MacOS – Use defaults to edit preferences

defaultsmacospreferencesterminal

Recently, I have been playing around with editing System Preferences without GUI and using the defaults command. I have tried for example:

defaults write com.apple.dock autohide NO

Though that did not do anything. The preference was still checked in System Preferences, and the plist did not get edited when I opened it in Xcode. Even after relaunch of Finder and restart.

Am I using defaults properly? And if no, what is the proper use of it, when I am aiming to edit Preferences through terminal?

I am using OS X Mavericks (10.9.5)

Best Answer

Your command is adding a BOOL true or false.

So you needed to declare it as such by adding -bool. Otherwise you are changing to a string.

But also with this change you need to relaunch the dock for it to pick up the changes. You can do this by adding a second command.

killAll Dock

In one command:

defaults write com.apple.dock autohide  -bool no;killAll Dock

This will run your command and kill any process named Dock. The Dock will then auto relaunch picking up the changes.

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MacOS – Disable screensaver password requirement from command line

If you are not forced to use defaults write you can use the following command. It interacts with the OS the same as if you were to utilize System Preferences.

TESTED ON:

10.5.x
10.6.x
10.7.x
10.8.x
10.9.x

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