This is easy. If you’re not comfortable changing preferences or configurations for an app on your Mac, move along; there’s nothing to see here.
However, if you’d like to get your geek on here’s the way to start. It’s a useful utility called PrefEdit; as in, ‘edit preferences‘ for various and sundry Mac apps. Changing preferences is not for the faint of heart Mac user, but PrefEdit makes editing easy enough for the common man.
Peter Piper Picked Preferences
First of all, don’t use PrefEdit unless you have some mucking around experience already, or, if this kind of tinkering and tweaking is new to you, take precautions with Mac backups.
Second, PrefEdit has been around on the Mac for a long time and is packed with features. It’s the first step to view the OS X preferences database for each user account, and it comes with both a browser for preferences and an editor to edit plist files (property list files), and a browser for preference manifest files.
PrefEdit is not your father’s TextEdit. Using PrefEdit you can view manifest file descriptions, modify user preference settings, and– short of a better description– lets you muck around with preference settings for most Mac applications.
Using PrefEdit a Mac user can browse through all OS X preference domains and settings, search settings in the preference database, change any entry in the database or property list file (plist), move or copy preference files.
It also comes with undo and redo, uses OS X’s Versions to find older files which were edited (or originals), and considering how simple the interface is, the capabilities are little short of remarkable. Just not for the faint of heart. It’s a good tool to learn about plist files and app preference settings, so use it with care.
