// the take
This is Dries Vints' personal macOS setup: a Brewfile for installing apps, an Oh My Zsh config, `.macos` defaults tweaks, and Mackup for syncing app preferences, all wired together by a single `fresh.sh` script. It's aimed at developers who want a working template to fork and turn into their own dotfiles, not a generic cross-platform framework.
The Brewfile-driven install is genuinely declarative — one file lists every cask and formula, so a fresh Mac reaches a known app state without manual App Store hunting. It goes further than most dotfiles repos by syncing actual app preferences through Mackup (iCloud), not just shell config, which is the part people usually forget to back up. The split between 'fresh Mac setup' and 'build your own dotfiles' in the README is unusually clear about what to follow verbatim versus what to replace.
It's one person's specific stack — Herd.app, 1Password SSH agent, a particular Oh My Zsh theme — so adopting it means picking apart and removing choices that aren't yours, not configuring a neutral base. Mackup's iCloud-based preference sync is a fragile mechanism (file-watching + cloud storage races) and the underlying Mackup project itself sees sparse upstream maintenance. There's no CI or test harness validating `fresh.sh` against new macOS releases, so a point release breaking a `defaults write` command or a Homebrew cask rename would only surface when someone's install fails. Using git submodules for plugins adds the usual submodule friction (easy to forget `--recursive`, easy for a fork to drift from the parent repo).
We read the README, the directory tree and a key source file in October 2026. Nobody pays to be listed. How we judge →