in today's video we are talking all about how to set your MacBook up for coding and productivity and we are setting it up in a way that's going to streamline your workflows make coding more efficient and hopefully boost your productivity so welcome back to a brand new video and welcome if you are new here if you are new here my name is Li and I love everything Tech so if that's something you're interested in please do consider hitting subscribe so the MacBook I'm setting up today is the M3 Pro MacBook Pro in the space black color I have already done the kind of basic Mac settings and I have a video on that so if you're interested go and check that out now don't worry if you have any other models so if you have an M1 an M2 or an Intel based MacBook you can still follow along this tutorial and for my Linux and windows users I'm also going to try and pop some Linux and windows Alternatives in the description box below if I'm using or talking about any Mac specific apps so everybody should be able to follow this video and that makes me very happy because these are apps that you honestly don't want to miss out on because they are so great so without further Ado let's get in to the video okay so the first thing I'm going to do is install my favorite browser and it's very important to consider what browser is right for you but my preferred browser is Google Chrome and here's why so Google Chrome is a fast and widely used web browser and of course it's developed by Google Chrome is pretty much known for its efficient performance it's tabed browsing and also it's clean interface it's really easy to use right my favorite things about Google Chrome is obviously the ability to have your Google Chrome account so you can kind of have your calendar your Gmail and just your kind of browsing account all in one place okay another thing I love about Google Chrome is obviously they have the Chrome web store so you can download loads of different extensions and themes for your Google Chrome which just either can support things like customization so for example I love using the uh custom cursor extension in order to get my little Hello Kitty and Ki cursors that you guys see me using and you ask me about all the time they've got so many different options so even if for example you just wanted a maybe a simple black cursor you can probably get this on here so I recommend checking out sticking on brand with customization obviously Google Chrome also has so many themes available my favorite one is this dark theme V3 which I'm currently using and this is what it looks like I feel like it's really nice Sleek elegant okay some other extensions I really like I'm just going to show you two of my favorite the first one is search GPT for Chrome okay so let me show you how this works basically every single time you Google something it's going to pop up with a chat gbt window that can sometimes give you the answer fairly quickly alternatively instead of going into chat gbt directly and opening up a new tab you can also just click in your little extension tab up here and it opens up a little chat window with chat gbt which yeah I just find really useful sometimes my only complaint about this is that I definitely recommend signing into a different account with that extension because as you can see every single time you make a Google search it will store it in your chat history with chat gbt so I do have a different account for this extension and then then my usual chat gbt account okay final extension I'm going to show you is the marinara Pomodoro assistant I know I'm not a student anymore I have a job I am a full-blown adult but I do still really enjoy using the Pomodoro assistant when I am working most people know what the Pomodoro method is is basically just timing yourself work and then giving yourself allocated time slots for breaks as well again let me quickly show you how this works so you just come up C this little tomato and then it will literally just start a 25 minute timer for you okay another option for your browser which so many of you guys have recommended to me in the past I've only been using it for a few weeks so I'm not actually going to talk about it too much in this video because I don't feel like I've used it long enough to actually give you my full thoughts or like an in-depth honest review however I have really enjoyed using it so far but Brave is a privacy focused web browser it was developed by brave but it's actually built on chromium which is the same open source software that Google Chrome is built on which might sound boring but it's actually really cool because it means that you can use Google Chrome extensions in Brave so basically Brave emphasizes user security and privacy number one by blocking ads and by blocking trackers and other web elements that can compromise your privacy or security when you're browsing the internet okay moving on now this is the number one thing that anyone who owns a Mac should install and that is Homebrew okay so Homebrew is a popular package manager it's a free and open SCE software that basically allows you to install software and libraries from the command line so it just makes installing everything so easy so in order to install it all we need to do is go to the home brew website and you literally just want to copy and paste this little bit of code that you see on the home screen okay then come to your Launchpad and you want to open up the inbuilt terminal on Mac which yes at the moment looks very boring but don't worry in just a minute we are going to fix that but for now let's install home brew so this is where you want to copy and paste that code that you just copied from the home brew website hit enter and then this is going to prompt you for your password so enter that and then we are going to start installing home brew simple as that and throughout this video you're going to see why having Brew installed in your MacBook is so handy and can save you so much time okay once you've successfully installed Homebrew it's very important that you read the output to be honest of any command that you ever write but it's very important that you read the one from Homebrew because it's actually telling you the next two steps that you need to do in order to make sure that you've installed home brew correctly so as you can see it's saying next steps make sure you run these two commands in your terminal to add home brew to your path so we are going to go ahead and do that so I'm just copying a pasting it into my terminal there and now home rout is all set up okay so as you guys saw we have just used the inbuilt terminal on Mac however there are many other different options that you can use for your terminal for example like iter 2 or warp now for anyone who knows me or anyone who works with me you guys know that I absolutely love working from the terminal it's actually my preferred method of working so even when I'm using VSS code to actually write my code I usually have an independent terminal open and that's where I'll be testing and actually running my code and 4 years I was actually just using the inil terminal on Mac but for a few months now my preferred terminal of choice has actually been warp so I was actually so excited when warp approached us about a collaboration because I yeah as I said I've been using it for a few months I've been really enjoying it yeah I feel like this is the perfect video for me to take you through some of the features and show you guys why I actually enjoy using warp this video is actually sponsored by warp which is so exciting so yeah let's see how Brew comes in handy now and let's download warp and get into why it's so cool this is where I want to show you how you can use Brew so we're going to come back to the home brew website and I'm going to go in this search box and I'm actually going to type in warp and as you can see it's actually going to give me the command again that I can just copy and paste into my terminal and what this is going to do is install W for me so rather than going to the website of any app that you actually want to download having to download it move it all into applications and everything you can just do it directly from the terminal I find that is actually a lot quicker as well and it's obviously so much easier so this is why I recommend using Homebrew okay so while it's installing let me tell you a little bit about it so it's a rust based terminal it has built-in AI which is one of the features that I really enjoy about it ah okay it's already installed so let's open it up and have a look okay first thing to mention about warp is that it does require a sign in I know some of you guys are not going to be overly keen on that but yes you do have to sign in I am already signed in because I have it linked to my Gmail account so that's all sorted out already okay now when you first open up whoop this is exactly what it looks like so already it's looking like a little bit more exciting than the inbuilt Mac terminal but if you want to customize it even furba you can do that by coming up into the settings as you can see it has many inbuilt themes just like you find on VSS code or any other code editor that you're probably already quite familiar with okay you can also change the font and the font size as well but I actually really like the default so I'm just going to stick with that okay also has some really great inbuilt keyboard shortcuts so for example we can use command shift T in order to quick quickly open up the theme picker panel and we can easily switch in between the different themes there and as you can see there are tons of other different keyboard shortcuts which are Super useful for like I said just speeding up your workflows and making everything a little bit more efficient so to show you some of the cool things that W can do I'm just going to start out by using some very basic commands in the terminal so I'm going to start out by using LS just to list all of the different files and folders in the current directory that we are in okay so as you can see whoop does this really cool thing but it actually will group your command and then also your output into something that it calls a block this is just a lot easier on the eye for me I find this is really nice for actually organizing my thoughts in my head because I can really nicely see the command that I've entered and then also the output together I find this is really useful when you're running either large lines of code or when your output is also different like large lines of code as well another really cool thing about it is that if we actually hover on these three dots next to the block we are actually presented with the option to either copy the command or copy the output individually even better you can actually click on this little button that says share and you can actually create a link which you're then able to share with anyone and let me show you how that looks feel like this will be so useful for teamwork and also for me for example I'm often helping students with basic kind of um coding navigation or just basic coding skills in general and I just feel like this will be really nice just to be able to like quickly send them over bits of code so yeah I'm a big fan of this feature I think it's really sick okay next feature that is absolutely sick if we click on the top Arrow key as you can see it's actually going to present you with a history of previous commands that you've run this is for me personally a game changer I often am literally holding down that Arrow key trying to find a line of code that I ran maybe a few days ago or even like an hour ago that I need to run again but for some reason I didn't write down anywhere one of those kind of like really little things that actually day to-day save you so much time and also just save you a big headache okay next up my main source of frustration honestly the reason that I was like okay I need to stop using just the terminal and I need to move to code editors is you know when you're working in the terminal and you write out like a full command then you realize that you've made an error on like the second I don't know word in the whole sentence and you actually have to scroll all the way back because you can't just click anywhere in the sentence to like fix your spelling mistake well in warp you can actually do that which is mind-blowing so let me show you that's a demonstration of how you can use it think it's so cool and again one of those reallyy little things that just save you so much time okay last feature that I want to talk about is one that we should be and probably will be seeing in all kind of features or apps released in the near future and that is that they have released AI into the terminal so I find this really useful in instances where I need to do something uh quite complex but also really easy and I've just completely forgotten how to do it so for example say there was an instance where I wanted to find all of the files in my MacBook which had the extension uh PDF all I need to do is use tilder to open up War Ai and then I can just say exactly what I want to do so find all PDF files on my MacBook and as you can see it actually gives you the command that it suggests that you use you can then click on it if you like the look of it and it will auto populated it for you then all you need to do is hit enter and as you can see it runs the command for you and there we go it's finding all of the PDF files on my MacBook this probably wasn't the best example cuz there's going to be tons as you can see in the output here but yeah it also obviously just saves you happen to have that extra kind of chat gbt window open because you can just do it all directly within the terminal which I think is super cool so yeah especially if you are new to the terminal you haven't used it you feel scared of using the terminal I feel like warp is just a great place to start it's a great place to start familiarizing yourself with the terminal and getting used to coding directly within the terminal as well so of course I will have warp linked down below and thank you so much again to what for sponsoring this video and now let's move on to our next essential app now the next app will come as no surprise to most of you and that is of course VSS code so vs code is a widely used source code editor and it's super popular amongst developers mostly I personally feel like it is massively underutilized in the academic and dat science space but it actually has so many good extensions for data scientist and academics so I'll try and show a few of those to you today first download vs code again we can use Brew now two things I like to do when I open up vs code number one is hit control shift p type in code you want to find the line that says install code command in path what this means is that you're going to be able to open vs code just using Code Dot from the terminal rather than having to find the app you don't have to do this but sometimes it is just a little bit useful if you've got a terminal open and you want to quickly open up VSS code you can just do it that way but again you don't have to do it okay and the next thing I always do when open up VSS code is of course choose a theme now you have several options here you can either design your own theme if you're interested in doing that I have a video tutorial and also a free guide which I'll link down below or you can just choose a theme from the extension tabs obviously I have my own themes on there if you want to use those so I'm going to go ahead and use my favorite one which is a genomics PhD code um this is a pink and blue tone theme which I think is really pretty um I mean I would hope so because I spend ages trying to make it but another theme I really like like I said earlier is Dracula so if you don't like my one I recommend checking out Dracula okay along with changing the color theme I will usually also install an icon pack which is basically just another way of personalizing the ide's visual Aesthetics however Beyond aesthetic considerations the ey compacts I feel like also facilitate um efficient file type recognition which ultimately streamlines your navigation process so moving between different files it just makes it a little bit easier to know which kind of files you're clicking into with options ranging from minimalistic designs to thematic visual elements incorporating an icon pack enhances both the visual appeal and also the functionality of the VSS code interface which offers a professional yet customized touch to the coding experience my favorite is actually the Animal Crossing icon pack which looks like this and yeah I think it's really cute another extension I love is vs code pets this is the fun extension that injects a bit of like fun and person into your editor so in vs code pets you can choose from a variety of virtual pets like dogs cats rabbits each with its own unique characteristics and animations they live in like this little small window within your IDE and they respond to coding activities and just provide kind of like a light-hearted presence as you work but also serve as like a friendly reminder to just take a moment to actually enjoy the process of coding sometimes it's not always about the end product but actually the journey that you go on to get to that end product right okay moving on want to some more serious extensions I will also always install all the language extensions that I might use so for me that would be python R Julia um JavaScript um so install what's relevant for you using the same method that I'm doing here so all I'm doing is going into the extensions tab typing in the language that I want to install and as you can see you can just click on install of course if you're downloading extensions for these languages and you then want to actually execute any code within VSS code using these languages you need to make sure that you have actually installed that language onto your computer so to do that again you can use Homebrew or you can just go onto Google search for download python for mac and install it that way but yeah make sure you are downloading languages that you're going to be using locally on your computer I work mostly on a high performance cluster so I actually don't have any kind of burning need to do that but yeah make sure that you are doing that if you need to of course I'm going to install chat gbt to get a quick solution to some code errors if I ever need and a few other extensions that I really enjoy like intell code rainbow csb which as a data scientist is one of my favorite extensions ever because it just helps you see your data so much easily as you can see here but I am actually going to be doing a full video on my vs code setup and I'm also going to do a little vs code for beginners tutorial as well so make sure you're subscribed if you want to see that video but now let's move on to some of the productivity apps that I really like um installing on my Mac that I feel like just helped me get so much more work done and help me keep everything organized okay so you guys ask me all the time what it is that I used to plan everything from content creation to gym progress to keeping track of my coding projects and of course it is notion notion is a productivity and not taking app which I feel like most of you guys should have probably heard about by now um but it is what I use to plan literally everything I have actually a full video on my whole notion setup so I'm not going to go too in depth but I'm going to give you a little bit of a tour but yeah as you can see see I do literally use it for everything so I have separate pages for coding life chucking my incomes um taking notes checking my reading list and also planning out all of my videos like for example this one but as this video is all about coding I'm going to show you guys a snippet of my coding page as you can see up here I have quick access links so these are all of the links that I use fairly often for example data Camp I'm pretty much always doing a course on data camp at any moment in time so I'm always kind of dipping in and out of the website so I have that link there just so I can easily access it along with GitHub free code Cam and also my coding Discord on the right hand side here this is where I keep track of all of my personal and work projects to be honest so each of these you can open up as their own page and they just have lots of detailed notes screenshots code blocks and all of that good stuff I just find it really useful to keep track of my project okay here I also have my little cozy coding sessions playlist then down here I have resources and videos so this is where I will record any useful videos that I've seen that I want to watch or any courses or anything like that that I want to keep up to date with and make sure that I don't use the link for and then down here we also have some code Snippets so uh I don't use this too often but I did add it to my template just in case any of you guys would find it really useful um but this is just a place to dump Cod Snippets that you find are really useful but you think you may forget so again if you want to use my template or you want to see a full tour of my noce I'm going to have that video linked somewhere up here and I'll also of course pop it in the description for you guys okay next another that I love for productivity is rectangle okay so rectangle is an app which you can use in order to basically split the views on your MacBook super easily with some different keyboard shortcuts so say for example you want to split your screen so maybe you want your code open on one half and then you want maybe an Excel spreadsheet open on another half you can just use rectangle in order to quickly just pop your Excel spreadsheet on the left hand side and your code on the right hand side it has tons of different configurations so that is just really PR easy saves you having to drag your windows across and kind of like resize them or you can just use the rectangle app next up a few social apps that I use obviously slack I feel like so many developers use slack but I use slack in order to communicate with actually my previous supervisor who I still do some work for every now and then because we are finishing up a few papers so I use slack in order to stay up to date with him and then I also download Discord if you guys don't know I do have a coding Discord I'll give you a link little quick tour of it right now this is your sign to download Discord and join the server because it is super useful as you will see in just a second so I believe we are literally just under 6,000 members so it is growing super quickly as you can see we have so many different channels all work and non-w work related it's just a really nice community that we've got here we've got channels for bu informaticians web and app developers data science cyber security and so much more we also have help forums where people can post in any questions that they have about any code kind of like a little mini stack Overflow within the Discord server so yeah definitely recommend downloading this okay and to end this video I'm going to show you one or two things that I do actually on my general Mac settings in order to just make my life a little bit easier as well and also just make my Mac more visually appealing so if you've just got a brand new Macbook you will notice that your doc which is this little kind of bar on the side that has all of your apps will be completely full with a load of random apps that you will never use and they often can be quite distracting so the first thing I will do like I said is clean up my dock in order to do that you would just need to come along to here and you can control right click on any of these apps you can then hover into options and choose to remove it from your doc equally if you have an app open that you want to add to your doc permanently say for example I want to add a brave to my doc permanently all I need to do is again control right click head down to options and then click on keeping dock and then as you can see even once I close this app Brave will still be on my Dock and is easily accessible so I like to do that and just make sure that all of the apps that I regular use are on my doc again if you come into system settings head down to desktop and dock you can also change the position of your dock so if you want it on the bottom or you want it on the right hand side or the left hand side here you can also change the size and the magnification of your dock as well okay the very last thing that I want to show you is something that I like to do in my finder which I feel like makes navigation in the Mac OS a lot simpler because honestly by default I think navigation in Mac OS is super clunky and just unnecessarily difficult so I'll open up my finder click on view and I will always toggle on the show path bar and also show this data bar and then as you can see I can see how much storage I've got available and I can also see my file path as well which is really nice so we have now complete the setup of our MacBook we've downloaded some really apps for coding and productivity if you guys think I missed any apps or there's any apps that you think I should check out please comment them down below because these are just apps that I have found along my journey of using the Mac OS which I believe has been about 2 or 3 years now since I switched over from Linux to Mac so yeah there's probably some really cool apps out there that I am missing but as you can tell it's getting very dark outside very quickly so I'm going to end this video here I hope you guys enjoyed it and found it useful and I hope you learned something from this video let me know what videos you want to see from me next time and yeah I will see you guys in my next video