Migrating to the Apple MacBook Air M2 / Eric Clemmons

My 13” MacBook Pro, Intel Core i7, 16 GB RAM (2017) was lasting ~2 hours at the coffee shop, so decided to upgrade to the MacBook Air M2.

Friction Log

Migrating from Previous Mac

Migration Assistant actually did an excellent job of bringing over apps & settings: Move content to a new Mac.

What’s most impressive is that it has a Peer-to-Peer connection option that’s faster than Wi-Fi.

However, anytime you get a warning about Rosetta to open an app, that’s a sign you should reinstall it.

Git

When running git, I would get this error:

xcrun: error: invalid active developer path (/Library/Developer/CommandLineTools), missing xcrun at: /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools/usr/bin/xcrun.

– Stack Overflow

Solving this was easy as running:

xcode-select --install

Homebrew

Installing brew is the foundation of all other macOS software.

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

Clipboard Manager

Jumpcut has been with me for years as my favorite, minimal clipboard manager:
```
brew install --cask jumpcut
```
Plus, it’s a stack for my memory when writing posts like this 😅

pnpm

curl -fsSL https://get.pnpm.io/install.sh | sh -

Node

By default, node didn’t exist on this machine.

Traditionally, I would manage Node with nvm, fnm, or volta.

But now that I exclusively use pnpm, pnpm can manage node versions for me instead!
```
pnpm env use --global lts
```
Then, you can tell pnpm to automatically install & respect this version when running pnpm commands in a project with use-node-version
```
node --version > .npmrc
```
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pure prompt

pnpm install --global pure-prompt

Then, update zsh to use it:

# .zshrc
autoload -U promptinit; promptinit
prompt pure

VS Code

Thanks to Settings Sync, all of my settings were already saved & synced between machines.

Conclusion

All-in-all, it took about an hour to get productive again (not including transferring files from Migration Assistant).

I used to think dotfiles were the solution to this!

But my dotfiles from 10 years ago were stale & irrelevant within a year. The ROI just didn’t exist.