Beware that some settings won't show up this way, and some settings that you can witness through `defaults read <some plist file>` cannot be safely edited through `defaults write`.
Power management settings, for example, will break some System Settings panes when manually written, in addition to not effectively modifying the relevant setting. Those, you have to modify with the `pmset` command instead.
I wonder if the program i use to manage my dotfiles could help manage your scripts and extend your setup to all your desktops? Its called yadm (https://yadm.io/) it makes it so easy to have a laptop and a desktop or two.
Edit: seems to support doing a diff and reverting/modifying right in yadm, i just do t really use thst bit myself: https://yadm.io/docs/common_commands#
> It's now a habit to save all my changes in system and app preferences in a script.
The end game of this type if thing is NixOS where your OS is created from a declarative and reproducible Nix file as are all of it's programs as well as their dependencies.
Nix-Darwin and/or Home Manager on macOS can provide a nice, slow way to transition into the Nix world as well, for folks who are hesitant to jump in with NixOS and like to have other options around. There's even a very nice Homebrew module for Nix-Darwin to let you manage Homebrew from Nix if you want to Nixify without giving up Homebrew!
It doesn't feel nearly as 'safe' as NixOS, in that OS upgrades are less predictable and can break a lot of things (not limited to Nix). But all-in-all, it's really not bad, and for some use cases it might be better.
At least virtually all applications use the same configuration mechanism, which is a lot nicer than many custom formats scattered everywhere (though more and more applications seem to use .config on Linux now).
I’d appreciate seeing those statements added to the linked article. Thank you for sharing it! I hope the author sees your comment and uses this technique to add them.
The settings in MacOS have become increasingly more frustrating. Especially security or privacy permissions given to applications.
I installed a capture card recently that needed a kernel extension and after agreeing a confirmation box to install the extension I couldn’t find anywhere in the settings to remove it. In the end I just deleted the file and rebooted.
I had Teams in the browser ask if it could access files in my Downloads directory which I mistakenly agreed to, this took a good ten minutes to find and revoke and I can’t remember off the top of my head where the setting even was.
A lot of this is down to more granular privacy and security settings but it’s difficult to find the settings you are looking for.
I previously gave access to an app to access removable storage (because there was no more granular way to just give the app access for a single folder - which is a serious freaking defect if anyone from Apple is reading this - that’s just plain bad), did some editing, then revoked the access.
The problem is the access wasn’t revoked and it could still access the whole drive. Checked the settings pane - definitely no access to removable drives (and no full disk access), went back to app and it could still access.
Went through tcc on the command line and it showed that the access was revoked but still it persisted reboots.
In the end I had to completely reset the machine and start from scratch just to revoke that drive access.
macOS really needs another Snow Leopard “no new features” release.
> macOS really needs another Snow Leopard “no new features” release.
This has always been a myth. Snow Leopard had some massive changes "under the hood", and OS X 10.6.0 was very buggy, as can be seen by the release notes for 10.6.1, 10.6.2, etc.
What people remember fondly about Snow Leopard was in actuality the 2 full years of bug fixes that occurred after its release.
What Apple needs to do is end the yearly major OS release cycle. It doesn't leave enough time to fix the bugs before Apple engineers start working on new features for the next release.
What hostile application is running on your computer that you fear about giving drive access as opposed to folder access? Uh.. So if you do.... What will that app do? Why are you using such an app then?
Isn't the idea like if you install an application on your own machine, it shouldn't be hostile to you and the app is trusted so why should I "fear" that the app has some access?
One that’s been at least mildly annoying to me personally is that there’s no way to fly elk the OS that a “removable” drive isn’t. My chained to my desk Mac Studio has 4TB of external aSSD (some old stuff, Time Machine, but also where I tore big stuff like AI models since I only have the base Studio with 512G
Constant pop up’s every time a new app wants to look at those files… so get a n admin populists that just be felt with. It’s not a huge deal for a single instance, but when it’s coming up 4 or 5 times a day…
Ill I want is a per-volume checkbox “treat as internal”.
This sounds like a bad pattern (I posted about this above).
“Mark as internal” seems like a really crude fudge when the real problem is you can’t give access to single directories rather than a whole drive. Also a “don’t remind me again” option on the external drive pop-up.
At one point my Logitech GHUB drivers bugged out and wouldn't launch anymore. Interestingly, the G502 mouse still had a 1000hz polling rate, even after uninstalling the drivers and every trace (as far as I could find).
After trying for over a year to install new drivers, they released a version which added 2 new kexts that they don't remove on uninstall. The only way to uninstall them is to go into safe mode, disable SIP and remove them.
That works for “Did I give Foo permission to Bar?” Questions, somewhat for “Who did I give permission to Bar?” questions (the UI would need updating to decrease the needed number of mouse clicks), but is utterly annoying for “What permissions did I give Foo?” questions, where the number necessary clicks is even higher.
I think an ideal system would make answering all three easy.
I find it really hard to maintain a mental model of all the settings now - I wish there was a “save as text” (that had better structure than the direct output of “defaults read”) that would show all the Boolean switches. Maybe have a comment for “or one of these” for something that had an enumerated value (like scaling). Hmm. (Starting to sound like a “I should just damn well go write that and quit complaining”)
All the default* options belong to the system settings, not to the specific app.
The system delegates specific functionality to a corresponding app.
Still, I admit that the whole settings structure is confusing and Apple should implement something similar to VsCode where you can globally search for all existing settings.
Why can none of the OS provide a simple everything-fuzzy-searchable interface with both directory and tag organization and sets to make the huge mess of poorly accessible configs they've created more palatable?
KDE's settings app is not bad in this regard. Gnome's is OK too but there is not many configurable things there. Everybody installs gnome-tweaks which provides a separate gui.
Before the System Settings redesign, this was quite possible. Even more so if you use Alfred. I’m Catalina I think I’ll get the right setting 1 out of 5 times, if that much. The redesign is absolute garbage.
Even if it were fuzzy (which can be tested piping Powershell's 'Get-ChildItem hklm:\' into fzf for instance), you'd need a lot of filtering to make that useful though (I'm guessing you don't want to see recent files whichhappen to contain the name of the thing you're looking for) and/or search specific trees only and/or limit depth. But even that won't immediately solve the usage of cryptic names.
Better starting point would be Group Policy, which is mostly a layer over the registry but containing pretty good descriptions of what a setting does. It has a Powershell module, so combining that with fzf and a preview pane which shows the description might ctually be pretty neat, but probably not very fast.
no I'm not, regedit is another usability nighmare which doesn't fulfill any of the conditions I've described, and search is not only not fuzzy, but also slow (Everything can search through the whole filesystem in less than a second, Regedit takes it sweet time)
And it also lacks any visual cues, so if you're used to some icon in the main settings apps, you'll not see it in regedit
Apple's settings and preferences are a blue-ribbon clusterf**k.
The other day, someone was complaining that they couldn't read their screen, and I (foolishly) indicated that I could fix it easily, because "I'm an expert."
I ended up searching through multiple pages of settings, in order to find the one they needed.
At least they got a good laugh out of it.
Zoom's settings are right up there, with Apple's.
Information architecture often tends to follow political and organizational structure, as opposed to good common sense usability structure.
Readit News
First I do a
Then I change the setting in the app or System Settings, then back on the commandline, I do The change gets copied to a preferences.sh file with a whole bunch of statements like: Afterwards, I don't care where the setting is. I just set it in my preferences.sh file, and if I update any of it, I run that file.Power management settings, for example, will break some System Settings panes when manually written, in addition to not effectively modifying the relevant setting. Those, you have to modify with the `pmset` command instead.
Edit: seems to support doing a diff and reverting/modifying right in yadm, i just do t really use thst bit myself: https://yadm.io/docs/common_commands#
The end game of this type if thing is NixOS where your OS is created from a declarative and reproducible Nix file as are all of it's programs as well as their dependencies.
It doesn't feel nearly as 'safe' as NixOS, in that OS upgrades are less predictable and can break a lot of things (not limited to Nix). But all-in-all, it's really not bad, and for some use cases it might be better.
The built-in options are listed in the modules docs starting here: https://daiderd.com/nix-darwin/manual/index.html#opt-system....
but you can also define custom ones without writing new modules via CustomPreferences and CustomSystemPreferences: https://daiderd.com/nix-darwin/manual/index.html#opt-system....
I track all of my `defaults` settings (aside from power management) in version control this way on my work machine. :)
You can likely get a lot of this by just creating a new user.
I installed a capture card recently that needed a kernel extension and after agreeing a confirmation box to install the extension I couldn’t find anywhere in the settings to remove it. In the end I just deleted the file and rebooted.
I had Teams in the browser ask if it could access files in my Downloads directory which I mistakenly agreed to, this took a good ten minutes to find and revoke and I can’t remember off the top of my head where the setting even was.
A lot of this is down to more granular privacy and security settings but it’s difficult to find the settings you are looking for.
I previously gave access to an app to access removable storage (because there was no more granular way to just give the app access for a single folder - which is a serious freaking defect if anyone from Apple is reading this - that’s just plain bad), did some editing, then revoked the access.
The problem is the access wasn’t revoked and it could still access the whole drive. Checked the settings pane - definitely no access to removable drives (and no full disk access), went back to app and it could still access.
Went through tcc on the command line and it showed that the access was revoked but still it persisted reboots.
In the end I had to completely reset the machine and start from scratch just to revoke that drive access.
macOS really needs another Snow Leopard “no new features” release.
This has always been a myth. Snow Leopard had some massive changes "under the hood", and OS X 10.6.0 was very buggy, as can be seen by the release notes for 10.6.1, 10.6.2, etc.
What people remember fondly about Snow Leopard was in actuality the 2 full years of bug fixes that occurred after its release.
What Apple needs to do is end the yearly major OS release cycle. It doesn't leave enough time to fix the bugs before Apple engineers start working on new features for the next release.
What hostile application is running on your computer that you fear about giving drive access as opposed to folder access? Uh.. So if you do.... What will that app do? Why are you using such an app then?
Isn't the idea like if you install an application on your own machine, it shouldn't be hostile to you and the app is trusted so why should I "fear" that the app has some access?
Constant pop up’s every time a new app wants to look at those files… so get a n admin populists that just be felt with. It’s not a huge deal for a single instance, but when it’s coming up 4 or 5 times a day…
Ill I want is a per-volume checkbox “treat as internal”.
[Edit] Either way, I’m gonna use it from now as a synonym for “tell [someone]”. Thank you for the inspiration!
“Mark as internal” seems like a really crude fudge when the real problem is you can’t give access to single directories rather than a whole drive. Also a “don’t remind me again” option on the external drive pop-up.
At one point my Logitech GHUB drivers bugged out and wouldn't launch anymore. Interestingly, the G502 mouse still had a 1000hz polling rate, even after uninstalling the drivers and every trace (as far as I could find).
After trying for over a year to install new drivers, they released a version which added 2 new kexts that they don't remove on uninstall. The only way to uninstall them is to go into safe mode, disable SIP and remove them.
I mean, the redesign of Preference is more difficult to navigate and has some rought edges, but this setting is where one would roughly expect it.
I think an ideal system would make answering all three easy.
Deleted Comment
Sounds good to me.
Still, I admit that the whole settings structure is confusing and Apple should implement something similar to VsCode where you can globally search for all existing settings.
https://daiderd.com/nix-darwin/manual/
(by the way, is it possible to change settings within the OS via this search interface?)
Better starting point would be Group Policy, which is mostly a layer over the registry but containing pretty good descriptions of what a setting does. It has a Powershell module, so combining that with fzf and a preview pane which shows the description might ctually be pretty neat, but probably not very fast.
And it also lacks any visual cues, so if you're used to some icon in the main settings apps, you'll not see it in regedit
https://support.apple.com/guide/script-editor/access-scripts...
The other day, someone was complaining that they couldn't read their screen, and I (foolishly) indicated that I could fix it easily, because "I'm an expert."
I ended up searching through multiple pages of settings, in order to find the one they needed.
At least they got a good laugh out of it.
Zoom's settings are right up there, with Apple's.
Information architecture often tends to follow political and organizational structure, as opposed to good common sense usability structure.
https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2016/03/16/magnets