○ Adventures with MacBook Air M4

Day 1

It's 7PM and I brought the thing from the store. Conversed for a while with an LLM to tell me crucial OS differences and recommended keyboard shortcuts, given a Linux power-user background.

Fired up an update to the latest MacOS version and installed Nix immediately. The recommended multi-user install script worked right out the box, tested with a simple nix-shell -p cowsay.

The next step (as I understood based on my reddit/LLM/Kagi queries) was to install Nix Darwin, so that I can manage system-level MacOS configuration. Used it to install some basic CLI tools like nvim, cargo, btop. Installed XCode Dev Tools along the way as a OS-level popup told me so, nice.

Rust is compiling, Neovim is running, no issues there.

I was unable to configure AstroNvim due to a cryptic error:

Unable to open swap file for "<any path i try to edit>", recovery impossible

On plain Neovim, this simply appears and then I can edit the file. On AstroNvim, the error appears and then it snaps back to the file explorer, preventing me form editing anything. Sometimes it opens the file but shows it as both empty and read-only. I'm assuming that's a permission issue I don't yet understand. Will continue tommorow. Working from VSCode (installed via Nix) and a Vim plugin, that's almost close enough.

Day one UX issues as a convert:

• Lacking middle click for opening new tabs
• The ``` key is in a weird position on this keyboard!
• The deal with apps not closing when I hit the red "close" button

Day 2

Incoming!

Notes

Install from Nix: https://rectangleapp.com/

Try switching to Helix?

Test Wireguard

Try HomeManager for Zsh config