How are System Preferences categorized in Catalina?

Solution 1:

According to /System/Applications/System Preferences.app/Contents/Resources/NSPrefPaneGroupsBanner.xml, there appear to be 3 primary categories now:

• __banner - Apple ID and Family Sharing pref panes
• personal - the set of pref panes from General to Security
• hardware - the set of pref panes from Software Update to Startup Disk (or more, depending on your hardware)

Two further categories are listed in the file:

• net - empty, unclear what pref panes would go here
• addons - this category is historically used for user-added PrefPanes, and presumably remains so in Catalina