I've actually never run into Secrets! Thanks for bringing it to my attention. I will certainly be adding more to it over time. Do you have any specific suggestions?
Cool stuff, lots of really good automation tricks that I haven't seen. I have a similar routine of doing a clean wipe every once in a while and wrote a bunch of scripts to make the process less painful.
One of the more useful ones is a small shell wrapper around homebrew cask that batches installation packages based on category, and one that automates symbolically linking dotfiles using a configuration file.
Ok, but doing a clean wipe to just reload a backup from TimeMachine won't do any good since it'll restore all the cruft back, right?
Which leads me to my second point: How would you go finding all those still relevant dotfiles and folders for settings of programs you still want to use and, with wiping, removing all obsolete ones?
I use Karabiner to customize just two keys, does anyone know how can I make the enter key act as a control key when pressed simultaneously with another key and act as enter key when pressed alone? was thinking of a script that is called at startup.
A much more comprehensive collection of tweaks and tips for OSX administration.. though I did learn a few things from WhiskyKilo which were quite interesting - I have wondered how to do this from the command line for years and am glad to have finally learned: "sudo softwareupdate -i -a" .. fantastic!
Without delving much past the first page, it seems like Boxen would cover a lot of this territory? Boxen [1] is a puppet-based OS-X provisioning tool used by (among others) GitHub to set up new Macs in a hurry. It does take a little while to get configured and dialed in, but once it's set up, (re)provisioning a new Mac is almost fun.
"This will download and install all updates available for your Mac: sudo softwareupdate -i -a"
I'm assuming that it won't install App Store software that is in your account but not installed on the current machine? Which if so is a shame that Apple haven't exposed this via the command line (preferably specifying the name of the application to install).
I believe it does. I will spin up an OS X VM and test it later tonight, since my MBPr is fully up to date. I will of course update the site with what I find.
I've been trying to do it for years, but you've just tipped me over the edge .. off to buy a new hard drive to contain all my music, export from iTunes, delete ~/Music, and start again .. fresh .. as if it were 1999 all over again and all I have to do is organize my music folders manually again, just like I used to .. Pity there's no way to manage iOS apps outside of iTunes, though.
[1] http://secrets.blacktree.com