menu bar battery preferences

M

Maxwell Edison

Registered
On my freshly installed OS X 10.1 the battery icon in the menu bar shows neither per cent remaining nor time remaining. I liked it like that. But having once used the drop down menu to 'Show' either per cent or time remaining I cannot get it back. (Moan: this is bad UI design; if I make a change like this I ought to be able to un-make it in the same sort of way.)

There is a preferences file stored in the System Library, but (new to OS X) I'm wary of altering this file directly. Any advice?
 
My problem was once having selected Show Time or Show Percent in the menu bar battery status icon's drop down menu, I could not restore the battery status icon to it original state, i.e. showing neither time left or percent remaining.

Well, I'm not sure anyone else has this 'problem', but if you do prefer the
clean look of the battery icon without textual accompaniment, here's
how.

1) command-drag the battery status icon from the menu bar (or go to Energy Saver and hide the battery status using the tick box)

2) Open the following file with TextEdit

Users/<username>/Library/Preferences/com.apple.menuextra.battery.plist

It will look like this (or like this but with the YES and NO swapped).

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist SYSTEM "file://localhost/System/Library/DTDs/PropertyList.dtd">
<plist version="0.9">
<dict>
<key>ShowPercent</key>
<string>YES</string>
<key>ShowTime</key>
<string>NO</string>
</dict>
</plist>

Change the YES to NO.
Save the file.

3) Restore the battery status icon from Energy Saver (in System Preferences) by checking the tick box for 'Show battery status in menu bar'

4) Hey presto! You now have the battery icon (which visual indicates the amount of battery life left, even going into the red when apprpriate) without the otiose per centage or time remaining information. Just how I like it :).
 
Sorry the angle brackets meant the text didn't appear in my
last message. This is what the file looks like, with angle brackets
replaced by dashes.


?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?-
!DOCTYPE plist SYSTEM "file://localhost/System/Library/DTDs/PropertyList.dtd"-
plist version="0.9"-
dict-
key-ShowPercent-/key-
string-YES-/string-
key-ShowTime-/key-
-string-NO-/string-
/dict
/plist
 
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