Six Months with a MacBook: The Update

Table of Contents

“The secret of change is to focus all of your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new.” — Socrates

Six months ago, I wrote about why I started using MacBook again and how I customized it to fit my workflow. Those articles are a snapshot of the first week, when I was still fighting muscle memory and trying to make macOS behave like Arch Linux with extra steps.

I sayd “stay tuned”, so 6 months later here’s my followup (yes, half a year has already passed). Some tools stayed, some got replaced, and something happened that I didn’t see coming: I stopped reaching for my personal Linux laptop. Let me explain.

What Changed #

Goodbye Karabiner Elements #

In my original setup, I had Karabiner Elements remapping two keys because I use an Italian keyboard with an English layout. The backtick and the non-US backslash were swapped, and it worked fine.

But here’s the thing: I realized I was overcomplicating it. macOS lets you switch keyboard input sources with a shortcut, and once I trained myself to hit that combo when I need to type accented characters, Karabiner became unnecessary weight on my system. One less background process, one less thing to update, one less configuration to back up.

I also said it in the original article: don’t waste your time remapping keys for every application. I should have listened to my own advice from day one.

Goodbye AltTab #

In the original setup, I installed AltTab to replace the macOS task switcher with something closer to the Windows Alt+Tab behavior. Six months later, I uninstalled it too. I simply started using Stage Manager and I don’t need it anymore. I got used to the macOS way of handling windows, and it turns out it’s not as bad as I remember. Things have changed during these years, and I’m happy about this. Who would have guessed.

I did keep MiddleClick, though. The three-finger tap for middle click is something I can’t live without, and I will die on this hill.

LogiOptions+ and Mouse Gestures #

My Bluetooth mouse did eventually pair (remember the rough start from the first article?), and I found a setup that I really like. LogiOptions+ lets you configure custom gestures on Logitech mice, and I turned the middle mouse button into a gesture trigger.

I wanted to mimick the trackpad gestures, so acquired muscle memory stays. I found out that I can set the middle button to usee custom gestures.

When I hold it down, I can move the mouse left or right to switch between virtual desktops. Holding it down and dragging up opens Mission Control, while dragging down shows App Exposé. If you click it, it behaves exactly as a middle mouse button, that, as you may right now, I cannot live without. I found it fast and intuitive and if you have a Logitech mouse, give this a try.

Ghostty Instead of iTerm2 #

I discovered Ghostty, and I haven’t looked back. Where iTerm2 needed me to dig through preferences to get natural text editing, Ghostty ships with sane defaults out of the box. My entire configuration is two lines:

background-opacity = 0.95
shell-integration-features = ssh-env

That’s it. No JSON blobs, no preference panes, no profiles to export. It just works the way I expect a terminal to work.

There’s a bug with Ghostty that prevents makes curly brackets ({}) impossible to type in Vim if you are connected to a system using SSH. The workaround is to manually set the TERM environment variable to xterm-256color before using vim in a SSH session. You can track the discussion here.

Nix Stays, Devenv Goes #

Nix is still my package manager and I’ll try to stay away from Homebrew, because the ability to install packages without touching the base system is something value a lot.

However, I ditched devenv. On paper, having per-directory virtual environments for everything sounds great. In practice, I kept running into issues where my editor or AI coding assistants couldn’t find commands installed inside a devenv shell. Auto-completions would break, tools wouldn’t be recognized, and I’d spend more time debugging my development environment than actually developing.

Now I just install everything globally with:

nix profile install nixpkgs#packagename

Is it as elegant as isolated environments? No. Does it work without surprises? Yes. And that’s what I need. The lazy sysadmin in me wins again.

What I Didn’t See Coming #

Here it comes the unexpecetd part.

Over the following months, when I wanted to work on personal projects like this blog, I kept reaching for my work MacBook instead of my Lenovo because the battery life, the instant wake from sleep, gave me the ability to make something while sitting on the couch without having to run to reach a charger in the middle of something. It just made everything effortless and easy.

But, as my colleagues konw, I don’t want to use my work laptop for personal stuff. It’s not just a preference: I need a clear separation between work and personal devices, for a few important reasons.

First, security. Work data stays isolated from my personal browsing habits, my experiments, and whatever random thing I decide to try and self-host on a Sunday afternoon. A malware or anything else will not impact important data, and reducing drastically the chance of leaking work information.

Second, continuity: if my personal laptop dies or has a problem, I can still work the next morning. In the same way, if my work laptop has a problem, I still have a device that I can use. No single point of failure in my daily life: I preach high availability at work, I practice it also at home :).

Goodbye Lenovo, welcome MacBook high availability and separation

So, during Black Friday, I bought a MacBook Pro M5 for personal use.

And I was lucky I did: after I migrated everything, I gave my three year old Lenovo to my father. A week later, its motherboard died and it stopped working entirely. If I hadn’t already moved, I would have been stuck without a personal computer. Sometimes timing works out.

What I’m Discovering Now #

With a Mac as my personal device too, I started exploring things I never bothered with before. Stage Manager, for instance. I ignored it at first because I had AltTab and my workflow was “good enough.” But Stage Manager actually makes sense when you work with multiple contexts: blog writing, terminal, browser for research, and a chat window on the side. It keeps things organized without the overhead of multiple virtual desktops.

I’m also finding all those little macOS automations that you only discover by accident, like Quick Actions for base64 encode and decode, quick QR code generation using Spotlight and a lot of shortcuts. None of these are revolutionary on their own, but together they remove friction I didn’t even know I had.

I already told that the battery life is the major benefit: being able to work on personal projects from the couch, from a café, or during a train ride without worrying about the charger has made me genuinely more productive. This blog exists partly because I don’t have to plan around power outlets anymore.

What’s Next? #

I’ve been using the same OnePlus Nord for five years now. It still works, but let’s be honest: having a MacBook as both my work and personal device, discovering how things “just work” in the Apple ecosystem, the question is becoming inevitable.

Could this be the time I switch to an iPhone?

Stay tuned.