How can I know which setting TinkerTool is modifying?

Is there any way to easily know which setting a TinkerTool option relates to in Mac OS X?

For example, the Show Hidden and System Files setting seems to be related to com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles. What about all the other settings?

Here’s a generic solution to find out what changed after applying a certain setting. I used this to create my .osx file which is full of hidden OS X tweaks.

Open Terminal.app, cd into a temporary directory, and check the difference between defaults read output before and after changing the setting.

cd /tmp
defaults read > a
# change the setting using TinkerTool or however you like
defaults read > b
diff a b # view the difference

If you’d rather use a UI to view the diffs instead of the diff binary, you could download the Kaleidoscope.app trial.

Alternatively, you could do a Spotlight search within the past hour/day/minute for plist files. That will only tell you which file changed, though; you would still have to figure out which setting in the file was tweaked.

This may not really be the answer you´re looking for, but I´d suggest having a look at secrets.blacktree.com for a very good database of hidden OS X settings (they also offer a preference pane to manipulate them).

If you´re looking for a more specific function that is available in TinkerTool, chances are that someone around here will know the command line way for it ;-)

The most GUI-friendly way I can think of would be to use the endlessly-fascinating fseventer, which lets you see which files on your disk are changing, in real time. With a bit of filtering, you can narrow it down to showing only those files that are changing in your Preferences folders, as you make settings changes in TinkerTool (or anywhere else).