Mac Setup Tips

Performance & Battery

Optimized Battery Charging should already be on — double-check under Battery settings. If you're plugged in most of the time at a desk, this keeps your battery from degrading by capping it around 80%. There's also a Limit option on newer MacBooks that lets you hard-cap at 80% permanently — worth enabling if your laptop rarely leaves the desk.

Keyboard & Input

Key repeat rate and delay — most developers crank these to max.

System Settings → Keyboard → slide "Key repeat rate" all the way to Fast and "Delay until repeat" to Short.

The default is frustratingly slow when you're holding down arrow keys or deleting text. This one small change makes the machine feel twice as responsive.

Also under Keyboard, turn off:

Correct spelling automatically
Capitalize words automatically

These are fine on an iPhone but maddening on a dev machine — they'll fight you in terminals, code editors, and even Slack.

Trackpad

Turn on Tap to click (it's off by default, which is wild).
Bump tracking speed up a couple notches from default — the default feels sluggish once you try faster.

Three-finger drag is hidden but game-changing:

System Settings → Accessibility → Pointer Control → Trackpad Options → Dragging style → Three Finger Drag

Instead of click-holding to drag windows, you just use three fingers. Once you get used to this, you'll never go back.

Dock & Stage Manager

Enable "Automatically hide and show the Dock" — frees up screen real estate. The Dock is mostly dead space 90% of the time. Use Spotlight (Cmd+Space) to launch apps instead.
Shrink the Dock size.
Turn off "Show suggested and recent apps in Dock" to remove clutter.

Finder

Show file extensions:

Finder → Settings → Advanced → "Show all filename extensions"

The fact that this is off by default is a crime.

Also:

Change "New Finder windows show" from Recents to your home folder or Documents — Recents is useless as a landing page.
Enable View → Show Path Bar — gives you context about where you are at all times.
Enable View → Show Status Bar — shows file count in the current folder without having to think about it.

Hot Corners

System Settings → Desktop & Dock → Hot Corners (at the bottom)

Set one corner to Lock Screen — when you walk away from your laptop, just flick the cursor to that corner. Faster than Cmd+Ctrl+Q and becomes muscle memory. Some people also set a corner to Quick Note or Mission Control.

Notifications

Go through System Settings → Notifications and turn off badge and banner notifications for everything that isn't truly urgent. Most people have 15+ apps sending banners they ignore anyway.

Keep on:

Messages
Mail
Calendar
Slack (or whatever your team uses)

Kill the rest. This alone will reduce interruptions dramatically.

Spotlight / Search

If you're not already using Raycast as a Spotlight replacement, it's worth considering — it's free, faster, and adds clipboard history, window management, snippets, and app switching from one launcher.

If you want to stay stock: go into Spotlight settings and uncheck categories you never search (Fonts, Movies, Music) so results are faster and cleaner.

Security

Turn on FileVault (disk encryption) if it isn't already:

System Settings → Privacy & Security → FileVault

On Apple Silicon Macs there's essentially zero performance hit.
Enable "Require password immediately after sleep or screen saver begins" under Lock Screen settings.

Macbook Customizations