[fortepianissimo]

I haven't had nerve to upgrade to Tiger, but according to some Tiger-running friends the plist files in Library/Preferences are now in binary!

Odd enough files like Library/Mail/MessageRules.plist is still in plain text.

Does anyone know why they want to take a step back? Made it XML so human can read it, and then made it binary? The argument of space-saving (compressed plist files) can't convince me - how much space can you save? And the overhead of decompressing the files?

[Mithras]

I think they're not so much compressed as stored in binary. So I think the idea is that it's faster to parse these files. But yes, I think it's pretty annoying. It makes futzing with stuff on the command line a multi-step process instead of a simple jump-in-and-fix.

But you can always use plutil to make a plaintext copy, and you can replace any binary plist with a plaintext plist, though it will probably be resaved as binary.

[mdc]

or if you install the developer tools you can use the plist editor to edit and view them perfectly. the developer tools come on the tiger dvd.

[smeger]

This annoys me, too. I'm accustomed to being able to just "vi" my prefs files and now I have to use "open" instead and use PlistEditor's abortion of an interface. Thanks for the tip on plutil, though, I wasn't aware of that!

And yeah, I'm pretty sure that it's for speed. It's much quicker to parse a binary tree than a UTF file.

[entrox]

Calling XML "human readable" already sounds like a stretch to me, but preferring to edit the plists with vi seems like the embodiment of masochism

[Adolf W. Bush]

If you need a fairly decent plist editor, get a hold of PlistEdit Pro, much better than Apple's one.

[smeger]

Originally Posted by entrox

Calling XML "human readable" already sounds like a stretch to me, but preferring to edit the plists with vi seems like the embodiment of masochism

Generally, I'd agree, but during coding sessions, I find it useful to be able to test something that changes a preference then bang into vi and type a quick /partofthekeyIwanttodelete<return>2dd:w:q. I can do it lightning-fast, and I do it pretty regularly. So this change sucks a bit as far as I'm concerned.

[Geobunny]

Yeah, I noticed this today as well. I was at work and needed a bookmark from my home computer. Normally, all I needed to do was ssh into my home machine, type pico Library/Safari/Bookmarks.plist, hit ctrl-w to enter search mode, type what I was after and hit return. Copy the URL and I'd be up and running in under a minute. Took me a while to get over the initial distress of my bookmarks obviously being corrupt, before I realised what was going on.

Suppose I can't really complain - if Apple finds yet another way to increase the speed, no matter how small that increase may be, then I'm all for it.

Thanks for the tip about plutil to make a plain text copy.