MacOS tips & tricks [draft]
Touch ID and sudo
Add this as the first line in /etc/pam.d/sudo_local.
auth sufficient pam_tid.so
This will let you authenticate with Touch ID when authenticating with sudo.
Don't log in to iCloud on your work laptop
This might strike some as obvious, but it's a mistake I made and it definitely was not worth it.
LinearMouse
If you use both an external mouse and a touchpad, use this progam to have natural scrolling on the touchpad but normal scrolling on the mouse. Personally, I think natural scrolling only feels right on touch screens or touchpads.
Custom keyboard layouts
Ever since adopting NixOS in 2021 I have used a custom keyboard layout that maps AltGR-; to ö, AltGR-' to ä, and AltGr-[ to å.
When I later switched to use Macs as my main machines in 2023, both personally and on the job, I lost this capability and was left with manually switching keyboard layouts between US and Swedish mid-sentence when using Swedish words.
Over one year later, 2024, I have successfully managed to have a custom keyboard layout, enabled by Nix. See this issue comment for more details.
TL;DR you have to generate a custom keyboard layout XML file (I used a program
called "Ukelele") and install it to /Library/Keyboard Layouts
. To integrate it
with Nix Darwin, use system.activationScripts.extraActivation.text
(reference).