Just what OS X was missing - RegEdit ;)

It looked like a nice idea, back in 92 or so.

Wouldn't it be nice if OSX kept its settings in text files under /etc like any civilized OS should?

No, because then there wouldn't be such a nice API for managing live settings from within the programs themselves:

http://developer.apple.com/DOCUMENTATION/Cocoa/Reference/Fou...

And why exactly would keeping the settings human readable prevent someone from developing a nice API for managing them?

Oh... It wouldn't

Mac OS X preferences -were- human-readable (and editable), but that's not what makes the NSUserDefaults API so handy. What makes NSUserDefaults handy is the support for varying default domains (network, system, user) and dead-simple serialization of Objective-C basic types (strings, ints, dictionaries, arrays).

Additionally, Apple switched to a binary file format to improve performance in 10.5, which may be converted to/from the text format, or edited directly using the property list editor.

There's also nothing stopping a software author from documenting their settings file keys, and some do. However, most of the settings options you do see listed on that site are undocumented because they are unsupported.

I'd like to see this website implement a simple up/down vote feature per setting.

Is that running on Google App Engine? The response headers say, "Google Frontend".

Yes. For curiosity's sake, source to both the server and prefpane are here: http://code.google.com/p/blacktree-secrets/

seriously.. is this kind of thing hn worthy? it's definitely not NEWS and it was already referenced on some other "ASK HN for Mac stuff" thread..

go on, vote me down

I one really wants to get into the settings of Mac OsX, and have a marvellous scheme based tool, which securely performs requests, and are free as well :-) Then Clix is the ultimate choice in my humble opinion. It is published under the assumption that it is better to teach a man to fish. The software can be found here: [http://www.versiontracker.com/users/rixstep] And their site here : [http://rixstep.com/]

Boy- I didn't understand a word you just said.