Sometimes there appears to be a gremlin in the best-behaved of Macs. It’s usually after we’ve updated macOS that we notice someone has changed a setting behind our back. I’m not going to debate whether this is a bug in macOS updaters or it’s likely to be something that we changed inadvertently. What this article is about is how to put that right, and correct a System Setting we’re unfamiliar with.

In the past, one approach could be to discover which property list that setting is stored in, and edit that. As I hope I have explained sufficiently, those settings files are managed by cfprefsd and chances are that any change we made would soon get overwritten, and that setting would be put back to its annoying state. Not only that, but we’d have to discover which of the hundreds of property lists that setting is stored in, and what its key is.

System Settings

The first place to start is where Apple intends us to control these settings, in System Settings, at least if you’re using Ventura or later. As none of us has been using this reinvented version of System Preferences for much more than a year, we’re all still unfamiliar with where it hides its controls, but it has three big advantages:

• You can make its window as tall as your display, so can see more of its controls at once.
• Its View menu contains many more items, and can take you straight to settings that are harder to locate through its window.
• Its search is excellent.

Say the setting you’re trying to find determines a shortcut triggered by a secondary click. You might logically start with Trackpad or Mouse settings, where the secondary click is configured. But those settings don’t determine any shortcuts that might be triggered. Searching for shortcut produces a load of hits, most of them in Accessibility, but beneath those, in Desktop & Dock, is one for Keyboard and Mouse shortcuts that looks more promising.

Don’t give up in frustration with System Settings: although some important settings were omitted, the vast majority of what was in System Preferences is available, and it’s still the best way to control most settings in macOS.

Third-party utilities

Some apps provide ready access to a far greater range of settings, among them the most comprehensive of all, Koingo’s MacPilot. If you’ve drawn a blank with System Settings, then you’ll almost certainly be able to locate and fix that setting using MacPilot. It handles settings properly, so the system won’t override them, and is kept up to date.

There are also some domain-specific utilities that specialise in configuring peripherals like trackpads and mice. They tend to come and go, and before trying one out, check that it works through macOS properly when it changes settings, and that it supports the version of macOS you’re using. Because Apple doesn’t intend the user to change these settings outside System Settings, features come and go, change name, and their property list moves without warning. Last year’s utility might be a complete failure following this year’s changes in macOS.

defaults

If you’ve reached the end of the line but are still determined to change that setting somehow, your last option is using the defaults command in Terminal, as that is reliable. But before you can use a command like
defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles true
to display hidden file in the Finder, you need to discover the domain, key and value to use.

You can list all the domains available with a command like
defaults domains > domainslist.text
to write them to the named file. For system settings, you’re then mainly concerned with domains starting with com.apple. Pick the most likely and list all its current key-value pairs with a command like
defaults read com.apple.finder > finderdefaults.text
to write them to that named file.

Unfortunately, this only lists those settings that are in effect at that time. There’s no straightforward way to discover those that can be set, but aren’t currently in your Mac’s settings. You may have luck searching on the web, but whatever you do, don’t ask any form of AI like ChatGPT, as it’s most likely to give you a confident and totally incorrect answer.

Happy hunting!