Lion’s great, but some of us prefer mucking with the behind-the-scenes stuff with our operating systems. We’ve found a variety of Terminal tricks that can tweak various Lion behaviors. (Note that with some of these commands, Terminal may complain that a “default pair does not exist.” Fret not. Run the command a second time and the error will go away.)
Restore sanity by not restoring
Thanks to Lion’s Restore feature, all the windows you left open in a given application remain open when you relaunch it. That’s awesomely helpful in a Web browser or a text editor. In certain apps, however—particularly those where you rarely need to revisit the same documents—the feature is more of an annoyance. Window resuming is actually configured on an app-by-app basis. Here are the Terminal commands to disable Resume in Preview and QuickTime Player X:
defaults write com.apple.Preview NSQuitAlwaysKeepsWindows -bool falsedefaults write com.apple.QuickTimePlayerX NSQuitAlwaysKeepsWindows -bool false
Quit the apps before you try the commands. Again, swap “true” for “false” to reverse your change.
An animated discussion
When you open a new window in Lion, it launches with a “zoom” animation effect that looks straight out of iOS. If you hate the animation—whether for the real or perceived delay it may cause, stylistic concerns, or something else—you can turn it off. Here’s the command:
defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled -bool false
You guessed it: Swap “true” for “false” to go back to zooming.
Reading Lost
Safari gains a new Reading List mode in Lion. Whether you want to use it or not, there’s seemingly no way to remove the Reading List icon—a pair of glasses—from prime real estate to the left of Safari’s bookmarks icon, just below the Back button.
Okay, just kidding. There’s totally a way—with the Terminal.
(Thanks to Hints reader nathanator11 for the tip!)
defaults write com.apple.Safari ProxiesInBookmarksBar '("Top Sites")'To undo this one and bring the Reading List icon back, you use this command instead:
defaults write com.apple.Safari ProxiesInBookmarksBar '("Top Sites","Reading List")'