Fish shell is my shell of choice and having it setup as default on the Mac requires some extra steps.

When homebrew is installed, run brew install fish.

After that, edit /etc/shells and add fish to it:

# sudo edit /etc/shells

Add the bottom of the file add:

/opt/homebrew/bin/fish

Then set the shell as default with:

chsh -s /opt/homebrew/bin/fish

It does require logging again to be activated.

I’m using Alacritty on the Mac and I noticed how the font rendering is much thicker than I’m used to on iTerm. On iTerm I use the “thin strokes” setting, which is not available in Alacritty.

Turns out, you can set it with:

defaults write org.alacritty AppleFontSmoothing -int 0

If you then log in and logout again, your Alacritty will be similar to the crispness you find in iTerm.

Some people like to have this kind of crispness across the entire OS. If you are one of them:

defaults write -g AppleFontSmoothing -int 0

I like to have my key repeat set high, because I still browse my code line, by line; yes, I know there are better ways to browse.

On the Mac, if you go through the “System Preferences”, there is only so much you can do. Luckily, you can get the right settings if you use the terminal.

First, make sure that you have disabled “Slow keys” in “System Preferences > Accessibility > Keyboard > Slow keys”.

Then go into your Terminal of choice and type:

defaults write -g KeyRepeat -int 1
defaults write -g InitialKeyRepeat -int 12

The normal minimum of KeyRepeat is 2. Setting it to 1 will have a key repeat delay of 15ms.

For the InitialKeyRepeat, the minimum is 10; 15 if you use system settings. I prefer to set it to 12.

If you want to restore the defaults, just go through the system settings and set it to a value you prefer.

I had to set up a new laptop recently, and one of the first things you install on a new laptop is Clojure.

Below is the setup I used and which got me started quickly. First, you must install Homebrew as a package manager.

Second, we also need Java, and the best option out there is supplied by Adoptium, which has pre-built OpenJDK binaries for you. Go to the website and download the latest LTS release if you want to be safe, or download the newest version (19 as of writing this) if you’re going to live on the edge.

After that, install Clojure is one command away:

brew install clojure/tools/clojure

Type clj on the command line, and when running for the first time, it will download the required packages and give you access to the REPL.

Now, for starting and managing projects, neil is an amazing new CLI which can help you do that. Install it with:

brew install babashka/brew/neil

There are many ways to install Emacs on the Mac, from pre-build Applications, to Homebrew, to installing from source.

My current favorite way to get the latest Emacs which has some additional stuff for the Mac is by using a build script, which builds Emacs from its source.

It’s called build-emacs-macos and is on Github. The instructions to use it are here in the README.