Fixing macOS Default Settings

Mac defaults are absolutely insane. Not in a good way. They're just terrible. I cannot believe Mac users have been dealing with this. Let's dive into the things that happen on Mac OS right out of the gate that I absolutely hate and then we'll fix because I I'm sorry. I cannot believe anybody would use stock Mac in this way. So, first off, let let's just jump into the sidebar. This thing. Now, you'll notice my sidebar probably looks a little bit different than the stock experience. Stock experience has it blown up about twice as big. And as you go from one icon to the next, there's this magnification effect. I mean, if you're in second grade, you probably think that's cool, but for me, I was like, that's insane. And then it's like just tons of bloat on the dock and everything here. So, I remove all the animation and get rid of it. Speaking of which, when it comes to max defaults, I probably could sum it up like this. uh Mac it it's like someone was a crackhead that was cocktailing some LSD with an absolute love of animations. Everything has animations. Oh my gosh. So like the switching of desktops like you can see here this is obviously modified but here is the stock experience. Actually this is a little bit better than stock. I'm not even going to revert all the animations so you get like the whoosh effect. But you see this slide that happens from one desktop to the next. That's crazy. Like what is Mac doing now? That's with reduced motion and other things. So that's the the optimal effect. The the absolute less you can make it as a stock default. Now I'm using thirdparty tools here. So we just like a normal person go one, two, three, one, two, three. You can go as fast or slow as you want. It's it's what Linux users have been doing for eons. And as a Linux user coming to Mac, I'm like, "All right, I have to fix this because this uh I'm going to puke on my computer." Anyways, continuing on. I'm I'm going to try and rattle these off as quick as I possibly can. Um, next up, Finder. Oh my god, Finder. The worst file manager like ever created is by Mac. This thing. Oh, there's so much to do here and talk about. I'm going to try and make it as small as possible though. First off, icon. This is crazy. This is the default view of Mac. And like if you have it like this, then you have to like scroll over and find things. I guess that's why they call it Finder. You're always searching for crap, but you can never find it. Also, like the defaults, like the search searches the entire computer instead of the folder you're in. Like, why is that the default? Um, so anyways, I switched to list view. Another thing, the sidebar is completely bloated up with a bunch of stuff that Windows does the same thing on the sidebar with like quick access is what they call it, but the sidebar and Mac obviously removing like uh those things little little little touches that could happen from an aesthetics point of view. It's almost like there's just no whoever is working on this, there's just needs to be some more detailoriented things where the OCD person in me is like, "God, it should not be like this." Uh, so obviously I just fixed it. So now it's pretty much alphabetical. But then we remove AirDrop. What? Wait, what? Sonology drives now back up there. No. Why? Anyways, some bugs and just kind of cleaning up sidebar. Kind of important. Uh the path right here obviously enable path bar, enable status bar. The fact these are off by default tells me that Apple thinks its users are 10year-olds that don't like to know where they're at in their computer or they only use the desktop and documents folder. Also, not having a status bar showing item count and how much drive space is left. There's just so much wrong with Finder. It's like blows my mind how bad it is. So, Finder awful. Um, but I I you can make those settings and these changes that I've shown here to to make it less of a thing. Oh, before before I go too, if you're a Windows and a Linux user watching this, uh, you you might notice some Mac users, if you ever get someone polluting your network with DS store files, that file is essentially saving for the Mac user. Hey, this is icon view or list view. You can safely delete that file because that Mac user if they know anything, they're going to set those defaults. Like my defaults are set like a sane person to list view and if there is no DS store file, which I purposely made my Mac not create these on the network files because I care about other users and I want to be looking out for them. I don't want to be polluting up all that with DStore files everywhere. Ah. Ah, DS store files. Just delete them. Just delete them. And they should not by default be creating them on network shares with multiple systems. Small rant about the DS store files, but an important one and you should know what they do. And yes, delete them anytime you see them. So, you have my permission. You may piss off a Mac person, but whatever. Tell them to set their defaults and then they never have to worry about it. And and honestly, as a as I use this, I honestly don't like that DS store file saving anything. The only time I want that DStore file created is something like that has pictures and maybe I want to go like a gallery view or something like that. Uh that's the only time where I'm like, hey, it should create it in that instance. But the fact that that's the default just wild, absolutely wild. Now, I want to talk about the security of a Mac because that's another thing when it comes to system limitations. You have system integrity protection. You also have extended Unix permissions. You might be thinking, Titus, what the hell are you talking about? Let me just show you. I've wanted to kind of label all these things because everything I'm showing right now can be fixed every as as with anything with Windows. I created the Windows utility because come on now, Windows needs a lot of love out of the gate as well. And I was like, you know what? Let me redo this. So, first off, the spotlight I noticed two was not very good. Now, mind you, it's way better than Windows search, but that's a pretty low bar. Uh, so I replaced Spotlight with Raycast. And then Raycast, you can actually bind hotkeys to launch applications, which is absolutely fantastic. I love that. But, uh, what I use it for mostly is just launching applications and then hotkeying them. I turn off like all the AI crap and other stuff. I I feel like Raycast is going down that road where it'll probably bloat up eventually and we'll have to use a different product which that's fine. If you're a Linux user, there's something called Albert which is pretty fantastic. It's like a spotlight alternative for Linux which I've used in the past which is really good. Uh so there's always going to be something to fix uh in that regard. So uh let's go to downloads. And I know Mac user always like what the hell what's he in? Um, first off, Mac terminal awful. Apple do better. I mean, come on. You could improve the terminal experience to not just be as bad as it is. Uh, you can use elacrity here. I also have been using mostly Ghosty. Ghosty I didn't really like that much on Linux, but on Mac I could tell Ghosty was designed with Mac first and not anything else. So, uh, Ghost is a fantastic terminal as well. uh more older Mac users, I see them use iTerm 2, which I tried that again and I was just like it just didn't it was better obviously way better than the default Mac terminal, don't get me wrong, but Ghosty I I thought was the best out of all of them. Uh but sometimes I just want like a minimal terminal with just no flare and elacrity just is the perfect one for me in that regard. So I kind of switch back and forth between Ghosty and Lacerty depending on what I'm doing. But for today, let's show you these uh default things. Now, I downloaded the Mac util directly from GitHub. And you'll notice it has this little at@ symbol. So, if you're a Linux user, you're like, "Oh, yeah, that's just basic Unix permissions, but what's this thing?" This is called an extended attribute. And it's really interesting how that works on Mac. And I was like, "Ooh, what is that?" Okay, so this right here, it shows metadata. So, it'll actually show some metadata sometimes for where it was downloaded from. And then it also adds a quarantine file for everything that's downloaded. Now, Mac does this so you can't just download any binary and run it on your system. So, if you were trying to run MAC util uh Mac util, it would say permission denied. Now, you might be, oh, well, it doesn't have the ch uh execute ran. So, adding the execute privilege to MCUIL and then running MCUIL, it runs. Um but sometimes like when you go to uh do other things with it, you can take this or some some applications especially guey applications will get blocked because of the quarantine command. And what you can do is actually remove all these attributes and it's one way to kind of get around uh some of them. So actually - c kind of gets rid of all these. So if we do another last you you'll notice the at symbol is gone. And if we go a listing of a ATR MAC util, it's uh there there's nothing there. So there's ways around a lot of the security. And then the system integrity protection also uh the reason why I disabled that was because the window management, which let's get into the window management. Oh my god, the window management of Mac. Okay, I'm trying not to make this a 15inute video, so let's get quick first. The full screen command. What are you doing, Mac? This is awful. Like you should feel bad about how this is implemented and the fact it still exists over a decade later. Like this has been going on for two decades. Window manager often. I will say for Sequoia one benefit is they finally added tiling. So you can actually tile to the left or right. It's still not great though. It's still not good. Um that's the best you could do over the past 10 years for development. Uh you can use rectangle. You can use magnet. Both third party tools both better. magnets paid for rectangles and open source good tiler uh for just just basic tiling. But let's say you want some actual window management because you don't want to be doing this stupid slide thing. Uh there's two projects you buy and aerospace. Uh I'm using you buy here just because it was kind of more of the obscure version and I wanted to do some of the ext script extenders and other things that came with it. So I I I started with it and sketchy bar at the top. You'll notice my bar uh up here, which if you hover, you still got the old Mac bar there. It's just kind of hidden. Uh you can't really completely get rid of some of this Mac garbage, but you can clean it up. So, it feels like Linux, and that's what I like. So, I got all this, got it done. You buy in there with Sketchy Bar. It's clean. Um but had to partially disable SIP. And that can be a problem for some developers, specifically developing for the mobile space. I asked a couple devs like why why why does zip like it's so annoying why not just disable like well if you're delevelop for other Mac users most Mac users will have that enabled so you got to make sure that that's there especially if going for the mobile space you have to have SIP enabled to use like their their mobile utilities apparently uh so a lot of people choose aerospace because it doesn't require any kind of SIP disabled for you buy to really get the full great experience like I have with no animations really clean, fast window management, you you have to do a partial disable of SIP. So, Aerospace is the other one I'm going to try after this, but uh for now, I'm really liking you by and kind of taking this and working with the that making it work how I want it to do it. It's It's good. So, you might be thinking, Titus, this seemed like you just sitting here rambling and complaining for the last 12 minutes. What do you like about Mac? The battery. the MacBook Air battery. Fantastic. I literally haven't plugged it in in two days. It went down to like 70% and I used it for hours and hours and hours. So, that's huge. The other thing is some of the limitations of Max such as you can't play games and other things like that that actually makes me more productive. So, as I've been on Mac and I've been kind of tinkering around, one, it's kind of exciting to see something new that I haven't seen in a bit. as you know I'm usually on Linux or Windows and I was like you know there's a lot of things about Mac I can do and I like fixing things. So uh as I was kind of going through I was really going through all these solutions and I looked at all these and I've been documenting as I go along on the removing of animations and fixing finder up and setting up a proper dev environment. I I feel like there's a lot of opportunity here to make a utility like Mac utility that could fix this up for users and go, hey, it doesn't have to be you don't have to be treated like a second grader or a 10th grader to use Mac. You can actually use it like Linux and still benefit from some of the hardware if you do have a MacBook, which I' I've really really enjoyed. And uh I know Linux users are like, "We'll just use Linux then." But within that Mac, you have good update cycles. You have really good compatibility. And there's certain two pieces of software I wanted to use on Mac, specifically Final Cut Pro and Affinity Photo that work fantastic on Mac, which uh don't work on Linux. Uh Affinity Photo has like some wine hacks and other things on Linux that it's not really a good solution where on Mac it is. So, I've actually really enjoyed that from a workflow and I wanted to test creating some videos in Final Cut and kind of messing around with that as that's just exciting for me. So, I've actually enjoyed it once I got it done, but it's taken like a week or so of really kind of messing around and there's still certain things I'm like, "Ooh, that can be optimized or changed to be better." And then I want to make a good environment for you if you use Mac ever and then make it really easy to set up. So instead of spending an hour or two hours sitting there, you just run one script, fix it, and then go on with your life and never have to mess with that script again until maybe the next feature update or something like that like it is on Windows. Um, but that's that's my opinion of Mac. Uh, big shout out to all my patrons, YouTube members, uh, Twitch subscribers. Thank you guys. As I've been kind of messing around on my live streams, just kind of seeing what all goes on a Mac. I I it's been exciting. So, I I really do enjoy seeing problems and fixing them. So, uh let me know down in the comments what you'd like to see because I really want to make this a better experience. And I'll see you in the next one.

macOS defaults are terrible, lets fix them. Finder, Window Management, Dock, Spaces, Mission Control, and many more settings that I find crazy and change to sensible defaults . ►► Digital Downloads ➜ https://www.cttstore.com ►► Patreon ➜ https://www.patreon.com/christitustech ►► Twitch ➜ https://www.twitch.tv/christitustech ►► Website and Guides ➜ https://christitus.com