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I’d say that a quick defaults command is probably on the whole more friendly than trawling around in the arcane mess that is the Windows registry. It’s not as friendly as it could be, but at least it’s a somewhat human readable one liner.

It’s also reasonable to back up plists and/or sync them between machines like some users do with their dotfiles, because they’re just files.




Registry settings can be modified via CLI, too. Windows users are just far more averse to the command line.


I have never seen anyone backup defaults database between macs[1], I have seen a lot of scripts calling setting by setting instead.

Which has direct equivalent in "reg" files, to be quite honest.

[1] Other than restoring time machine backup to another system or similar cloning setups


It’s not a database, they’re individual files. Most are even plain XML that can be hand written and edited with a text editor.


This is not a gotcha, really. An XML file can be considered database just as well (similarly, part of registry on NT is portable between machines).




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