teaBASE

A macOS preference pane that levels up the security and power of your development environment.

Requires macOS ≥13.5

Warning

teaBASE is in beta, almost certainly there are edge cases we are not yet catering to. Please report any issues you encounter.

Secure Development

Set up SSH as securely as possible and configure git to prove your identity by signing your commits.

Our gpg signing is best in class secure with way less bloat, hassle and overhead than GNU’s GPG suite.

Tip

We store your GPG private key in the macOS keychain, signed such that it is impossible for any other app to get it. We never expose it, it is fetched for as small a time as possible into memory, used to sign your commits and then discarded.

Note

We use a custom fork of withoutboats’s bpb.

Git Add-Ons

A fork scaled “package manager” for the vibrant Git ecosystem.

Dotfile Sync

teaBASE’s dotfile sync keeps your dotfiles versioned, backed up to a private GitHub repo and synchronized to any number of computers automatically. You can easily override, restore or otherwise fiddle with how it works because it’s all just git under the hood.

Note

Dotfiles are . prefixed files in your home directory and are how open source stores configuration.

Caution

Read the script before enabling this.
We have carefully made every effort to ensure data loss is impossible but: this is new software!

Install & Update Common Developer Tools

 

Contributing

Note

Building teaBASE requires Xcode >=16, which requires macOS >=14.5. You can check device compatibility here.

Prefpanes are fiddly.

1. Build the prefpane with Xcode.
2. Select to show the build folder from the Product menu
3. Quit “System Settings.app” (if open) †
4. Open the .prefPane product from inside the Debug subfolder

† System Settings.app doesn’t seem to otherwise reload the .prefPane bundle.

Debugging is hard. In theory you can connect the debugger. In practice logging with a teaBASE: prefix and filtering in “Console.app” or showing NSAlerts is the path of least resistance.

Contributing FAQ

Why is this a Preference Pane Rather than a .app?

More tools like this should be Preference Panes in our opinion. You don’t need Menu Bar apps or clutter in your /Applications for rarely used configuration tools. If you disagree we’d like to hear your take though.

Why is this Written in Objective-C rather than Swift?

Preference Panes are old school and the continued integration of them into macOS is not well documented nor well supported. We didn’t want to risk potential deployment hassles by choosing Swift here even though we would prefer Swift.