[rovr138]

They all have to be saved somewhere. A lot of Mac only apps also use the defaults[0] system which allows you to read/write values there.

  man defaults
  defaults domains | tr " " "\n"
  defaults read com.apple.Safari

For dot files, I personally use stow[1] but there are other utilities and workflows out there[2].

  [0] https://ss64.com/osx/defaults.html
  [1] https://www.gnu.org/software/stow/
  [2] https://dotfiles.github.io/

[draebek]

Note that, at least as of 10.14 (Mojave), lots of built-in macOS preferences do not like their settings to be changed this way. For example, you can use `defaults` to change preferences for the trackpad to your heart's content, but they won't take effect immediately because IOKit (I think) has a shadow copy of the preferences that is much harder to modify. The pref pane for the trackpad ends up changing both the plist and the IOKit prefs to make preference changes take effect immediately.

If you use a lot of `defaults` commands, you'll want to reboot immediately afterwards.