Recently I have been experimenting with some of the more advanced settings in Mac OS, specifically editing plist files (which hold the settings and preferences for programs on the Mac, together with system settings). However, on the newer versions of Mac OS many of the plist files are in binary format, and thus they cannot be directly edited using a text editor. However, there is a way to convert these binary plist files into text, allowing them to be directly edited. To do this, open a new Terminal window and use the following command:
plutil -convert xml1 This will convert the existing plist file from binary into text. Additionally, there should not be any need to convert the plist file back to binary after you have finished editing, as Mac OS should be able to read the text base plist files without problem.