Of all the "under the hood" components of Mac OS X, my personal favorite is preferences files. Why? For starters, they are important. They potentially affect every application you use, from the Finder ...

Jake Peterson is Lifehacker’s Tech Editor, and has been covering tech news and how-tos for nearly a decade. His team covers all things technology, including AI, smartphones, computers, game consoles, ...

Safari crashes on launch. Mail quits when you try to send a message. What to do? Most savvy Mac users will delete the application’s preferences file, which stores changes made to the program’s default ...

System Preferences is easy to use: open it, click here, click there—whoops, not there, over here instead… wait, where is that setting? My point is: System Preferences could be easier to use. And it is ...

A preferences file is, almost by definition, any file that stores the preferences settings for some software. In Mac OS X, most user-modifiable preferences settings are stored in .plist files in the ~ ...