MacOS – Can’t find .plist files

macosplistpreferencesterminal

I can’t find the .plist file for TextEdit, Preview. I’ve looked into /Library/Preferences, ~/Library/Preferences, and ~/Library/Containers. I have tried opening the app and changing the preferences and still it doesn’t create them.

I run the following command in Terminal to find it:

mdfind -name (osascript -e 'id of app "Preview"').plist -onlyin ~/Library/Preferences -onlyin /Library/Preferences -onlyin ~/Library/Containers/

I also looked myself and they weren’t there. Any reason this is happening? Odd this is I can still read the defaults with defaults read -app Preview in the Terminal. So where is that coming from, is there another place it’s stored at.

Best Answer

~/Library/Containers/com.apple.Preview/Data/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Preview.plist

and

~/Library/Containers/com.apple.TextEdit/Data/Library/Preferences/com.apple.TextEdit.plist

~/Library/Containers does not seem to be indexed, at least on my system, so mdfind didn't find them. That said, I have a copy of my system on another hard drive, which IS fully indexed, and it listed some files there that started me poking around in that folder on my OS drive.

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