Posted on Thursday 8 December 2005 - Popularity: unranked
OS X applications normally save application and user preferences in .plist files located in “/Users/username/Library/Preferences/”. However, plist files are XML formatted and there are a lot of them, so you normally just touch them if nothing else helps. Now why do I even want to directly change those files and not use each applications preferences GUI? Of course because you can’t. There are a lot of “hidden” preferences you can’t access with the application that made them, if that’s for security, laziness or other reasons isn’t really important.
Pref Setter is an application that makes the task of finding and editing a “hidden” preference a lot easier. You can easily browse through all plist files or just use the search feature and than individually change each setting.
Btw, if an application isn’t working anymore because the app itself or you changed something in a plist file, just make a copy of the plist file (for the case you need to re-enter some of the old preferences), delete the plist file and than restart the application.
Fredi
