How to explore more defaults write tweaks on OS X?
Disclaimer: I’m the author of ~/.osx
, a collection of defaults write
settings. These are the techniques that I use to find settings. Let me know if there is a better/easier method I didn’t mention here!
For most non-hidden settings, this is how you can find the correct preference keys in Terminal.app:
defaults read > a
# Change the setting
defaults read > b
diff a b
For hidden settings, it gets trickier. You can use the command-line strings
utility on any binary executable and see if any of the resulting text looks like a preference key. E.g.:
strings /System/Library/CoreServices/Finder.app/Contents/MacOS/Finder
Here’s another example that will look through all .framework
files in /System/Library/Frameworks/
and filter the output somewhat:
strings /System/Library/Frameworks/*.framework/Versions/Current/* /System/Library/Frameworks/*/Frameworks/*/Versions/Current/* 2> /dev/null | grep -E '^[a-zA-Z0-9_.-]{10,80}$' | sort | uniq
There’s also a tool called GDB which can be used to find hidden preferences.
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Tom S
Updated on September 18, 2022Comments
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Tom S almost 2 years
I would like to explore some new tweaks which can be done by the "defaults write" command in OS X(ML).
What can I do to find them out myself rather than hunting online for known tweaks?
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Tom S almost 12 yearsThank you very much and I can't believe that you are replying me! I knew about your nice list at github long time ago btw. Thank you very very much! Will try this now.
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Mathias Bynens almost 12 years@Lri FWIW, I’ve done a clean Mountain Lion install just last week and
defaults read;
works fine here.