You say about them on message boards and vane sites , in Old World chat room and e-mail : Someone ’s Mac is suffer problem , and a helpful soul writes , “ DownloadXYZand clean your caches . ” Or a substance abuser want to know how to tweak a specific setting in Mac OS X , and several masses chime in with suggestions for obscurely named utility such as Onyx , DoktorKleanor , and TinkerTool . There are many of these software titles out there for Mac OS X , but they all have one thing in vulgar : They offer ways to access setting and features of Mac OS X that are n’t easy uncommitted via the standard interfaces — System Preferences , applications , and various preference dialogs . These utilities also be given to let you do several “ care ” chore that may or may not be efficacious ( that ’s the topic for another article ) . As a group , I call these software title “ tweaking ” utilities because they serve you tweak your Mac ’s lineament and performance .
Over the past couple age , I ’ve seen more and more of these pluck utility graze up , many of them very standardised to others on the market . Since I ’m often need which ones I urge , I decided it was time to contain out as many as I could to see if any stand out .
Caveats and cautions
Before I get into my discourse of the various tweaking utilities , I need to make something clear : With few exceptions , these utility simply run Terminal ( shell ) commands in the background . In other lyric , few do any “ magic ” of their own ; instead , they cater a graphical exploiter user interface ( GUI ) for Mac OS X features and configurations that would otherwise be usable only to those proficient with Terminal and Unix scale . The most obvious ( and transparent ) example of this is the utilitymaintain1 ; clicking a button in this utility actually opens a Terminal window to start the corresponding Unix program line — often something as basic as
Now , some “ purists ” feel that such public utility company are a scourge upon the ground , since , in their mind , these utilities keep people from actually learning about Unix and the shield . I bump to live on in the real world , where most of the people who practice these utility would never , ever , ever pick up a book on Unix . Their Unix skills are limited to copying a command from a Web site , paste it into Terminal , and pressing the Return samara — and they ’re perfectly OK with being such Terminal starter . For these drug user , tweaking public utility company cater easy access to those feature OS X has hidden beneath the surface .
That said , the resultant risk of these utilities is that some of them place grave dick in the hands of inexperient users . ( The fact that many tweaking utilities call for your admin - level username and password to run should be a big red flag . ) Although these apps can perform benignant actions such as enabling the Dock ’s concealed options , they can also do more serious things such as deleting virtual store swap files , deleting preferences files , and munging low - level web configurations . One wrong click and you could find your electronic computer working very otherwise — or not work at all . So an emphatic Book of caution : If you use one of these utilities , clickonlythose buttons you understand ; do n’t click wildly because the various choice go interesting or because you ’re intensely odd as to ` what they do .
On another safety - relate note , before using one of these utilities , make certain you have the tardy version — and be trusted that version is compatible with the version of Mac OS X installed on your Mac . When using a utility that makes modification to the OS , compatibility is especially crucial .
Tweaker table
When I first start look at the various tweak utility , I downloaded each one that I found and jotted down what each did . This approach turned out to be , shall we say , less than idealistic : I found far more deed of conveyance than I have a bun in the oven , many of which leave scores of features . ( It look that for at least some vendors , there ’s a race go on to see who can include the most pinch in their package . ) So when my mesa chop-chop produce beyond what could be decipherably represented in my notebook computer , and I realized that I was n’t going to be able to give a qualitative story about each title , I move around to an Excel spreadsheet . When all was said and done , I terminate up with 30 current utilities — a twelve or so others are no longer supported — and over 400 possible “ tweak ” !
Because the Web is n’t an idealistic mass medium for presenting such a large table , we ’ve included below a sum-up of the included utilities ; we ’ve made the original uncommitted for download asan Excel spreadsheetandan OmniOutliner 3 document . ( If you have OmniOutliner , I recommend downloading that version , as it ’s easier to read . ) The full mesa list every task I line up could be perform by any of these various utilities , along with which utility can do each labor .
A few notes about the full table :
Which to use?
One look at the full table and it ’s easy to get overwhelmed — there are 30 different utilities and no two allow the same feature film or interface ! So , assuming you need such a utility , which do you prefer ? If you have a specific place setting you need to change , then you could practice any of the titles that can make such a variety . If not , here ’s a summary of a few of my favorite . ( See the full table for complete details on each claim . )
Finally , an alternative to these GUI utilities is CLIX ( ) , which I covered in Mac Gems back in December 2004 . CLIX is basically a database of Unix shell commands , each of which can be hightail it by double - clicking that command . Many of the features offer by the tweaking utility covered here are useable via CLIX ’s scale command . The downsides to CLIX are that its interface is fairly spartan and in many type you ’ll need to run multiple instruction to accomplish what these GUI public-service corporation offer up via a single button . On the other hand , CLIX prove you the exact command to be run so you know exactly what ’s go to happen — and possibly learn a bit about Unix in the process .
Do you have a favorite tweaking utility that ’s not included in our roundup ? have us know in the meeting place yarn for this article , accessible via the inter-group communication below .
