FIND HIDDEN FILES MAC MAC OS X
As an example, a Mac OS X Hints reader found no-glass in the Finder’s text strings. It is, however, the only way I know of to find hidden preferences that you really don’t know anything about. This kind of digging is my least favorite, because it’s tedious and usually not overly rewarding.
FIND HIDDEN FILES MAC HOW TO
Read the section on testing to learn how to test your possible discoveries. If you don’t see a preference setting related to translucent windows, you may have found a hidden preference. For instance, say you found the string EnableTranslucentWindow while browsing a given app’s text. Once you’ve worked your way through the file, run the program in question, and see if you can find preference settings that look as though they belong to any of the words you’ve jotted down. If you find one that looks interesting (based solely on the name), copy and paste it to a new document for further investigation. Typically, though, keep an eye out for phrases-that-are-hyphenated, and InterWordCappedStrings. What sorts of words and phrases, exactly? Unfortunately, that question is nearly impossible to answer, because it will vary so much from program to program. In your text editor of choice, open the text file you just created with the strings command, and then (ugh) just start scrolling through it, looking for interesting-looking words and phrases. If that’s the case, you’ve got a herculean task in front of you: because you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, you have to look at everything.
FIND HIDDEN FILES MAC CODE
At the hardest end of the scale, assume you’re looking at a brand-new program, and you’re wondering if the developer hid any preferences in the code that they didn’t include in the GUI.
In most cases, you’ll only see one file (named iTunes in this case), and this file is the program’s actual binary code.įrom here, the difficulty of the task at hand depends on what you know about your elusive targets-the more you know about the hidden preferences you’re looking for, the better. To see what’s here, type ls and press Return. This same path should hold true for most any OS X program-you’ll find the binary in the MacOS folder, within the Contents folder inside the application bundle. This will set the working directory to the location of the iTunes 8 binary. Open Terminal, and type cd /Applications/iTunes.app/Contents/MacOS, then press Return. To do that, you need to find the actual program code. So the first step in hunting for hidden preferences is to dump the program’s text strings into a file. There is, however, a Unix command named strings that will pull all the actual text out of binary file. That’s because programs are stored as binary data, and binary data doesn’t do well when opened in a text editor. But if you try to open the iTunes application (the actual program file, not the application bundle see below) in TextWrangler, you’ll see nothing but gibberish, as seen in the screen at right. The first thing to realize about hidden preferences is that in order to work, they must be coded in the program’s actual code-so we’re going to look for hidden preferences by finding all the actual text within a given program’s code, then start digging through that text looking for clues. (The following is lengthy, but that’s mainly because I’m trying to explain each step in some detail it’s really not as hard as it may appear.) I’m going to use iTunes 8 as my example, but the general methods apply to pretty much any OS X program, so you can easily use this technique on other programs. Note that I’ve never permanently messed up an application by experimenting with preferences at worst, I’ve had to trash the preferences file.Īssuming you meet all the prerequisites, and you understand the risks involved, here’s how to go about finding and testing hidden preferences for a given program. This isn’t really required, but it’s definitely the safest way to experiment. Ideally, you’ll have another system-whether that’s a version of OS X installed on a FireWire drive or partition, or a completely separate Mac, is really up to you. To go digging for hidden preferences in applications, there are a few prerequisites. While relatively simple, the Terminal commands to control these “hidden” preferences aren’t documented anywhere, so I’m often asked “just how do you find these things?” The answer, as with the Wizard of Oz (“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain”) is that things that appear magical may actually be quite simple, once you know how they’re done. ITunes 8-including the ability to toggle the iTunes Store link arrows on and off, for instance. Recent Mac OS X Hints blog, I explained how you can use Terminal to control a number of features that Apple removed from
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