GUI in MacOS for defaults?

Question

I'm not a Mac person (yet, plan to add that to the repertoire this year) but I've been following a lot of the Mac questions on SF. The defaults command comes up a lot and from the context of the questions / answers I get what it does. Just curious, is there a GUI for editing the settings? Seems to me that this would be somewhat analagous to the registry editor in Windows (although I expect that the registry does much more).

Answer 1

Yes and no. Mac OS X doesn't have a unified registry like Windows; instead, it stores preferences in individual .plist files.

When you execute a defaults write command, it stores the change in ~/Library/Preferences. As an example, the command to change the Dock from the 3D glass look to a more basic 2D shade is:

defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES

What this does is it modifies ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dock.plist and changes no-glass to true. The Mac OS X developer utilities contain a program called Property List Editor that will allow you to edit the file with a GUI:

Answer 2

The Secrets app will allow you to toggle some of the more well known default commands.

Answer 3

There are a few tools that allow you to change these 'default' type settings from a gui interface, here are two:

• TinkerTool: http://www.bresink.com/osx/TinkerTool.html
• Onyx: http://www.titanium.free.fr/pgs2/english/onyx_leopard.html