“defaults” command tricks

If you use the defaults command to set preferences, it’s easy to forget that you ever did. Some implications of this:

• You could be filling up your drive with logs or slowing your system down

• You could run into other bugs later that are caused by the default itself

• An update to an app might not benefit you because the default you set is overriding behavior

Finding defaults

The defaults command has a find subcommand, but I’ve found that people generally aren’t aware of it. Let’s say you set some defaults relating to your trackpad, but don’t know what domain they are in:

defaults find trackpad

Found 3 keys in domain 'Apple Global Domain': {
     "com.apple.trackpad.forceClick" = 0;
     "com.apple.trackpad.scaling" = 3;
     "com.apple.trackpad.scrolling" = "0.75";
 }
 Found 3 keys in domain 'com.apple.AppleMultitouchTrackpad': {
     Clicking = 0;
     DragLock = 0;
     Dragging = 0;
     FirstClickThreshold = 2;
     ForceSuppressed = 1;
 }
 Found 1 keys in domain 'com.apple.preference.track…