Mac OS X Prefs Editor Alternatives

Mac OS X Prefs Editor

Prefs Editor can edit application and system preferences in a simple, tabular format.

Mac OS X 10.8 introduced a caching system for app preferences ("cfprefsd"). While this probably increases performances for apps, it makes it harder for developers to manipulate preference values quickly for testing, because making changes directly to the plist files in the ~/Library/Preferences folder does not work any more with editors such as "Property List Editor.app" and the similar editor in Xcode. As of now (Dec 14, 2013), the only way to edit such preferences is by using the "defaults" command, which is rather difficult to use once it comes to editing dict or array entries.

Therefore, I've written a tool that works like the plist editor in Xcode but uses the CFPreferences functions to modify the values instead of editing the plist files directly.