How do you manage macOS .plists?

[BasixKOR]

I'm trying to manage some of my macOS application settings with chezmoi, but I've come across some hurdles:

• macOS plists are binary files, which makes it hard to work when templating is needed (secrets, conditionals, etc.)
• Many applications (ab)use the Preferences plists to store their temporary, machine-specific state, which I'd rather not sync.

How are you managing your macOS preferences? I'd love to see how others are working with this.

[Jaharmi]

I’m just getting started with Chezmoi, but macOS property list files — at least the ones people tend to care about in places like ~/Library/Preferences — are essentially an on-disk cache of in-memory settings.

For best results, they should only be accessed/edited with a CFPreferences-aware tool. The defaults command on macOS is one. There are libraries that use the CFPreferences framework for various scripting/programming languages. This should result in the modification of the setting (including in-memory), and not just the on-disk artifact we see as plists.

One example I’ve found for Chezmoi is a script in twpayne’s dotfiles.