Upgrading to MacOS Catalina

June 4, 2020tips-and-tricks

MacOS Catalina (10.15.x) has some cool new features, in particular Catalyst, enables iPad developers to run apps natively in MacOS, which is INCREDIBLE! I would love if all my iPad/iPhone apps could just seamlessly run on my laptop.

There aren’t that many useful apps running this yet (although out of box, Twitter has been converted), but I’d love for a bunch of native apps to just run on my laptop without a Chrome Browser (FB Messenger, Mint, Google Maps, Google Calendar …). The Apple ecosystem already does an amazing job in having native support on all Apple devices incredibly seamless through iCloud. I recall a similar experience with Android devices and the Chrome Browser, except for some applications (Google Keep) the mobile version worked much better, while on the browser, the smaller form factor just couldn’t keep up (Google Docs, Sheets, etc). – there’s just so much distraction that’s tied our attention to the browser, when the native apps just feel so much better, it’s almost as if it were 1995 (Windows 95 release?) again.

In short, for productivity apps, the larger screen + keyboard wins, for short-term attention apps, convenience of smaller form-factor wins.

One caveat to upgrading to Catalina is the major change in the default shell to zsh over bash.
I’ve spent countless hours optimizing my dotfiles that I couldn’t simply just switch over in the middle of the work-day, so I decided to just opt-out and change my default shell back to bash:

chsh -s /bin/bash

Now whenever you open Terminal.app, it’ll automatically use bash!

This will cause MacOS to print out an annoying warning message that the new default has been changed:

The default interactive shell is now zsh.
To update your account to use zsh, please run `chsh -s /bin/zsh`.
For more details, please visit https://support.apple.com/kb/HT208050.

To supress this, simply add to your ~/.bashrc

export BASH_SILENCE_DEPRECATION_WARNING=1

Voila! Take that Tim Cook. :-)