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8 Responses to "QotD: PLIST"

1. | Reply Daniel
   Posted 25 May 2005 at 8:29am #
   

   I used to use vi to edit them, so no, I'm not down with it either. I seem to recall seeing that they can be converted back to text, though.

2. | Reply Steve Streza
   Posted 25 May 2005 at 8:32am #
   

   They went binary? I don't pay attention I guess.

3. | Reply Mike Zornek
   Posted 25 May 2005 at 9:38am #
   

   I am not down. I never could get a good reason why moving to binary was a "good" decision.

4. | Reply Adam
   Posted 25 May 2005 at 9:44am #
   

   (The binary format has been around for a while, since 10.2 I think. What changed now? Is it the default format for new plist files being created?)

   I've always preferred the custom text syntax -- it has the best balance between readability and compactness, while the XML format has neither. And, best of all, they made a Simpsons reference in the text-format's specification! Hell yeah!

   The binary format will be harder to work with, but anything is better than that depraved XML format. There's always Plist Editor.

   Personally, I'd rather stare at Goatse for an hour than manually work with XML plists for ten minutes. I hate it with the fury of a thousand suns.

5. | Reply Clark Cox
   Posted 25 May 2005 at 9:56am #
   

   It doesn't bother me much. It's faster and smaller, and editing them isn't really that difficult:

   plutil -convert xml1 ~/Library/Preferences/com.barebones.bbedit.plist

   bbedit ~/Library/Preferences/com.barebones.bbedit.plist

6. | Reply Dustin Quasar Sacks
   Posted 25 May 2005 at 10:45am #
   

   I am also not down. Maybe BBEdit will come up with a little piece of mojo where it auto-converts plists to text on opening and back into binary on saving (if it was binary to begin with). That still wouldn't help other tools, but I pretty much only used BBEdit to deal with plists.

7. | Reply mike3k
   Posted 25 May 2005 at 10:46am #
   

   I'm not down. I've always used BBEdit to edit plist files.

8. | Reply Tim Buchheim
   Posted 25 May 2005 at 2:37pm #
   

   It's not too hard to make an alias which runs plutil to convert it and then invoke vim on the converted file. So I don't really care.

   I wish Apple would replace Property List Editor with something usable, though.