PLIST Editor is an easy to use editor for property list (.plist) data. In a clean and uncluttered interface, it allows you to quickly create, visualise, modify, and save your.plist documents. PLIST Editor is probably the only 'source control' friendly property list editor that you can find on the market (except Xcode, of course). $ plutil -insert somekey -string somevalue test.plist $ plutil -insert flag -bool YES test.plist $ plutil -insert bestNumber -integer 1 test.plist $ plutil -insert pi -float 3.141592 test.plist This is pretty straightforward. Inspecting a property list. You can use the -p option to check our progress. Configure Microsoft Edge policies on macOS The first step is to create your plist. You can create the plist file with any text editor or you can use Terminal to create the configuration profile. However, it's easier to create and edit a plist file using a tool that formats the XML code for you. To edit the contents of your information property list file, select the -Info.plist file in your Xcode project to display the property list editor. Figure 1 shows the editor for the information property list file of a new Cocoa app project. The file created by Xcode comes preconfigured with keys that every information property list.

I stumbled over these option this morning. I do not know when they were introduced, but I can see the options in 10.11 and 10.12. You can see them yourself with plutil -help. (The options are not listed in the man page.)

Note: Managing and editing Property List files and preferences is covered in much more detail and depth in my book “Property Lists, Preferences and Profiles for Apple Administrators“

Quick recap: plutil manipulates property list files. Its main use up to now was to convert between property list formats (mainly from binary plists to something readable)

and to check wether the syntax is valid

On Sierra, when you run plutil -help you see some new options. These allow you to directly manipulate keys and values in a property list. This may be useful to replace PListBuddy and defaults to manipulate property lists.

When testing this I noticed one downside of plutil immediately: it cannot be used to create a new property list file. Copy this to create an empty plist file:

Inserting a new key/value pair

This is pretty straightforward.

Inspecting a property list

You can use the -p option to check our progress:

This uses a non-standard output format, and the help text warns to use this parse plists. But it will do to look at the content.

Note: you can use plutil -p to read the content of binary plists without converting!

Modifying values

You can modify values with the -replace option.

Note that you can create new entries with -replace:

But you cannot overwrite an existing value with -insert.

Deleting values

Very straightforward:

Arrays

You can insert an empty:

or

and add items to the array

or do it all at once

Dictionaries

Getting Values

It looks like -extract is meant to get values from a property list, but there is caveat. -extract will not merely get the value of a key in the property list but will write it to a new file! And by default if you do not provide an new output file path with the -o option it will overwrite the current file with the extracted data.

The proper, non-destructive syntax to use -extract is:

This will print a full property list file to stdout. The -o - option tells plutil to print to stdout. You can give a filename instead of the -.

Since the output is encumbered with the json or xml syntax, it will be hard to use this to get to property list values in shell scripts. However, it still may be useful to, well, extract property list data from a complex plist file.

Conclusion

Keep in mind that there now is an alternative to defaults and PlistBuddy. Not having to convert a plist before changing data might be helpful, as well as the possibility to manipulate arrays and dictionaries with key paths. (You still should always use defaults when working with preference plist files, since defaults will go through the preferences system and possibility notify a process to update data.)

If you are using python or a similar high level scripting language it will still be more effective to use the libraries for property lists.

If you're a long time Windows power user and are recently switching over to the Mac, you may have wondered if there was something analogous to the Windows Registry .

However, if you've always been more of a Mac user, don't run away just yet as you may learn something.

In case you don't know what the Windows Registry is, here is a short definition from our good ol' friend Wikipedia.

Windows Registry is a hierarchical database that stores configuration settings and options on Microsoft Windows operating systems. It contains settings for low-level operating system components and for applications running on the platform that have opted to use the Registry.

You have probably already figured that since it's called the Windows Registry that there is likely not a Mac Registry that looks/operates the same way.

You are correct; however, where do all of the system and applications settings get stored if there is no registry?

If the Windows Registry is a place where system and application settings are stored, then the Mac equivalent of the Windows Registry would be a series of .plist files in several preferences folder on the Mac.

While researching how to automate bootstrapping my Mac development computer, I stumbled upon large number of .plist files in several folders that correlate to the installed applications and system settings. And BOOM just like that I discovered the holy grail of my Mac's system and application settings - kind of like the first time lift up the curtain and discover the Windows Registry.

A .plist file is a configuration file that contains a list of properties in either plain text or binary format. I'll go into more later about how to read and update values in these files later in the post.

For more info on plist files, check out the Wikipedia page...

I know of at least 2 locations that host the common system and application .plist files.

The first one is user specific and is in the following location:

In my case (since my user name is jason)

The second location one is at the root of the system:

If you look into these folders you'll see a large number of plist files that follow reverse domain name convention (like com.apple.sample).

Here are some (not all) examples of system configuration plist files:

In the same folder as the sample configuration files listed above are where you can find plist files that are associated to applications installed on the system.

Now that we can find system and application configuration plist files, if you try to open them in a text editor you may notice that many of them are in a binary format which would be challenging to read and understand, let alone edit.

The Mac comes with a command line utility called defaults for reading and writing to these .plist files.

If you take an example from the above list of plist files, you can, at the command prompt type the following:

defaults read com.apple.fin<tab> (where <tab> is the tab key that allows tab completion of the rest of the property list format) and be sure to exclude the .plist of the end so:

will print out all of the properties to the console so you can inspect what's there.

You can pipe this output to grep and filter for a setting name when doing searches. Once you've found a property name you want to look at you can pass it into the defaults read command to get the value of that specific property.

Example reading a single property:

WARNING

Just like modifying the Windows Registry can mess up your system, you need to take care modifying system or application plist settings.

Macos Plist File

WARNING

Most of these settings can be changed by navigating to the application or system's respective preferences U.I. and just changing settings manually. However, the whole reason I ran down this path was to learn how to automate these setting changes.

When I first tried to change the settings I tried manually modifying the plist files with a GUI tool built into the Xcode developer tools.

However, and I have yet to understand the internals of this, after I made the changes to the plist file they would automatically get overwritten after a few seconds. So it seems that there is some official source of these values somewhere that for some reason overwrite the ones in these folder. I probably have that all wrong - but was an observation I had.

So if my understanding above is somewhat correct, how did I update the source?

Macos Plist Global Protect

Similar to reading property list values you can use the defaults command line tool to write changes back to the .plist files.

As an example, here's how I update Finder to show file extensions.

The configuration options are now endless.

Using my new knowledge that app and system settings can be found in both /Library/Preferences and ~/Library/Preferences and I can use the command line tool defaults to read/write to understand and update settings.

I can now create a simple .sh script that allows me to pre-configure a new development machine with all of the settings I would like.

Now, each time I catch myself trying to use an application's preferences U.I. I stop myself and try to find that setting in a plist file and create a CLI command that I can save into my development setup script.

Happy Mac Settings Hacking!