DevOps Engineering part 1. (Mac) – Make your Macintosh easier to use

Posted byLaszlo Pinter Leave a comment on DevOps Engineering part 1. (Mac) – Make your Macintosh easier to use

Enable the right-click

To be able the right-click on the mouse

  1. Open settings.
  2. Enable Secondary click for the mouse and the trackpad.

Disable caps lock

If you never write emails with all capital letters, and many times a day accidentally press the caps lock key, you can disable it.

  1. Open the Keyboard settings
  2. On the Keyboard tab click the Modifier Keys… button
     
  3. Assign the Caps Lock key to No action

Remove Siri from the control strip

If you don’t use Siri on your Mac, there is no reason for Siri to occupy space on the control strip above the keyboard.

  1. Open the Keyboard settings
  2. On the Keyboard tab click the Customize Control Strip button
  3. Move the mouse below the bottom of the screen to highlight the Siri icon on the control strip, and drag it from the control strip up to the screen.

How to lock the screen

On High Sierra ( macOS 10.13 ) and later

  1. Press the Cmd-Ctrl-q key combination to lock the screen.

On earlier macOS versions

To be able to lock the screen from the menu bar:

  1. In Finder search for Keychain Access and start it,
  2. In the Keychain Access menu select Preferences,
  3. Check the Show keychain status in menu bar checkbox,
    This will place a lock icon in the menu bar.

To lock your screen

  1. Click the lock icon in the menu bar
  2. Select Lock Screen

Show the full path in Finder

  1. Open Finder
  2. In the View menu select Show Path Bar
    Finder will show the full path of the current folder at the bottom of the window. 

To jump to a folder shown in the path bar just double click it.

Show hidden files and folders

  1. Open the terminal and execute the following line 
    defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles YES
  2. For the change to take effect relaunch Finder.
    • Press the ‘Option/Alt’ key, right click on the Finder icon in the dock and click Relaunch

Show the battery charge percentage

Before Monterey ( macOS 12 )

  1. Click the battery icon in the toolbar
  2. Select Show Percentage

In Monterey or later

  1. In System Preferences select Dock & Menubar
  2. On the left side scroll down to Battery Menu Bar and select Show Percentage

Apple Id without credit card

If you don’t have an Apple Id, create one. To obtain one without a credit card, you need to create the account in an older version of iTunes. In version 12.7 Apple removed the access to the App Store.

  1. Downgrade iTunes on your Mac to version 12.6. Follow the instructions at http://osxdaily.com/2017/09/17/downgrade-itunes-12-7-to-itunes-12-6/
  2. Start iTunes 12.6 on your Macintosh,
  3. Click the drop-down menu in the upper left corner,
    apple-id-01
  4. If Apps is visible, select it, otherwise click Edit Menu…
    • Select Apps, and click Done to display it in the drop down.
      apple-id-02
  5. Search for a free app in the App Store and start to download it,
    apple-id-03
  6. Create a new Apple Id and select None for credit card type.

Show the user home directory and drive root

  1. Open Finder
  2. In the Finder menu select Preferences
  3. Select the Sidebar tab
  4. In the Favorites section select the checkbox next to your user name
  5. In the Locations section select the name of the hard drive

Prevent Microsoft Outlook to send the message with Command-Enter

To prevent Outlook to send the email when you accidentally press Command-Enter, associate the Send action with a zero length character:

  • Quit Microsoft Outlook
  • Execute in the terminal 
    defaults write com.microsoft.Outlook NSUserKeyEquivalents -dict-add "Send" "\U200B"

Stop Spotlight indexing the Time Machine drive

Spotlight helps to search for files by indexing drives. To speed up the Time Machine operations prevent Spotlight indexing the Time Machine drive.

  • Connect the Time Machine drive to the computer.
  • In System Preferences select Spotlight
  • On the Privacy tab click the Plus sign
  • In the locations section select the Time Machine drive and click the Choose button
  • The list should contain the Time Machine drive

Homebrew

Homebrew is a package manager, it can install packages on your Macintosh that apple does not provide, like a few utilities below.

Installation

Installation instructions are at http://brew.sh/

List outdated software

  1. To list installed software that has new versions available, execute
    brew outdated

Update installed software

  1. To update (upgrade) all software that has new versions, execute
    brew upgrade

Uninstallation

To uninstall Homebrew if you don’t need it later execute

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

Limit battery charging to 80%

To prolong the life of the battery of your Macintosh, you can install a utility to stop battery charging at 80%.

  • Install BCLM from https://github.com/zackelia/bclm
    • If you don’t have ownership of Homebrew, before installation execute
      sudo chown -R $(whoami) /usr/local/var/homebrew
      sudo chown -R $(whoami) /usr/local/Homebrew/
    • The installation steps are currently
      brew tap zackelia/formulae
      brew install bclm
      sudo bclm write 77
      sudo bclm persist
    • Check the set value with
      bclm read
  • Turn off Optimized battery charging in System Preferences to give full control to the tool.

  • You may need to reboot the computer for the process to start monitoring the battery.
  • The charging will stop around 80%. It may goes above 80% with a few percents, but at least the battery is not fully charged.

After software update

The system software update usually resets the upper charging limit to 100%. After system update execute in a terminal

sudo bclm write 77
sudo bclm persist
bclm read

UTC Clock in the menu bar

xBar is a plugin manager that can display plugins in the menu bar. One of them is World Clock that can display multiple clocks in a drop down of the menu.

Install xbar

  1. Navigate to https://xbarapp.com/
  2. Click the Download xbar for macOS button
  3. Download and run the .dmg file to install the application
  4. Move the xbar application to the Applications folder

Add World Clock to BitBar

  1. Launch xbar form the Launcher
    • Click xbar in the tool bar
    • Select the Plugin browser
    • On the Time page select the World Clock

Customize World Clock

  1. To open the plugins folder click the UTC clock, select xbar, Open plugin folder…
  2. Open the 001-worldclock.1s.sh file in a text editor

To change the displayed timezones, edit the ZONES variable in the file:

ZONES="US/Pacific UTC Europe/London Europe/Berlin Asia/Kolkata Asia/Tokyo Australia/Sydney"

To change the display format, edit the data formats.

  1. To remove the seconds from the menu bar, delete the :%S from the format line
date -u +'%H:%M UTC'

To add the day of the week and date to the clocks in the World Clock drop down

add

  • %a for the day of the week
  • %Y for the four digit year
  • %b for the name of the month
  • %d for the date
  • %z for the time zone offset
echo "$(TZ=$zone date +'%H:%M - %a, %Y %b %d %z') $zone"

To refresh the dropdown formats after making changes in the config file

  1. Click the World Clock in the menu bar
  2. Select Preferences, Refresh all

Disk Inventory X

This utility displays the graphical representation of file sizes and helps to find the biggest files.

  1. Download it from http://www.derlien.com/

System information in the menu bar

Stats is a free open source software to display system information in the menu bar including

  • CPU usage and temperature
  • Memory usage
  • Network and hard drive usage

To install it, navigate to https://github.com/exelban/stats

Next:

Back:

to the Tutorials page

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