💡 macOS setup (tested on Tahoe). For devs who switch machines often, juggle between personal and client work, or are tired of reconfiguring everything by hand. Concrete promise: about 1 hour to put it all in place the first time, then 10 minutes to replicate the setup on any new Mac. The principles (versioned dotfiles, naming convention, fuzzy navigation) adapt to Linux/WSL, but part of the comfort (native ~/Developer icon, brew) stays macOS-only.

⚠️ This article was previously written in French and was translated into English by AI.

What's on the menu

Six building blocks that fit together:

1. ~/Developer: a tidy root folder
2. chezmoi: version your dotfiles
3. ghq: organize your repos without thinking
4. The dev function: navigate at the speed of thought
5. 1Password SSH Agent: keys safe in the vault, Touch ID signing
6. Brewfile: reinstall every app with one command

The problem

When you do dev work for a while, three pains keep coming back:

1. Your projects scatter across obscure folders (~/Documents/projects/old/v2-final/, sound familiar?)
2. Your config files (.zshrc, .gitconfig, .ssh/config) only live on the current machine, and you struggle to recreate them on a new Mac
3. Finding a specific project takes 3 cd .. and an ls, sometimes more

The default approach, dumping everything into ~/Documents/projects/ . It always ends in chaos. Worse: on recent macOS, Documents is synced with iCloud, which creates conflicts on .git folders.

Here's the setup that got me out. Six simple blocks that fit together.

1. The ~/Developer folder: a hidden gift from Apple

macOS has a little-known feature: if you create a folder named exactly Developer directly in your home, it automatically gets a hammer icon. No config, it's native.

mkdir ~/Developer
killall Finder  # in case the icon doesn't appear right away