Overview

Unlike the Windows way of storing applications preferences within the Registry, neither macOS nor iOS use or have a registry. This tip covers the mechanism used to store user preferences and default settings of applications.

Defaults

The mechanism Apple provides is known as defaults. Each application has its own namespace where it can add or remove settings. Additionally, there is a global namespace common to all applications. For example, to enable substring matching in Safari we would need to modify the FindOnPageMatchesWordStartsOnly property:

$ defaults write com.apple.Safari FindOnPageMatchesWordStartsOnly -bool FALSE

Usually, these default settings are stored in property list files. Users preferences are maintained in the ~/Library/Preferences folder, while /Library/Preferences contains system-wide settings.