Mavericks and prefs caching
Good grief, what a pain in the ass.
I was trying to change the default font in Apple Mail 7.3. Changes wouldn’t stick, but I didn’t want to delete the entire prefs file and reset just to change the display font. Finally worked the process out:
- Open Mail prefs
- In terminal: killall cfprefsd
- Make desired changes in Mail prefs
- Exit Mail
- Open Mail to verify changes
I found PrefsEditor by Thomas Templemann, looks like I simply need to stop thinking of editing prefs files and start interacting with the cached prefs.
Update 15 Jun 2014:
Looks like the changes don’t stick after a shutdown/startup cycle. Restart cycle is OK. Like I said at the beginning, what a pain in the ass.
Update 30 Jun 2014:
Made some progress. Finally got around to checking the console logs, saw the following:
6/30/14 10:45:04.406 AM cfprefsd[174]: CFPreferences: error renaming file /Users/asdf/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist.RtrsKda to /Users/asdf/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist.
I wasn’t even aware of the Containers directory, so I took a look. The permissions on the file itself looked like they had a stale UID from the old machine so I just reset permissions on the entire Container/com.apple.mail directory (using “Apply to enclosed items…”) and most of the problems seem to have cleared up.
The only remaining niggle is that the selected account always defaults to one that I don’t want. I’ll get back to that when I have some time to waste…