Defaults Write

Christoph Kappel · · , , , · Reading time 2 minutes

I’ve been using macOs for over two years now and my overall experience is: I hate it more and more with each successive day.

There are so many annoying things that either can’t be turned off or there is some arcane setting in the configuration depths of the defaults write hell..

Here I am going to collect some of the things that solved an issue for me.

Defaults to write

Automatically switch spaces

No idea what happens, but sometimes Mission Control decides to switch to any space on any screen, regardless what its user might want.

This is supposed to be to turn this off:

$ defaults write com.apple.dock workspaces-auto-swoosh -bool NO
Keep in mind to restart the Dock afterwards.

Animations - away

MacOS comes packed with lots of annoying animations, here is a list of defaults to get rid of them:

$ defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled -bool false
$ defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled -bool false
$ defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled -bool false
$ defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled -bool false
$ defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled -bool false
Keep in mind to restart the Dock afterwards.

Fun with the dock

I usually auto-hide the dock, because is just wastes space most of the time, but the delay of the hiding is pretty long.

Here is how to speed that up:

$ defaults write com.apple.Dock autohide-delay -float 0

Miscellaneous

Slow time machine backups

Every struggled with a backup task, which might not be doable in a geological timeframe - yes I am talking about backups.

Apparently, the process just gets low CPU priority and fails to get any speed on track.

This is also supposed to make it a bit faster:

$ sudo sysctl debug.lowpri_throttle_enabled=0
Setting it to 1 again restores te previous slow state.