Topic: defaults

• Reading and writing macOS preferences: defaults, plutil, and why cfprefsd hides a direct edit

  defaults and plutil read and write preference domains without hand-parsing plist syntax, but a cache daemon, cfprefsd (one per user plus one for the system), mediates every read and write an app makes — so editing the plist file on disk directly often has no visible effect until the cache is invalidated.

  article · en · reviewed · knowledge as of 2026-09-24

Machine-readable: JSON