OS haX: Undocumented, inaccessible, and incredibly useful

As enjoy­able as Apple’s soft­ware is to use, they like to make us work.  Hid­den below the sur­face of most Apple soft­ware are hun­dreds of undoc­u­mented lit­tle “switches” which can be turned on to enable new sooper-seekrit fea­tures.  By the same token, these switches can be dis­abled to remove unwanted behav­ior or fea­tures from applications.

Today i offer to you my per­sonal col­lec­tion of must-have haX and helpful/fun tweaks.

All of these tips require a brief visit to the Com­mand Line Inter­face, that dark & scary screen that com­puter nerds on TV are always star­ing into.  The Ter­mi­nal appli­ca­tion for access­ing the command-line can be found in the Appli­ca­tions folder inside Util­i­ties.  But don’t fret too much, for one thing, command-line hack­ing is fun and sexy!  And i’ll make the tuto­ri­als real sim­ple for you, you can cut & paste, right?

Quick­look into fold­ers (with­out a plugin)

By default Apple’s whizbang file pre­view util­ity doesn’t peer into fold­ers, although there are Quick­look plu­g­ins that will pro­vide this func­tion.  This hack will dis­play folder con­tents in a very sim­ple fash­ion, not a super-powerful tweak, but cer­tainly use­ful for at-a-glance peeks into folders.

1. Quit/Relaunch Finder using the Force Quit menu
2. Open Ter­mi­nal
3. Paste (or type) the fol­low­ing command:

defaults write com.apple.Finder QLEnableXRayFolders 1

4. Relaunch Finder

Note to Path Finder users:  It works for us too!

Add Quit to the Finder menu

Do you ever need to quit the Finder?  It is just another appli­ca­tion that runs on your Mac after all.  Albeit, one that runs con­stantly.  But no ill will come to you if you quit it, and in some cases, it’s use­ful to be able to do this.  This com­mand will add Quit to the Finder menu, it will also allow you to use the com­mand + Q key­board shortcut.

1. Quit/Relaunch Finder using the Force Quit menu
2. Open Ter­mi­nal
3. Paste (or type) the fol­low­ing command:

 defaults write com.apple.Finder QuitMenuItem 1

4. Relaunch Finder

Another note to Path Finder users:  If you REALLY want to mar­gin­al­ize the Finder, there are much hack­ier ways to remove the Finder entirely from the GUI.

Remove the iTunes arrows

In this next hack, lets turn OFF one of the more obnox­ious pieces of visual clut­ter in iTunes, those pesky iTunes Store arrows that appear next to EVERY SINGLE track, artist and album.

1. Quit/Relaunch Finder using the Force Quit menu (OR the new Quit menu option
2. Open Ter­mi­nal
3. Paste (or type) the fol­low­ing command:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes show-store-arrow-links -bool FALSE

4. Relaunch Finder

Change your login screen background

This one is just for fun, but it can be pretty fun.  It is also a use­ful hack for office work­group com­put­ers that spend their off-hours sit­ting on the login screen.  I like to replace the wall­pa­per to reflect the com­pa­nies brand­ing.  For this tip you’ll need to first pick a wall paper image to use, then place it in a folder that the sys­tem will be able to access, i rec­om­mend the /Users/Shared folder.  In the exam­ple below be sure to replace mynewbackground.jpg with the file­name that you are actu­ally using!

1.Open Ter­mi­nal

2. To change back­ground img:

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow DesktopPicture /Users/Shared/mynewbackground.jpg

3. To reset:

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow DesktopPicture /Library/Desktop\ Pictures/Aqua\ Blue.jpg

You’ll obvi­ously need to log out to see this in effect.

Do you have some defaults tricks that you like?  Please share in the com­ments, i love new tips and know what/how folks use them.