Secrets Unhides Hidden Preferences

Hidden preferences are among the more popular items covered in the Tips & Tricks sections of Mac-related websites, and the method usually presented for setting these preferences is via the defaults Terminal command. As a consequence, someone who doesn't feel comfortable with using the Terminal may refrain from utilizing hidden preferences even if they would find them useful, and it is also tedious to keep track of which hidden preferences are available at all. Nicholas Jitkoff's utility Secrets solves both of these problems.

Secrets is a system preferences panel, and it presents an extensive list of hidden preferences, which is searchable, and which can be filtered by application or the meta-filters Top Secrets and New Secrets. Setting a hidden preference becomes as easy as clicking a checkmark, making a selection from a pop-menu, or typing in a property.

What happens if I click this...?

Anyone who has uncovered a hidden preference can contribute their findings via a form on Jitkoff's website, but there is a slight problem that you can often see with public contributions like these: the contributors know exactly what their contribution is about, and what it does. As a result, the documentation for many of the secrets is lacking.

Yes, most of the preferences' names are self-explanatory, but not all. So, without having a proper discription at hand, it's difficult to guess what a certain preference setting does, or what the valid property range and formatting is for options that are typed into a text field.

Any freshly contributed "secret" remains editable for three days, but I wished that this time limit were lifted so that descriptions could still be added at a later time.

The same critique also applies to the software itself: some of the items are displayed in bold text, and their font color can be black, blue, and red, but the documentation (I think I should have used quotation marks around that word, really...) does not explain what this means.

Clicking vs. typing

Still, if you find a hidden preference tip online that you would like to utilize on your Mac, Secrets is your most comfortable option to access that setting, yet. For example, one of the more recently published hidden preferences lets you disable Data Detectors in Apple Mail. To set this option, you could either launch the Terminal and execute this command:

    defaults write com.apple.mail DisableDataDetectors YES

Or you could open Secrets in the System Preferences and click a checkbox:

After a longer hiatus, caused by server hiccups, Secrets is now back online, and you can download it from its new home at the Google Code website. (Tip o' the hat to Hawk Wings)