prefnerd

Are you an OS X prefnerd? Do you keep a base set of OS X preferences in version control to make it easier to set up new machines? Do you want to know which items are being changed, and to what values, whenever you alter a setting on OS X?

prefnerd is a command-line tool, pn, that watches the OS X "defaults" (ie. preferences) database for changes and echoes them to the terminal as they happen.

Installation

gem install prefnerd

Usage

Run pn from the terminal with no arguments.

Requirements

prefnerd relies on three executables that are usually present on all OS X installs — defaults, diff and system_profiler — plus one that will generally have to be installed separately, fswatch. The simplest way to install this is usually via Homebrew:

brew install fswatch

Development

This is a quick-and-dirty hack that I cooked up in an hour, so there are no tests, no Bundler, no Rakefile. To cut a new release, update the version number in the gemspec and:

git tag -s v0.1 -m "0.1 release"
git push --follow-tags origin master
gem build prefnerd.gemspec
gem push prefnerd-0.1.gem

To debug the in-development version:

DEBUG=1 bin/pn

Future plans

Right now prefnerd is implemented in the crudest and most unsophisticated way: whenever a change is detected, it effectively runs a before and after snapshot of the output of a defaults read command and feeds the result through the diff tool.

A future version could instead interpret the resulting property lists as structured data, and show the defaults commands that would be required to recreate the same changes (right now, it's up to the user of figure that out based on the diff output).

Author

prefnerd was hacked together by Greg Hurrell ([email protected]).

License

prefnerd is licensed under the MIT license, because that's the default one created by the bundle gem command. See the LICENSE.txt file in the prefnerd repo for more details.