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Create Your Own System Preferences Panel

From the University of Hackem', Professor Ibson instructs us on the fine art of customizing the System Preferences panel. To perform these modifications, you need the PropertyListEditor application that is part of the MacOS X Developer Tools. These tools can be downloaded from Apple's Developer site. Just create an account and navigate to Downloads.

First, we need to make a copy of the System Preferences application and give ownership of the file to a non-root user so it can be easily edited.

Open a terminal and type the following commands. Be sure to substitute your user name in place of mine!

coyle% cd Desktop/
coyle% su
Password: XXXXXX
root# cd /Applications/
root# cp -R "System Preferences.app" /Users/coyle/Desktop/
root# cd Desktop/
root# chown -R coyle "System Preferences.app"

These commands do the following: Copy the application to your desktop and then set the owner of the file to your user name. Because we are working on a copy, we can make mistakes and do no permanent harm. Just trash the corrupt one and make a new copy.

The System Preferences window is broken into several main sections: Hardware, Personal, System, etc. We can create additional group names opening System Preferences.app/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/NSPrefPaneGroups.strings. To add a new group, click New Sibling and mimic the settings of the existing groups. In the example below, I created a new group named "Seldom Used". This step only makes the name available for use. If you open your local copy of the Preferences, you will not see any difference yet.

To reorganize the panes within the various groups, use the PropertyListEditor to open System Preferences.app/Contents/Resources/NSPrefPaneGroups.plist. It's a little tricky getting familiar with the format of this file, so don't be discouraged if it takes you several attempts to get the desired results.

Each Dictionary coresponds to a group of panes with a name identifier. Within each pane, the preference is listed. By using the New Child button, you can create a new identifier (if you added the name to the goup listing as shown above), or you can copy and paste string values to move the prefernces within existing panes.

In the listing above, I created a new group titled "Seldom Used" and moved most of my preferences into it. Left the group Personal for my commonly used selections. The remaining group, Other, is for third party and I left it unchanged.

The image below shows the final results. Because you are the owner of this file, it can be renamed and placed in your Home folder. Drag the icon to the dock for quick access.