You may be scratching your head asking yourself - why the hell would I prefer to do it through the command line instead of using a nice looking GUI (graphical user interface) to change things? Two reasons! A command line way gives you access to things that you cannot change via graphical panels (toggling hidden files is a perfect example). Let’s take it apart to get familiar with the terminology used throughout this article: defaults write AppleShowAllFiles -string YES You may have even used it before - revealing hidden files in Finder is a popular snippet (hot tip: ⌘ + ⇧ +. Macs come with a defaults command line interface that lets you read, write, and delete macOS user defaults. The System Preferences window is not the only way to adjust user settings. Change macOS user preferences via command line
