OT Re: Mac and Xy

[David Auerbach auerbach@xxxxxxxx]

I'm guessing I have more applications than you. I have 6149 plists.
I was writing from the point of view of their making life easy or
difficult, say, in the context of scrubbing the machine of an
application.
The plists that *aren't* where I said are: inside applications
(applications are really packages and you can easy open them and take
a look see. If you're a space fanatic you can erase all the many many
many non-English language files (if you don't need them). Of course,
there's a utility that will do that for you. Buried in there are plist
files. But they vanish when you delete the app (and I'm pretty sure
they are static--functioning as initial values for the real plist. At
least many.) Thus Adobe and Microsoft have bunches and bunches of them
inside their many apps.
next in line are a whole bunch of Example plists inside the Developer
folder.
All the rest reside under either my library or the system library.
(Oh, a few under the Mail directory, 'cause Mail always has to be a
little peculiar and a very very few stored in some app's folder 
Usually a cranky app like the Palm stuff.)
 I've never had any problem uninstalling stuff, either by using the
program's uninstall or by deleting the app and its easy to find plists.
This is way off-topic and although I much prefer Macs for my purposes
(my most used programs Mail, Firefox, (both with some add-ons) and
Papers) I don't have an interest in general debates over which system
is best.




David Auerbach
Department of Philosophy & Religion
Box 8103
NCSU
Raleigh, NC 27695-8103


On Aug 11, at 3:13 PM, Robert Holmgren wrote:
** Reply to message from David Auerbach
 on Sun, 9 Aug 2009 11:30:16 -0400
[Config files] aren't all over the place. They are called plist
files, they are in one place, they [are] editable by a text
editor ...

Huh? I have a very application-"light" Leopard installation,
which contains 6,999 plist files in 3,479 *different*
directories. I'll send you the alpha-sorted
"/[subdirs/]*.plist" filelist, if you're curious... (Also: a
few plists are binary, not plain text.)

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Robert Holmgren
holmgren@xxxxxxxx
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