The binary plist format isn't new, but it is now the default with 10.4. Property List Editor opens both kinds, which may be easier than a text editor for some needs.

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you beat me to this ;-)

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The trouble with Apple's PropertyListEditor is that it has no 'find' facility, much less search-and-replace, so I've usually looked at plist files in TextEdit or SubEthaEdit . The 'switch' to binary forced me to look for alternatives. I found PlistEdit Pro , which seems to do the job nicely, but costs $24.95. Anyone out there have another favorite?

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Woops! that's PlistEdit Pro

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Or, you could use the Property List Editor program, which hides in your developer folder. The tools are on the Tiger DVD. It's much more user friendly for plist edition than TextEdit, anyway...

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This change has converted me over to using Property List Editor rather than BBEdit (which I had previously preferred for viewing + editing .plist files). You can extract just the Property List Editor using Pacifist, without installing any other parts of Xcode.

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Which may have been Apple's intent. It's much harder to get badly formed plists that way.


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I don't have Tiger yet so can someone answer this: does defaults read/write still work with these binary files or is there now a more convoluted method required to change an apps settings from the command line?
I any case it sounds a lot more difficult to determine exactly which parameters you need to set with defaults without first converting it in the way described above.

What are the chances that in the future they'll remove this ability by making the binary format as cryptic as .DS_store?

---
So, I said ... well, I can't actually remember exactly what I said. But it was one of the most enormously cruel and frighteningly witty put downs ever.

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This command will print the XML list to standard output. plutil -convert xml1 -o /dev/stdout file.plist

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Yep. Defaults works just fine.

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I often work in Terminal and enjoy the ease of sudo. So it's usually much easier for me to work with plist files in nano rather than opening a graphical app. For anyone who's interested, here's a simple script to convert a plist file, open it in nano, and then convert it back to the default binary format.

#!/bin/bash

plutil -convert xml1 ${1}
nano -w ${1}
plutil -convert binary1 ${1}

Just paste this in a file, chmod +x the file, and copy it to a location easy to access. I named mine pledit and copied it to /usr/local/bin.

---
Jayson --When Microsoft asks you, "Where do you want to go today?" tell them "Apple."

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Outstanding comment!!!

All I need do is type
pled /path/to/.plist
and the script does
all the conversions.

Cool. (works great)

Thanks Quantum0726,

-HI-

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Put $EDITOR instead of nano, and that code will use any editor you've set up; for example, my $EDITOR is subethaedit.

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Or you can just stick this in your .bashrc

# to edit apple plist files:
function pledit {
plutil -convert xml1 ${1}
$EDITOR -w ${1}
plutil -convert binary1 ${1}
}

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