Mac Terminal, Access The Depths Of Mac OS

With the Mac Terminal app included in Mac OS X you get access to the heart of your Mac OS X system. This is not for the faint hearted, you can make some serious changes that could compromise your systems stability and usage if you don't know what you are doing.

If you are used to working with UNIX or Linux system this may be familiar to you because deep down Mac OS X is quite UNIX like.

Here are some things you could try to do, i do not take ANY responsibility if you mess up your system, don't this if you don't know what you are doing, ok ?

Lets get to it !
(the sentence after # is the one you type, do not type the # just the text after.)

Deactivate the Dashboard:
# defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES
# killall Dock
Replace YES with NO if you want to active the dashboard again.

Show hidden files in the Finder:
# defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE
Replace TRUE with FALSE to hide the files.

Force your mails to display as plain text:
# defaults write com.apple.mail PreferPlainText -bool TRUE
Replace TRUE with FALSE to turn this feature off again.

Change your Leopard Dock to 2D:
Some people doesn't the 3D style of the Leopard Dock. If you move your dock to the sides of your screen you see how it looks like in 2D. You can get this look also when you have the Dock in the bottom of the screen, to make it like that type in the following in your terminal:

# defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES
then you have to restart the Dock with this command:
# killall Dock

To get the Dock in 3D again you just replace YES with NO, and then perform the killall Dock command.