What's up with my plists?

[Mikuro]

I've noticed recently that a lot of the plists in my preferences folder aren't XML anymore (notably, com.apple.safari.plist), but rather some mysterious and cryptic non-human-readable binary format. Why? WHY?!?!? It was so nice to be able to manually edit any preferences whenever I wanted to. It was so simple. So elegant. So sensible. Why the change? Is it really worth it to save, what, a few kilobytes?

I realize that Apple's Property List Editor app can read these new Franken-plists, but still. Most OS X users don't have the developer tools installed. This makes it a lot harder to coach people to edit settings when you need to. Also, Property List Editor is more annoying (to me) than a plain text editor, because it has no search feature. It's a huge waste of time to scroll through the list manually searching for what you want.

Does anyone know why Apple made this move? It seems like such a step backwards. And is it new to Tiger, or did I just never notice it before?

....you know you're a hopeless geek when something like this actually bothers you. *sigh* Oh well, I am what I am.

 

[lurk]

They are in a binary format that is supposed to load faster and be lighter weight. You can change back and forth between the binary and xml version using the plutil program.

 

[Darkshadow]

Yep, Apple changed it because of what lurk said.

Shameless plug here:

You can use my app Pref Setter to play around with preferences. Works with Tiger. Think of it as Property List Editor on steroids.

To note, though, it currently saves the files back in the XML plist format. An update will be out sooner-than-later (I'm a bit busy with some things and haven't had time to sit down and do the update yet). This doesn't cause any problems with any apps, just thought I'd mention the fact.

Oh, and it's free, so I'm not $ grubbing here.

http://homepage.mac.com/darkshadow02/apps.htm#prefsetter