player (open source)

VLC media player level of customization with the clean Tahoe UI elements. No borders, no disruption. You get what you install and nothing more. No complaints. Best app

Markdown preview app (open source)

If there is one macbook default app that i love, it would be this app called preview which opens the pdfs. Simple, does its damn job, has no borders nothing. Markdown files however are not native to macOS like pdfs are, and in order to look at them rendered I’d have to move them to my obsidian vault and open it off of obsidian, super cumbersome. This app is like preview but for markdown files. Highest compliment I can give it, super fucking clean, does its job and does it well.

Localsend

This creates an ecosystem without you having to own an iphone for it. Whatever you manage to install this on, hook it up to the same wifi, it all becomes part of the same device somewhat. I use this app all the time to share my pastes across my devices, from my phone to my macbook, my tablet etc. I can share files at blazing speeds between devices. Incredible app

Obsidian

You should’ve seen me at the prime of Notion vs Obsidian battles. I was all for federation, ownership of your own notes and speed of app use. Nowadays, as much as those reasons are important, I find myself loving this app for other reasons, mainly its CLI tools working with my AI agents seamlessly to access my vault with ease, the skill files made by Kepano which lets AI agents understand my vault better.

Brave Browser

It’s chromium based, it works, and it comes with built in adblockers. Slightly bloated at the beginning but nothing you cannot debloat and get to work on. Also lets you get a sidebar for the tabs which I love using instead of the usual tab bar on the top layout which only shows a few tabs at a time. Set it and forget it for me, whereas my previous Firefox + Ublock origin setup would require some maintenance to have it keep blocking youtube ads from time to time imo

Communication (Whatsapp + telegram + discord)

I used to be this weirdo who used to keep all communication done within my browser window only. I would only use the web versions of all of these apps because installing them is a pain (I come from Arch land, hope that makes sense now). Well all that changed when I got this macbook. I can ASSURE you the whatsapp experience on macbook is the best experience you’ll have with the app on any device and form factor you can access whatsapp through at this moment. It doesn’t stutter, works cleanly, and the downloads actually work and nothing breaks like it usually does on web. Especially the LONG loading time at the beginning when you load the website as if its decrypting nuclear secrets when all i want to do is send a cat vid to mom. cant believe i used to live like that wtf

Tailscale

I wish I discovered this when I was struggling to play with my friends on minecraft, waiting on Aternos queues. This lets you log in with google oauth on your devices of choice, and regardless of what network they are on, they all effectively work like they are on the same wifi network if you connect them all to the tailscale VPN. Super useful if you are at a restaurant and you want to ssh into your macbook to see how your agents are doing from your mobile phone. You could also host some home websites on your homeserver, hook it up to tailscale and now effectively all tailscale connected devices can access that website while its gated off from the rest of the world. Free plan is goated.

Other niceties

boringnotch (open source)

Notch on the keyboard is jarring, this lets you make a dynamic notch (like the one on the iphone) and put a calendar, music control even music lyrics that appear with the dynamic animation at notch hover. Clean and sick

Paper

It’s like basically figma, except its all HTML internally, and it connects to your AI agent using an MCP. There was one more like this called Pencil which is effectively the same thing and free, but its not HTML based and it forces the agent to eyeball it with screenshots which only jacks up my token spend. HTML is what agents work with naturally, and Paper just renders it in canvas form. I use it not just to wireframe UI (which i imagine is its intended purpose) but also to design invitations, posters (oneshot clutched my capstone project poster with this), ppts, documents, all sorts of shit that requires you to look at the creative output and iterate. Thanks to it all being HTML you can export the thing into basically any format you want. 16 dollars per month kinda steep though, I only buy the subscription occasionally.

Stremio + torrentio

Stremio lets you stream anything from anywhere. It gives you a frontend for all your movies and shows, like Netflix. You can log into it from any device and it will just work right out of the box. Lets you install extensions for sources. Technically, you could install sources which fish streams for your fav shows/movies from trusted torrents and stream them for you without having to download the entire video. I don’t condone piracy though. Hmm, I wonder what torrentio is?

Astris (binary available on github, but closed source) for nintendo switch emulation

A very recent find. Wanted to test my macbook’s capabilities on nintendo switch emulation. This app is basically a fork of the ARM version of Yuzu (the well known switch emulator) which uses Apple Metal (the internal GPU language thingy, like CUDA for Nvidia i think) to render them instead of using a translation layer and hogging compute. Works like a charm. 60fps (max) mario kart at 2x resolution and 30fps (max) pokemon sword at 2x res. No stutters. It didn’t even get heated up all that much either. Goes to show how capable M series chips are. I only tried 2 roms on it but community seems to love this app so much and it seems stable to. Perfect for occasional gaming

Packages

mole from homebrew for cleanups

Installing mole off of homebrew and debloating this macbook was the first thing I did and you should too. Removes a lot of shit that macOS comes with and frees up a lot of storage. I use it occasionally to audit and remove useless things. Quintessential for macOS users.

btop for monitoring

Just a monitor for your processes, like htop except cooler and you can move things around and monitor a lot of other things as well. You can set up configs for your fav views and stuff.

typst for PDF typesetting

Imagine if Latex and markdown had a baby. The ease of typesetting in text format and getting a clean finished pdf after compilation, except it was actually readable to look at. Has saved me many times from opening google docs or microsoft word and actually having to deal with the horrendous UI to make the simplest documents. Since its pretty straightforward to make a .typ file for any document with any text arrangement, any picture positioning, any formatting you can think of, I just have my, you guessed it, AI agents deal with the pain of creating legal documents, research papers, contract templates etc. Most importantly, the text plane and the visual rendering/formatting plane are completely decoupled (as it should be!) which means you could just make a single line replacement and have your exact text reformatted in a different way, to a different look. If you are a writer you can easily make a few easy line replacements and ship out your book as a perfectly formatted pdf, an ebook file, etc. Its actually far more powerful than I use it for, but never bothered to look too deep into it.

imagemagick / ffmpeg

Quintessential media manipulation CLI tools. Apart from having a few oneliners aliased to my zshrc for the occasional video/audio download off of youtube (who even uses online downloaders these days) I can’t remember a single flag of ffmpeg for shit. I just have my (YES HAH)AI agents deal with the complex commands that make them do what I want them do, like simple frame extractions, video edits, etc

bat + eza

Point replacements for cat and ls respectively. cat just dumps text in your terminal and calls it a day, no syntax highlighting, no line markers, no scroll daemon nothing. bat provides you with all that. Same with ls, coloured formatting for ls. Just alias cat and ls in your zshrc with these and forget they exist until you’re writing a blog post and you do a brew list to list all your CLI tools and you realize how much they improve your life without you knowing it

fzf + ripgrep + zoxide

Mostly super QoL improvements over their alternatives. fzf is a blazing fast fuzzy finder for your files. ripgrep is a replacement for grep but you guessed it, fast af (alias grep to ripgrep in zshrc). And zoxide is a smart autosuggestioner for your most used cd commands.

neovim (i personally use lazyvim defaults)

Sometime during my arch days I bit the bullet and drank the nvim koolaid. Turns out you can do a lot without using your mouse on a terminal text editor (who would’ve thought? not me). Mostly its a feeling of independence, that you don’t need a GUI to code, you can get everything done through the terminal and most importantly, save yourself from the carpal tunnel caused by mouse use for a few mins everyday (sarcasm). As much as I don’t use it anymore and I’ve forgotten most of the macros thanks to me using Cursor on macbook like a sane normal person, the hjkl movements stuck with me for life, I use it to navigate all sorts of things all the time, everything from lazygit to moving my windows around with raycast. If you are feeling crazy enough to go the nvim route, use lazyvim first, install a ton of plugins, break them, cry and come back to cursor like I did. Yes. I admit defeat. nvim never was for the faint of heart anyway. I do use it occasionally to make point edits to files without having to open cursor just to feel something.

lazygit + lazydocker

How the hell did I go most of my dev life without this idk. Found it a couple years too late. TUI for git and docker, lets you do most git/docker commands with keyboard macros. You’re telling me I don’t have to remember the complex git command for rebasing/resetting? Count me in. lazydocker also has these cute graphs to show container use which is awesome.

fastfetch + figlet

Purely cosmetic. fastfetch is the better written, highly customizable big brother of neofetch (which I hear has been archived, by the dev who has decided to become a farmer now? goals) figlet lets you print text in stylized ways which i have put in zshrc so it pops up when i spawn a new terminal. I have it print in big slant style the name of the device (“phobos” in my macbooks case, “mars” for my homeserver, “deimos” for my mobile phone termux) to remind me of which device im sshing into.

hiddenbar

MacOS is weird. All running processes end up at the top as an icon and honestly it looks odd to me. I’d love to have them all sit in a menu (like windows does) but it simply doesn’t allow that. This is a statusbar cleaner thingy which wraps up all those icons into the menu. Pretty weird that we gotta install an app for this, but it is what it is and this app does it without complaining.

tmux

How does someone even live without this? I use it all the time in my servers to spawn persistent terminal sessions that I attach and detach to when needed. I just have daemons, http servers running in tmux all the time. You could also customize it to panes, windows, views and stuff which was rage for me for a short while, but nowadays i just use ghostty/supacode tabs, it aint that deep. A more beginner approachable alternative is zellij (was using this during my Arch beginner days)

MacOS settings to tweak

• Obv set all of the above apps as default apps to open files, especially IINA
• the stupid DSstore. DSstore is like a small file finder makes to remember the POSITIONAL location of the subdirectory/file icons within a folder. How crazy is that? And it gets committed into my git repos all the time and it bugs me so much. I made it so that it doesnt show up when I’m looking for hidden files, and gitignored that thing globally. Best QoL improvement ever. No more remove DS store commits to my repos
• shows the space in current folder underneath in the statusbar
• cmd + shift + 3/4/5 do not save outputs, copies only to clipboard to paste anywhere

Dock

• set it to vanish by default, frees up valuable screen real estate, especially if its a 14 inch macbook
• reduce its damn size, its so huge by default holyfuck
• remove all the frickin apple ecosystem apps from it, dont need them
• keep just the apps you use and keep the set very minimal
• make sure it is small in size but on hover it enlarges (there is a setting for this)
• put settings in the dock, you can right click it to see all the subheadings before clicking on them, saves a step

Other dope tips

• cmd + delete(backspace) deletes a file to bin
• cmd + delete when you are typing a sentence deletes the entire sentence
• opt + delete deletes the word alone
• You can use cmd/opt + arrow keys to move sentence by sentence or word by word in a piece of text you typed
• Three finger swipe up/down/left/right my BELOVED. I’ve disabled stage manager, it made no sense to me whatsoever. I occasionally do cmd + m on apps to minimize them to dock so they don’t show up when I do 3 finger swipe up to look at all open windows. I love the minimize and maximize genie animation so much. These gestures map to ctrl + up/down/left/right arrow and i have these macro’d to my Kreo Chimera V2 mouse extra buttons and its part of my workflow to the point that i struggle to work with macOS without this mouse.

Macbook care tips

• Get one of those microfiber cloths you get for buying spectacles, wipe it down weekly, the aluminium shell gets a bit smudgy and if you have one of those lighter colours it could actually look dirty
• When wiping the screen inside, do it in gentle circular motions
• The keyboard doesnt turn off when the macbook is turned on, and im too lazy to shut it down, so i have this thing on raycast called clean keyboard which rejects keyboard input for 5 mins, i just deepclean the keyboard with the microfiber cloth in that time
• never put anything in between the screen and keyboard and close it, even a thin sheet of paper should not be put in there.
• never install any screen protector on it, it does more harm than good
• dont even install any sort of those shells on the macbook it looks tacky as hell anyway
• The only accessories i suggest you buy is one of those HDMI extender dongles which come with a USB port and an extra type C port and a soft envelope like cushioned carry pocket thingy to put the macbook in
• Keep it plugged in as much as possible. Very counterintuitive to what our parents tell us, but it keeps the lithium ion battery inside it from cycling for no reason, improving the longevity of the battery by a lot. This is how i still have 100% battery health even after 6 months of heavy use (on average 9-10 hours per day)
• Try not to use the keyboard all that much. Its apparently a known issue that the oils in your finger interfere with the screen coating or something and make it de-adhere microscopically which kinda gets visible after sometime. You’ll know its happening when you see small brown specks on the screen that don’t seem to go away no matter how much you wipe them sometimes.
• Try not to stress the macbook too much when its in clamshell mode, if it heats up regularly with the screen pressed against the hottest part it could lead to damage in the long run