Terminal Wrappers and Ditching Docker Desktop

While a transition to Arc browser didn’t stick last year. I’ve recenly made two changes to my Mac setup that I’m going to document here so I have it for the inevitable day that I have to setup a new macbook and I can’t remember what I did.

Ghostly

My long time use of the default Mac terminal is something that I wanted to change aesthetically but not functionally. I need to jump on other people’s machines and various linux boxes I don’t control all the time, so my muscle memory needs to stay pretty out-of-the-box standard for commands.

Ghostty is a terminal wrapped that’s been getting buzz on Youtube recently, so I decided to give it a go

https://ghostty.org/

Install Ghostty
configure ghostty’s config file

theme = dark:catppuccin-frappe,light:catppuccin-latte

background = #000000
background-opacity = 0.75
background-blur-radius = 15

font-family = JetBrainsMonoNL Nerd Font
font-size = 20
cursor-style = block
cursor-style-blink = false
shell-integration-features = no-cursor

auto-update = check
keybind = super+r=reload_config
keybind = super+i=inspector:toggle

keybind = global:cmd+shift+`=toggle_quick_terminal

realize Macs have been using zsh forever and I need to maintain my ~/.zshrc file more diligently
realize the pretty stuff in people’s terminals come from things like starship https://starship.rs/

brew install starship

have all tha stuff start nicely

# ~/.zshrc
eval "$(starship init zsh)"
alias ls='ls -G'

This goes in starship config file

# ~/.config/starship.toml
[character]
success_symbol = '[➜](bold green)'

[package]
disabled = true

[gcloud]
disabled = true

[aws]
disabled = true

Podman

My work made authenticated Docker Desktop require using our Corp email and a license.

And Docker made logging into Docker Desktop required on Jan 6, 2025 (I think)

I never used Docker Desktop with our corp account, so this change bricked my work machine. My personal machine was also bricked. I’m assuming some of this is me just not knowing what I’m doing and relying on the Docker Desktop easy button for too long. I rage quit on getting a reasonable solution from Docker that would work on both my personal machine and work machine.

Looking around for alternartives, top options were Podman and Rancher. I ended up deciding to try podman, without really going through any kind of analysis of alternatives

install podman on the mac wich sets up podman, ‘podman compose’, Podman Desktop app, and the host vm for containers

because ‘podman compose’ doesn’t map well to ‘docker-compose’ to try to get older scripts on my machine to work

brew install podman-compose
sudo ln -s $(which podman) ~/.local/bin/docker
sudo ln -s $(which podman-compose) ~/.local/bin/docker-compose
## make sure this folder is on my path in my ~/.zshrc