Getting started with OSX

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Well yes, I am switching to OSX on my work machine. I'm still using my Surface Pro 3 at home and for meetings, but my primary work computer will be a 13" MacBook Pro from now on. As I had no experience whatsoever working with OSX, here are my notes on getting started:

 

Get OneNote

One of the most important productivity tools, for me, is OneNote. Everything from screenshots, recipes, drafts, ideas, writing, learning, to meeting notes goes there. I am simply not functional without it :) so just go to onenote.com and grab the latest version. It's free, too.

 

Get Brew and Cask

A package manager for OSX, once installed you can easily install packages (including dependencies) just like this:

$ brew search nmap

$ brew install nmap

 

And, importantly, updating packages is straightforward to. No more updating all individual applications, just run (Caution: this will update all packages!):

$ brew update && brew upgrade

 

Simple as that. Cask extends brew, and brings along many more packages.

 

Keyboard shortcuts

This was really important for me, as I am using keyboard shortcuts a lot on windows. There is a good list of possible shortcuts at apple.com.

Another important part, at least for me, in getting around in OSX are trackpad gestures. The most important can be found in the Trackpad section of "System Preferences".

 

Python

There's no PowerShell on the Mac. Bummer. I decided to look into Python and found a couple good sites for beginners.

 

More tools...

I use KeePass on my Windows machines, a lot. There are multiple possible solutions on OSX, the one that worked best for me is MacPass. It opens kdbx files and there is an autotype feature.

As I work a lot with console/command-line tools, a decent terminal emulator is key. A colleague pointed me to iTerm2, and I love it :)

Atom is a great, customizable text editor.

 

What else?

Am I missing something, do you have any suggestions? Comments are highly appreciated :)

 

Links

OneNote: http://onenote.com

Homebrew: http://brew.sh

Keyboard Shortcuts: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201236

Learn Python the hard way: http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/

Coursera: https://www.coursera.org/course/pythonlearn

Python: https://docs.python.org/2/library/index.html

MacPass: http://mstarke.github.io/MacPass/

iTerm2: http://iterm2.com

Atom: https://atom.io