Following on from my iTunes rating tip last week, I thought you may like a collection of my favourite ‘defaults’ commands to change hidden Mac Preferences.
Useful ‘defaults’ Commands to Change Hidden Mac Preferences
Have you ever wanted to remove an annoying ‘pop-up’ warning or dislike having to re-confirm an action in the Finder?
Most of these pop-ups, warnings and verification windows can be disabled and other features enabled using unix commands.
The Terminal application is located inside /Applications/Utilities on your Mac computer and allows you to write to preference (.plist) files to change settings on your Mac.
All you need to do is open this application and at the Terminal prompt ($), enter ‘defaults write’ followed by the name of preference you wish to change, and the new value. Then press the Enter key.
For example:
There are many of these settings you can change, but here are a collection of what I think are some of the most useful in Mac OS X Lion:
Make Dock icons of hidden applications translucent
defaults write com.apple.dock showhidden -bool true
Enable iTunes track notifications in the Dock
defaults write com.apple.dock itunes-notifications -bool true
Disable the “Are you sure you want to open this application?” dialog
defaults write com.apple.LaunchServices LSQuarantine -bool false
Enable AirDrop over Ethernet and on unsupported Macs running Lion
defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser BrowseAllInterfaces -bool true
Avoid creating .DS_Store files on network volumes
defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores -bool true
Disable the warning when changing a file extension
defaults write com.apple.finder FXEnableExtensionChangeWarning -bool false
Disable the warning before emptying the Trash
defaults write com.apple.finder WarnOnEmptyTrash -bool false
Empty Trash securely by default
defaults write com.apple.finder EmptyTrashSecurely -bool true
Show the ~/Library folder
chflags nohidden ~/Library
Disable local Time Machine backups
hash tmutil &> /dev/null && sudo tmutil disablelocal
Viewing additional system info at the Login window which were available in 10.6 but removed in clean install of 10.7. Click on the top right hand corner clock for details.
sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow AdminHostInfo HostName
NOTE – I highly recommend that you perform a full backup of your hard disk before modifying any preference files settings.
Please also note that some of these settings may be reset after applying the next Apple 10.7 OS update.
Happy tweaking! 🙂
While the author has taken care to provide our readers with accurate information, please use your discretion before acting upon information based on the blog post. Amsys will not compensate you in any way whatsoever if you ever happen to suffer a loss/inconvenience/damage because of/while making use of information in this blog.