Finder -> View -> Show Status bar
Finder -> View -> Show Path bar
Finder -> View -> as List
Finder -> Settings -> New Finder windows show -> Choose Desktop (or any preferred folder that you like)
Finder -> Settings -> Untick Hard disks, External disks, CDs, DVD's and iPods, Connected Servers
I also don't like the tags system on the mac and I disable it as well
Finder -> Settings -> Tags -> I select all and delete them
On the Sidebar I prefer to keep Airdrop, my home folder, Desktop, Documents and a shortcut to all my repositories which is in a folder called Codebase. You can do this by:
Finder -> Settings -> Sidebar -> Select or deselect items that you want to be shown
I prefer to see filename extensions and quite often I do change extensions - so I disable the warning pop uo. You can set this by:
Finder -> Settings -> Advanced -> Select Show all filename extensions
Finder -> Settings -> Advanced -> Deselect Show warning before changing an extension