[azinman2]

It is far from the Windows registry. Everything is file-oriented, making it easy to backup or wipe away any given plist. The plists themselves are well named and located files that tell you what it is, and things don’t appear in multiple places. No program that gets installed needs to modify any system plists; in fact, apps pretty much never access plist that they don’t own. This last fact makes it so different from windows that you don’t see “plist repair apps” in the same way you do for windows.

Binary plists are identifiable to ascii plists, they’re just more compact. plutil is a utility that can convert them back and forth. Internally the plist classes can be passed either to load and they won’t bat an eye.

[saagarjha]

> Everything is file-oriented, making it easy to backup or wipe away any given plist.

Does cfprefsd react well to that these days?

[azinman2]

Most plists are NOT NSUserDefaults / CFPreferences

[saagarjha]

Right, but those would be the closest analog to the registry would it not?

[azinman2]

Kind of but that doesn’t make it the same, especially when it doesn’t suffer from all the issues that plague the registry.