OSXFAQ Mac OS X Tip-of-the-Day  

Following on from Monday's tip, here is how to create a tidier global Startup Items by editing the loginwindow.plist file. Copy your own loginwindow.plist to the global one if you have not already done so, and give Others Read Only access. If you have installed the Developer Tools, double-click the global loginwindow.plist. Otherwise use a text editor to edit it manually.

I have experimented deleting as much of the original file as possible to make manual maintenance easier. In the example below I have kept just one item - X11.app.

I changed this:

to this:

Textually, the final file looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>AutoLaunchedApplicationDictionary</key>
<array>
<dict>
<key>Hide</key>
<false/>
<key>Path</key>
<string>/Applications/Utilities/X11.app</string>
</dict>
</array>
</dict>
</plist>

I also removed the alias data to prove that Startup Items still worked without it. Without the need for alias data, it is easy to manually add new Startup Items by adding a 'dict' entry such as:

<dict>
<key>Hide</key>
<false/>
<key>Path</key>
<string>/Path/to/application</string>
</dict>

Enjoy !! :-)

Panther 10.3.8

To discuss this tip in the OSXFAQ Mac OS X Tip-of-the-Day Forum, click here:

E-mail your comments or suggestions to webmaster@osxfaq.com