defaults_plus

This is a knock-off of the Mac OS X defaults program, but able to manipulate nested dicts.

Long-term, I'll likely abandon this project in favor of an Ansible plugin, something like ansible/ansible-modules-extras#2392.

Prerequisites

It needs Python 3 and PyObjC (pyobjc-framework-Cocoa, for CoreFoundation). Homebrew's Python won't let pip install packages into it, so the easiest way is to run it with uv, which provides both:

uv run --with pyobjc-framework-Cocoa ./defaults+ read com.apple.Terminal 'Window Settings.Basic'

Or add the dependency to the script itself, so uv runs it directly:

uv add --script defaults+ pyobjc-framework-Cocoa
sed -i '' '1s|.*|#!/usr/bin/env -S uv run --quiet --script|' defaults+

Usage Examples

To get all the settings for the Basic profile in Terminal:

defaults+ read com.apple.Terminal 'Window Settings.Basic'

To add a setting to that profile (to disable the audible bell feature):

defaults+ write com.apple.Terminal 'Window Settings.Basic.Bell' 0

To read the setting you just wrote:

defaults+ read com.apple.Terminal 'Window Settings.Basic.Bell'

To copy one Terminal profile to another:

defaults+ copy com.apple.Terminal 'Window Settings.Basic' 'Window Settings.Copy of Basic'
defaults+ write com.apple.Terminal 'Window Settings.Copy of Basic.name' 'Copy of Basic'

TODO

• Add delete command.
• Add rename command.
• Add other types of items for write.
  • data
  • bool, float, etc.
  • array, dict
  • array-add, dict-add
  • with and without flag explicitly specifying type
• Add read-type command.
• Require a flag to overwrite an array or hash with a single value.
• Handle a top-level key that doesn't exist, or isn't a dict (it crashes now).
• Accept -app Terminal syntax for the domain.
• Accept the same <value_rep> syntax that defaults does.
• Allow specifying the key path separator.
• Do real command-line option parsing and help.

Copyright

Copyright (c) 2014 Craig Buchek
Copyright (c) 2014 BoochTek, LLC

This software is licensed under the terms of the MIT License. See LICENSE.txt for details.

Contributing

1. Fork it.
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature).
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature').
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature).
5. Create new Pull Request.