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Comment by aeturnum | Hacker News Reader

I love that this document takes inscrutable OS X settings and translates them into familiar human-readable settings. I have no idea what "NSGlobalDomain NSNavPanelExpandedStateForSaveMode" is, but I understand what "Expand save panel by default" means.

However, like other people, I'm not sure that I agree with this particular set of changes. Is there a project somewhere that packages these options into a GUI? I know a bunch of folks who use OS X who might want to change these things, but they're not programmers and they don't even know shell scripts exist.

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> Is there a project somewhere that packages these options into a GUI?

There was: Secrets* was both a website were people aggregated a small database of these options and a MacOS preference pane which displayed these:

https://web.archive.org/web/20150515104503/http://secrets.bl...

https://blog.taylormcgann.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/sec...

(* by the makers of Quicksilver!)

Sadly the project stopped updating in 2012 and the website, repository and forks seem all long gone.

(Should anyone resurrect this great app, one improvement should be versioning of secrets recipes. AFAIR Secrets.prefPane displayed options long after they stopped applicable for later Mac OS versions.)

MacPilot seems like what you’re asking for: https://setapp.com/apps/macpilot

$9.99 a month..

Why would an app like this require a subscription and not a one off payment.

I think many small developers are taking cue from large enterprises on how to price products without thinking it through. There was another similar discussion about a YC macOS notification widget company the other day.

The $10/mo is for a subscription to Setapp, which bundles a bunch of apps into one subscription service.

There has to be a reason for subscription, as in continued incremental value, cloud data storage and sharing, some sort of server backend that incurs monthly cost to run and so on.

Just slapping a subscription to a regular desktop application doesn't make sense.

Also, bundling is not a justification for a subscription, especially if one only cares about a single application. This is similar to the music albums which have already undergone unbundling and no one wants to see a bundling where there is no benefit to the consumer.

Onyx has a bunch of these: https://www.titanium-software.fr/en/onyx.html

It’s probably not exhaustive, but quite convenient.

Oh thank you! This is exactly what I was looking for.

You’re welcome :) I should add that the author might be willing to add some missing settings if asked nicely. I have been using Onyx since OS X 10.2 and it’s always worked as expected.

https://www.bresink.com/osx/TinkerTool.html

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