Cool article, i especially liked the gradient in the stacks, i didn't know that one yet. All the others like the menu bar and the dock are nice aswell, but i heard of those before.

You should at least post something that lets people know that most of these changes are in fact irreversible. Kudos for putting the strings in on *some* of them that allows the user to return to the defaults, but a big thumbs down for your lack of care in publishing this article in general. Encouraging people to "sudo" all over the terminal without even a cursory warning is highly irresponsible (at best).

Is it possible to turn the mouse-over-thing on for the finder, too? Send me an email if you know a trick. fkt

@Jeremy: he's not a babysitter. people should take responsibility for their own actions. otherwise, great list :)

don't forget the safari command for the debug menu % defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1

I need to know how to active translucent menu bar on my iBook G4 with the ATI Radeon 9200... :(

I realise he's not a babysitter, but he still has a responsibility that he is not fulfilling here. "sudo" is a very, *very* powerful and dangerous command. This kind of advice is like publishing a windows article with a bunch of Registry tweaks that the author suggests you just "try out" on his say-so. One wrong command with this and you could *easily* destroy your whole system and lose *all* your data. No Mac tech of any worth would ever suggest people start "sudo"-ing around their computer, but given that this guy is going to do it anyway, the very very least he could do is simply put up a warning or a link to a description of what the "sudo" command actually is and how much irreparable damage you could do to your computer by using it wrong. He doesn't even recommend that people back up their computers before attempting this. It's like leaving a bad photocopy of a recipe for poison in an 8th Grade Home Economics class. Sure if someone bakes it up and kills themselves it's their own fault but that doesn't make the idiot that left the recipe blameless.

I'd like to make customized folders that have icons on them of my choosing, which also have the icon by itself in the sidebar, etc...as apple has. Can it be done? Anyone tried?

While it would have been nice to post reversal commands for all rather than some, I think that 'irresponsible' applies more to someone who would bring up a terminal window and start typing commands without knowing the exact consequences because they found them on some website. But these rather benign and inconsequential GUI tweaks are probably not going to kill anybody's system. That being said this is obviously not a complete guide, use with discretion.

Should he also include a warning that running these commands while sitting in the bath may be hazardous? Or that people should not use admin commands while sitting on top of their chimney? As far as comparing it to Registry tweaks, all that sudo does is allows you to run commands as root, so the windows equivalent would be if he explained to people how to login to their computer, since windows users are mostly all logging in as administrator anyway.

How about something useful next time?

Hey, Rob: If people run commands they do not know what does without checking first and they DO fuck up everything, at least they will have learned something. The coffee from McDonalds IS hot. Only in stupid America would you ned a warning for that. D'uh. Wrong advice on the Internet WILL fuck up your computer. Only noobs does not know that. D'uh.

You should mention that the Recent Apps can be right clicked and changed to Recent Applications Recent Documents Recent Servers Favorite Volumes Favorite Items (home, applications, desktop, etc) You can repeat the terminal command, which adds new "Recent Apps" And then change each to be another one.

Well, I somehow made my menubar irreversibly grey: the translucent command isn't working, either. I'm a total n00b when it comes to these things - can anyone help me out here?

I agree, there should most definitely be a warning with these. I'm not stuck with a white menu bar which I hate. There's no way that I can see to go back to the translucent one.

<flamebait> @Ola. STFU. Seriously, you're a tool. - America has nothing to do with it, I'm betting I can find a Mac user in your country(It's not America right, I mean why would someone who lives here call it stupid) or many other countries that will make the same mistake. You meant to strike out at the fact that America is overly litigious. That lady knew the coffee was hot, she wasn't stupid, she just knew she could capitalize on getting injured. - I hate to say this but a lot of Mac users are going to be 'noobs', and not just to social skills like yourself, but to their computer as well. Mac markets to them, "d'uh". It is reasonably likely that a lot of Leopard users may not know a single thing about the Unix underneath their system and as a Mac user have been living a live where they simply are not given coffee that is hot, or they are warned about it ahead of time. - Not sure that the whole Coffee is hot thing is really a good analogy. Its pretty reasonable just based on life experience to expect coffee to be hot. Again, the woman who did that was very likely not stupid, she just knew she could get money for it. </flaimbait> In the end both camps are right, its a bad idea for the author to just post these commands without caution. Even a tiny bit of background (at least a reference link) to what the Terminal.app interface actually represents would be useful. It is also a bad idea for any user to just go in there and poke around. The trouble is the Mac is marketed and used by a lot of people that just know basic things about computers. You'd hope that most would research what this 'sudo' thing is before they run it seeing as how they have to go open their terminal to do it, and even more interesting, it asks for a password ;) Like it or not though people do crazy and irresponsible things with their computers and its really not asking too much to have someone suggesting these changes post a sentence or two explaining the possible impact. It's hard to say if the author themselves even realizes this however as they even refer to these as codes, when in fact they are commands. Tiny difference I know, and I'm pedantic for even mentioning it. However tiny difference can give you an idea both of the intended audience (those who won't snicker at it being called 'codes') and possibly (no offense) the author. That being said, caveat emptor for folks who open up the Terminal and just go to town. If you guys believe so strongly that this sort of behavior is a problem unchecked, perhaps a RFE to Apple to put a warning message as part of the shell opening would be appropriate. One final note, doing these things as root implies system wide changes, so if there is more than one account you're going to be slapping all users with these changes. I have not done it in a while but I would think the safer alternative like writing to your own defaults (which is mentioned for a couple of these changes).

I wish there was a way to have an icon-free desktop.

I apologize to anyone who has to read my post. It's nasty looking. I had put line breaks in the text box forgetting that they probably wouldn't get honored. I swear it wasn't as long winded looking when I wrote it :)

For anyone unable to return the Menu Bar to translucent, the correct command is: sudo defaults delete /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.WindowServer 'EnvironmentVariables' The syntax for defaults is 'defaults delete <domain> <key>. There is no need to include '-dict 'CI_NO_BACKGROUND_IMAGE'', which is the value and is only required for read and write commands.

For the commands that start with sudo, anyone has to make sure that the command is correctly entered because it effects the whole system.. For example, to return back your translucent menu bar it's : %sudo defaults delete /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.WindowServer 'EnvironmentVariables'; Don't ever forget to include 'EnvironmentVariables' or your Mac won't be able to boot up again.

@meta: Thanks a bunch, man. Just saved me a lot of foolish worrying.

I agree with Jeremy - some sort of note should have been included to warn people of the potential for disaster. The warning would not have been for those of us who are well versed in Unix and Mac protocols, but for the poor noobie who is trying to learn and just doesn't know any better. Since this has not hit Digg, lots of people will be seeing it and some who have no business doing so will try it. If they are lucky, they will spell everything correctly and all will be well; or the muck up the spelling and they will get an error with no change. If they are unlucky, they will make a minor change and end up with a sour feeling about the Mac and the Mac community.

I enabled the stacks thing, then disabled and now the icons don't zoom. Any ideas?

You just need to click one time on the separator line, which is the only 'free from Application' zone, for the Dock to respond the change, then the magnification will go back again. ^-^

@Wendy I did entered it wrong, can anyone help to fix it?

Not to be persnickety here, but although I think it's appropriate to afford warnings to people unfamiliar with the Unix core of MacOS, I think if you are going to be doing serious changes to your computer, the sage and experienced tweaker, especially someone who knows and has worked in a Linux environment before, will simply backup their entire system prior to making minor or major mods to the desktop environment with the sudo command. Although these are GUI mods, and don't really affect a great deal of the functionality of Leopard, I'd strongly recommend for inexperienced Terminalistas to archive everything prior to attempting this. On the plus side, this does provide some cool ways to access the Unix core of your mac, and I laud any attempt at making the "noob" user (we were all one once) aware of the powers of their machine. As for any anti-American (or any other anti-nationalist sentiments), these have no place on a site about using your Mac computer. Cheers.

"Terminal Codes"? Geezus. You aren't unlocking a secret weapon in an X-Box game here, you're working with Unix. It's not a "code", you're typing in Unix commands to modify preference files.

Thanks Mike, I was about to say the same thing. Dear OSX folks: they are called commands, applications, scripts or other names (depends on context); codes are things you enter in video games to unlock secret junk.

@webmaster: do you mean the racing stripe between the apps and the stacks icons?

@Gary Roberts: Thanks, I was just going to post a similar comment. I suggest everyone try that.

So in case there are still new users not realizing sudo can be bad, don't ever run what Gary suggested, unless you're feeling like you don't need your stuff any more ;)

Will what Gary Robers suggests wipe out all your data? Is that what it's doing? Do these guys work on the Vista team or something?

Thanks for the tips. Mouseover on the stacks is pretty sweet!

@Jeremy: Thanks, mom.

I've been a Unix admin for 15 years. 0) "Terminal codes"? For fucks sake, this isn't magic. It's called a command line, folks. The commands given above simply copy preference files into areas where the application is normally looking anyway, and use a tool called "defaults" to change GNUStep-style application settings. 1) These changes are NOT irreversible, nor will they "destroy your computer". 2) Sudo is not dangerous. Idiots are dangerous. Don't blame the tool -- blame the tool using the tool. 3) If you're not comfortable with fire, don't play with it. 4) The internet never was, isn't now, nor ever will be your nanny. Quit complaining.

So I agree on all 4 counts there. Something to keep in mind though: 1.) The target audience may not even realize this is fire. They may in fact be idiots[sic] when it comes to Unix. This isn't like a post on a X11 blog or a Gnome/KDE blog. These folks are using an interface that shields them almost completely from the Unix OS underneath. 2.) No one expects the internet to be their nanny. Just looking for a little bit of responsibility when posting commands that are run as root. Particularly becuase again, the target audience(and potentially the author) does not necessarily grasp the full meaning of this. 3.) I'm not sure if anyone thinks the UI changes are fatal, I personally am just saying its stupid to suggest system wide changes made with sudo if its at all possible to make the change to a single user account. I'm not normally an advocate of nanny state type things but I am an advocate of practicing responsibility when guiding others to do things as _root_. I'm not talking about putting 'egg' on the list of ingredients in Egg Nog here, this stuff is very likely NOT obvious to anyone. You should see (and may have) the crazy stuff people do to their macs. Like the famous '/usr, well I already have /Users so I can just get rid of this /usr junk its wasted space.' But in the end you're right, assuming they only do sudo for the commands above, yeah it's not the end of the world. If they follow advice in the comments like mixing sudo with a dash of rm -r then its a recipe for fail.

I'd like to take back my statement that 'sudo' can be bad. As hpcassidy said it really isn't the command that is the issue. I mean that 'sudo' can give you rights and permissions you would not normally have (i.e super user). This can be a double-edged sword and if you're not careful about the commands you run using sudo you could potentially do damage (i.e remove files that a normal user simply would not be allowed to delete).

@Chris I live in America and I still call it stupid...

This is certainly a nice little packaging of defaults write commands, with the screenshots and all. But I see no credit as to how you found out about these settings. Did you pull them right off of http://www.macosxhints.com/ , which is pretty much the go-to source for stuff like this, or did you discover them yourself somehow?

Webmaster. Please pull Gary Robert's post. Even though by this point in the thread everyone should realize the BS is flying, it's not only irresponsible that Gary posted that, it's malicious. Free speech or not, it should be removed, or commented out by you a as webmaster. As a community, we have absolutely no obligation be people's nannies, but as a Mac Community, we should be able to police ourselves to not be a**holes. How does his comment help anyone other than his own self-importance? It doesn't, and should be stricken. Thanks

The minimum font size for Safari can already be set in its Preferences/Advanced menu.

I second DK: please pull out Gary Robert's post and quick. About those command lines, thanks for bringing the "Stacks, Activate Mouse Over Gradient" to our attention. Stacks were really missing this.

Out of curiosity, anyone come across a way to make a stack show more than 8 items?

If there's a way to disable the RSS in the sidebar of Mail, I'd love to know how. I already have an RSS ready and I'm quite happy with it, so it's just a waste of space.

@DK and OneZeroZero : Okay, I've already pull out some dangerous comments. Thanks for reminding me.
@Jeremy : I've posted the warning message on the article, thanks for your advice.
@Chris : HTML tags can be used if you want to put a line break for your comment. ^^
@Travis : You can click on the arrow next to RSS in Mail sidebar to collapse it.

well i am an idiot i guess. i tried to change the names of the capitalized things in the sidebar.. they didnt change, so i tried to revert to the backup i made. now when i right click on a file, instead of like "show package contents" it says n153" and all the other things are like "n163" "n172" etc. any ideas?

interesting thread I agree with the irresponsibility theme. Tim I knew that some people couldn't speak without use of the word like but I did not know it extended to writing, try removing them from your post it works perfectly.

thanks for the sarcasm and lack of insight. actually, using the word like in that post was because i didnt know the exact wording it was telling me, so it needed like.

Well, sudo *is* potentially dangerous for people who don't know what they're doing. I'm a fairly advanced computer user, but I'm no programmer or computer scientist. Recently, I happened to nuke my applications folder (and probably a bunch of system files too) while trying to change the default settings of Guest accounts in Leopard. I'm pretty sure my mistake wasn't any kind of typo, but I don't know enough to know where I messed up. I had backups of my data, so it wasn't a big deal, but I still had to re-install everything. Anyway, my point is that a warning about the power of sudo is a good thing for tweakers like me who aren't computer scientists. I've been bitten once and learnt my lesson, but there might be others who will nuke their system into oblivion and won't really know how to fix the mess. I have a question though. I've installed the transparent folder icons that give stacks "drawers" to make them more readily identifiable. The problem I have is that sorting by date modified doesn't always put the last downloaded file on top of the download stack, so I'd like to find a way to modify the "date added" of the drawer icons so that I can organize my downloads by date added while always keeping the transparent drawer is always on top. Is there any command line magic that could help me here? Is there any way to manually overwrite the "date added" of a file?

I officially throw in my vote that all the USELESS banter about the dangers of unix hacks be stricken from this comment feed. What a waste of my time - you want to talk about law stuff, I should charge some of these folks my hourly rate. Obviously I can't, because I CHOSE to read the comments - same as how any person interested with unix will choose to enter in the sudos. That being said, none of this verbal vomit will help out any of the readers who actually have problems and need to fined USEFUL repairs from users like Wendy. My name is Father CommonSense and I am asking for the cat fighting school girls to come back to the dormitories - Mother Superior is worried sick.

Thanks for the tips. Always enjoy finding the hidden defaults. Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't sudo give a warning at the command line when you first use it? Then it asks for an admin password, which clearly indicates that it's doing something unusual and outside user space. How many warnings does one need? Filling comment space with arguments about whether the title should be "Terminal Codes" or commands or whatever is equally silly. It's a title. You clearly understood it. Move on.

I love the recent apps hack. Is there a way to have this display in the "fan" method instead of "tile"? I tried replacing tile with fan in the command and my dock didn't come back and my wallpaper changes every second. I don't think it worked ;)

Ok, this is a little more serious than I thought. I figured I would just run the command (with 'tile') listed above and it would all go back to normal... no dice. I rebooted, no help. Any ideas??

I like the tip for changing the default localized sidebar strings. "SEARCH FOR" has been driving me crazy. Now, if only there was a way to re-order the sidebar categories. As I use the DEVICES entries far less frequently, I'd love to be able to move PLACES to the top of the list. I dug through the rest of the Finder.app resources, but couldn't find anything... could it be that this is hardcoded? Egh. I hope not. If anyone has any info on this, please post!

Frank, you can visit this site, that discussed about icon drawer. Maybe this can help you.
Dave, have you solved your problem? If not, maybe you can my com.apple.dock.plist file, which I've sent to your email, and save it to Home ▸ Library ▸ Preferences. Hope you can cheerfully greet your Dock again.
Kris, you can click on the triangle next to the Label and the category will collapse.

Thank you Wendy! I moved my com.apple.dock.plist out of the folder before copying yours in and it fixed itself before I used yours. It gave me the default dock layout. Thank you so much for your help.

'I wish there was a way to have an icon-free desktop.' There is. Don't use Finder. 'For the commands that start with sudo, anyone has to make sure that the command is correctly entered because it effects the whole system.' Not just that: they're powerful commands no matter where they apply. In a short while they'll be available with other commands in an upcoming update to CLIX - then you can at least know 1) somebody's already tested them; and 2) you don't have to type them in and risk a typo - you just click 'Run'. http://rixstep.com/clix Two comments. 1. You could have used ; instead of line breaks. 2. It's a really well put together article. Thanks for the great work.

Thanks for the reply, Wendy. I'm aware of the collapse feature, but it isn't exactly what I'm looking for. Take Mail, for example. The collapsible main categories can be moved. If I'd rather see the RSS category listed before the MAILBOXES category, it's a simple drag-and-drop. I'm looking for the same functionality in the Finder sidebar. It's possible to completely remove a category from the sidebar by un-checking all the possible entries in the Finder > Sidebar preference pane. Unfortunately it's not a viable solution here, as I'd have to remove _all_ the DEVICES and SHARED entries to get PLACES to the top of the list. I know this all probably sounds like nitpicking, and it's definitely not a deal-breaker... it just seems like functionality that _should_ be there.

Rob's an idiot. Anyone with a unix background knows that you use sudo all the time for various tasks. His warnings are nothing but bullshit, and everything I read was reversible if you have any clue the command structure involved. The menubar thing is a hack, but it's a simple one that is fairly easily reversible based on what I see. The greater question is why anyone would want to get rid of the translucent menubar. I think it's pretty.

anonymous,
not everyone comes with a unix background. However, it's true that everything is reversible as long as you know what you're doing.
And for the translucent menu bar, sometimes it can be really irritating, depends on the desktop background itself.

Sweet! What a great batch of commands. I especially like the 2d dock one. :)

>JobDud Says: >November 22nd, 2007 at 11:09 AM Sweet! What a great batch of >commands. I especially like the 2d dock one. :) Indeed, the 3D dock is a hindrance to usability. Glowing blue orbs to indicate an open application? Give me a break. Not to mention the GPU cycles wasted waiting to render a reflection. I thought Leopard was slow on my MacBook until I disabled the 3D Dock. Shame on the MacBook for using an integrated graphics chip, but also shame on the Leopard devs for incorporating a feature that does nothing but drive hardware requirements. Sure, it's "pretty", but that's subjective. If it actually improved the desktop experience, it'd be a different story.

KANO>>> To get that pesky hard drive off your desktop, go to Finder>Preferences and uncheck "Show hard drives on the Desktop"

Another tweak: to add empty separators to the dock, you can use the following command: defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-apps -array-add '{ "tile-type" = "spacer-tile"; }' and then "killall Dock". The separator will appear after the last permanent icon in the dock, and you can then drag it wherever you want. I wrote a bit more details here: http://zzamboni.org/brt/2007/11/21/real-separators-for-the-leopard-dock/

How do you UNDO these tweaks?

Codethought,
The command lines to revert the tweaks had been posted at the article along with those tweaks, such as Deactivate in contrary to Activate and so on.

One more. For those who use the "scale effect" to minimize windows, you might have noticed that the window is miniaturized before getting pushed to the dock - where is the "scale" effect in that?! To bring back the true "scale effect" do- defaults write com.apple.dock minimize-128 -boolean NO killall Dock

I can't deactivate mouse over gradient in stacks. I activated it just the way the told us to do so, but I just can't deactivate it. Anyone has an idea?

Is there anyway I can change the color of the Apple logo back to blue (as in Tiger) ?

Mape + most others who asked-- change YES to NO. Poof effect gone.

Ode to Ola Judging from your poor and replete with expletive writing, I wouldn't cast too many stones. Maybe go back and finish 8th grade.

Hi? i thin it easy

@Tom: No, at least 4th grade.

The non-transparent menu is not working in Leopard or does it?

Is there a tweak that will bring back translucent drop-down menues? (I dont talk about the menue bar!) They have been taken away after Update 10.5.2. thanks in advance! dennis

its probably way late, but deskshade will provide you with an icon free desktop. hope it helps.

UGH! I REALLY REALLY REALLY want that clear menu bar!!! But i copy and pasted it all into the terminal and sometimes is does nothing sometimes it replies with 2008-03-19 20:39:12.091 defaults[5338:a0b] There is no (EnvironmentVariables) default for the (/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.WindowServer) domain. Defaults have not been changed.

I second Dennis' question. I loved those transparent drop downs, and they're gone as of update 10.5.2...and I want them back...a lot. So if anyone knows a script for that, that'd be great. -Thomas

I recently bought a Teach Yoursel Unix book but it was written back in Panther days. Can anyone recommend a book or online tuition site for Unix relating to Leopard? Apart from tweaking GUI settings and other abstract projects, what do all you clever folk actually use it for in a productive and creative sense. Can you give me any worthwhile examples such as in making movies or Keynote presentations. AW

These are good trick to know.. much appreciated. Another item I am trying to find is how to modify the word boundaries for text selection.. in iTerm, I can specify what characters make up words I want to click on to select. for example, if I have /dev/nst0 and click on that string “/dev/nst0″ in Terminal, it only selects “dev” or “nst0″, I need it to select “/dev/nst0″ so I can copy/paste. Any ideas on this for macs Terminal.app? in iTerm this works.. I just don't completely like iTerm and would love to stick with the native Mac applications...