Mac OS/X Customization Tips
Mac OS/X Customization Tips | |
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| Revision 0.2 Copyright © 2011-2012 by Zack Smith All rights reserved. IntroductionApple's OS/X operating system can be altered in numerous interesting and useful ways. There's a fair amount that you can accomplish, and the following list shows just a little of what is possible.Using System PreferencesChange the name of your computerGo into Sharing to set your computer's name.Make the hard drive appear on your desktopClick on the desktop to make Finder your current program. Then go into the menu: Finder, Preferences and in the General section select to show the hard drive on the desktop.Change the login screen background imageIf you already have a JPEG image that you want to be your new background image, do the following. First, rename it DefaultDesktop.jpg.Then, in a Finder window, navigate to /System/Library/CoreServices. Rename DefaultDesktop.jpg, which is the existing background image, and then copy your own JPEG image into that directory. It will ask you for your password. Using the Terminal utilityThe Terminal utility offers you a "command line" interface to access the internals of Mac OS/X, which lets you issue commands directly to the operating system.Change the title bar fontThe default font used for the titles of windows isn't very attractive. Using the command line, you can change it! As follows...cd ~/Library/Preferences ls plutil -convert xml1 .GlobalPreferences.plist vi .GlobalPreferences.plist plutil -convert binary .GlobalPreferences.plist plutil -convert binary1 .GlobalPreferences.plist plutil -convert xml1 .GlobalPreferences.plistWhen you edit .GlobalPreferences.plist, insert this:
<key>NSTitleBarFont</key> Use whatever font you like. In my case, I prefer TeX. Font smoothingThe Mac is known for its pretty but somewhat blurry fonts. To set the font smoothing to the minimum and thereby reduce the blurriness, issue this command:defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing -int 1 Links
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