Fixing things Apple broke

Every time Apple updates the OS they break things that I rely on. Sometimes it’s simple things like pinning the dock to the bottom of the screen. Other times it is things like making the menubar translucent. People usually figure out fixes and they are usually command-line switches. My Mac Mini is getting older, and recent updates to Xcode seem to have made the process of compiling apps much slower, so I’m probably going to upgrade my computer in the near future. This post will be a collection of things that I can apply to my next Mac.

Apps no longer appear in the tab switcher.
I noticed a while ago that if I close all of the windows in Safari after a while it does not appear in the app switcher list. According to Michael Tsai Safari and other apps are going into a new state called App Nap. You can prevent this with this line:


defaults write -g NSDisableAutomaticTermination -bool TRUE

Display File Extensions


defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleShowAllExtensions -bool true

Show the Library Folder


chflags nohidden ~/Library/

Show Hidden Files
This is useful for finding things like git repositories.


defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -bool true

Restart Finder
For some of these you need to restart the Finder. You can do it with the Force Quit menubar item or the command line.


killall Finder

Use Xcode’s Font in BBEdit


cp -R /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app/Contents/Resources/Fonts/. /Library/Fonts/