I recently had the ‘pleasure’ of freshly reinstalling Mac OS X ‘El Capitan’ on my MacBook Pro. As an experiment, i took notes on what i did after that: what settings i changed, which apps i installed and other tweaks i did.

Tweaks and settings:

• Remove useless apps from Dock (Facetime, Maps, etc)
• Copy ‘home’ directory from backup disk
• Removing useless shortcuts from Finder sidebar (“All my files”, iCloud, etc)
• Copy keychains and set as default
• Drag the dock to the left instead of bottom
• Enable ‘don’t rearrange spaces’
• Enable ‘don’t correct spelling’
• Enable full keyboard access
• Disable natural scrolling
• Enable ‘Show path bar & status bar’ in Finder
• Increase tracking pad speed a few notches
• Enable sound volume slider in menu bar (not all of my keyboards have volume keys)
• Add signatures in Mail.app
• Enable ‘Show on desktop: hard disk’
• Enable ‘New finder window shows home directory’
• Enable ‘When Searching, search current folder’
• Don’t show warning when changing an extension
• Set computer name to something meaningful and easy to remember
• Copy .ssh settings
• Disable gamed daemon
• Snap to grid for desktop icons
• Hot corners: top left for all applications and bottom right for desktop
• Add nice custom backgrounds for desktop spaces
• Play a sound when the volume changes
• Set mouse speed to maximum
• Add keyboard shortcuts for fast moving of mail messages to folders
• Enable ‘show date in menu bar’

Apps / packages i install, in order of importance

• Chrome
• Sublime Text
• Spectacle (if you don’t know this app, check it out)
• Macpass
• Mamp
• Dropbox
• Google drive
• Xcode
• Spotify
• Echofon
• Legacy java
• Cafeine
• Imageoptim
• Telegram
• Nvalt
• Slack
• Transmission
• Torbrowser
• Virtualbox
• Vlc
• Office
• Brew
• Compass
• npm

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