Set up MacOS for Linux user

Tools and applications that make life on Macs bearable.

CLI tools

Enhance shell with atuin, zoxyde, starship.

Standard CLI tools replacement and enhancements: bat, eza, dust, duf, dua, fd, ripgrep.

Menu bar

New MacBook Air has a notch, and because of that icons in menu bar are not always visible, as some of them tend to be behind the notch. Also, some applications just use the menu bar to indicate that they are running, providing no actions. As usual, there is a paid app that helps with that: Bartender.

Vanilla is another application that I've tried to manage icons in menu bar, and discarded, as I was unable to figure out what icons it hides and when.

A bit of different application is Stats, which allows displaying in menu bar CPU/GPU load, RAM consumption, battery level, and network/disk activity and throughput.

Applications Hotkeys

Coming from Linux and Awesome WM, I've been missing its features that allowed me managing windows and applications with keyboard shortcuts.

Phoenix allows defining global hotkeys to manage windows and applications, and script reactions with JavaScript, so I can assign a hotkey per application, like ⌘+1 for Chrome, ⌘+2 for Sublime Text, ⌘+3 for Outlook, ⌘+4 for Slack, and so forth.

Rectangle configures window sizes and positions with hotkeys, been using it before I found Phoenix.

Terminal

iTerm2 so far works the best, and it allows configuring a hot key ⌘+enter to bring a quake-like console atop of working screen, and it allows opening multiple tabs. Within iTerm2 I use ⌃+1, ... ⌃+9 keys to switch between these tabs.

I've tried multiple other terminals available for Mac: WezTerm, Kitty, Alacritty, and so far none of them fits the bill. Notable struggles include making them work like quake-like console with tabs, and providing sane defaults that work with SSH.