Mac OS X

If you have previously uninstalled Steam games from your computer to free up disk space or remove a distraction, you may eventually decide you want to reinstall the games that you had previously deleted. Or perhaps you have a game in your Steam library that you haven’t installed onto a new computer, but you want to do so. Fortunately the Steam application makes re-installing any Steam game onto a Mac, Windows PC, or Linux computer very easy, as you will see in this tutorial.

It’s important to remember that Steam games are associated with a Steam account. Thus, if you had previously deleted a Steam game you would need to use the same Steam account to reinstall that Steam game, because the game is attached to that Steam accounts library. That’s how most App Stores work by the way, associating the apps and purchases with the account used.

How to Reinstall Steam Games on Mac, Windows, Linux

Remember, you must use the same Steam account that contains the game you wish to reinstall. You will also need an active internet connection to re-download and reinstall the games.

1. Open the Steam app if you have not done so already and login with the Steam account
2. Click on “Library” tab to view your game library in Steam
3. Select the game you wish to reinstall onto the computer from the left side menu
4. Click the “Install” button underneath the games title

The game will re-download and reinstall within Steam. This can take a while depending on how large the game is along with the speed of the internet connection, so be mindful of that when you’re reinstalling any Steam game.

In the tutorial example here, we’re re-installing Civilization VI onto a Mac via Steam that had previously uninstalled the game.

You can watch the download progress, pause the download, or cancel the download and reinstallation of the game if desired for whatever reason too.

You can reinstall any previously owned Steam games this way using the Steam client on any Mac, Windows, or Linux PC. This is also how you reinstall a Steam game onto a new computer. Regardless of the platform, the re-installation of the game(s) are the same. Obviously this tutorial is using a Mac but the Steam client is the same on all supported platforms.

Oh and one final tip; if the reason you had originally deleted the Steam games in the first place was to free up disk storage capacity, then you may find it useful to move the Steam games and saved game files to a new hard drive, whether it’s another internal drive or an external drive – for best results in either situation you’ll want to make sure it’s a fast drive though, whether that’s a USB flash drive, external SSD, or otherwise.

Steam is a popular gaming distribution platform for it’s large gaming library, cross-platform nature, but also because of how easy it is to maintain a game collection that is easy to install, manage, delete, reinstall, and even play on different compatible platforms with many different gaming titles. If you’re a gamer, Steam is an essential.

Enjoy your newly downloaded and reinstalled Steam games!

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If use the Chrome web browser, it’s fairly likely you will find Chrome autofill suggestions recommending things for various forms and text entry points. Sometimes those autofill suggestions can be accurate, but sometimes they can be bizarrely irrelevant, unhelpful, or outdated. Most often these irrelevant Chrome suggestions show up from autofill in search boxes or text entry forms on various websites, and they can attempt to populate with random words, old search terms, and phrases that are less than useful or just not relevant to the current site.

Fortunately there’s a way to delete specific Chrome autofill suggestions from these sort text entry boxes, search forms, and various website menus. Because Chrome is available on virtually all mainstream computing platforms, you can use this trick to delete specific Chrome autofill suggestions in nearly any OS, including MacOS, Windows, Linux, and Chromebook too.

How to Remove Specific Chrome Autofill Suggestions

1. Open the related website which has a form entry where autofill suggestions appear
2. Start typing so that the suggestion shows up as an option in Chrome
3. Using the keyboard arrows, navigate down the suggestion list to the item(s) you want to remove from the Chrome autofill suggestions
4. With the suggestion highlighted, use the appropriate keystroke sequence to delete the Chrome suggestion:

• Mac: Shift + FN + Delete
• Windows: Shift + Delete
• Chromebook / Chrome OS: Alt + Shift + Delete

Repeat with other suggestions to delete if desired

In the screenshot example here, a website search box is populating with an array of various autofill suggestions, none of which is even vaguely relevant to the website or the topics on that site, but appear to contain mixed keywords from web searches on other websites sometime in the distant past.

How to Edit & Modify Other Chrome Autofill Suggestions & Data

Separately, you can edit and modify general Chrome autofill details in Chrome settings as well. To do that, place the following URL into the Chrome URL bar and hit return:

chrome://settings/autofill

In the general Chrome Autofill Settings page you can clear all autofill suggestions and toggle some of the specific parameters to better suit your needs.

This is obviously geared towards Chrome, but if you’re a Mac user with Safari then you can also edit and modify Safari Autofill data in Mac OS too.

If you find that Chrome is holding onto a lot of data that is no longer relevant to your particular web usage, you can also go all out and clear all Chrome caches, history, and web data, including autofill data from the web browser.

Do you know of any other helpful tips or tricks to clear out unwanted or irrelevant autofill data from your web browsers? Share with us in the comments below!

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Need to use Telnet in MacOS? Well, many Mac users have discovered that Telnet has been removed from modern versions of system software, including macOS Mojave and macOS High Sierra. Presumably this is to encourage using the ssh client instead, but there are many Mac users who need Telnet for a variety of reasons. Telnet continues to be in a valid tool for many systems and network administrators, security professionals, people working with Cisco hardware or towards Cisco certification, MUD enthusiasts, amongst many other purposes.

Accordingly, this tutorial will detail several different ways to get Telnet back in modern versions of Mac OS system software. We’ll cover installing Telnet with Homebrew, restoring Telnet from a prior system software release or backup, compiling Telnet from source, as well as a few alternatives to telnet.

This article will assume that you have experience working with the Terminal and command line, since Telnet is entirely command line based.

Installing Telnet in MacOS with Homebrew

By far the simplest option is for Mac users to install Telnet through Homebrew. Of course this means you will need to install Homebrew on the Mac first, but if you’re advanced user that spends time in the command line you’ll likely appreciate having Homebrew for other reasons since you

1. Install Homebrew on Mac OS if you haven’t done so already – if you already have Homebrew skip this step

/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

2. Use Homebrew to install telnet with the following command:

brew install telnet

3. Hit Return and let Homebrew download and install Telnet to the Mac
4. When installation has complete, you can run Telnet as usual:

telnet server-or-ip-address

One simple way to test that Telnet is working properly after installation is to connect to the goofy Star Wars telnet server, which plays Star Wars in ASCII art:

telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

You’ll know Telnet is working when you are greeted by Star Wars rendered in ASCII characters (and yes seriously, it’s the full movie).

Installing Telnet in MacOS Mojave & High Sierra via Older MacOS Versions or Backups

If you happen to have access to a Mac that is running a prior version of MacOS (Sierra or prior), or you happen to have an older MacOS system software backup laying around from Time Machine or otherwise, you can actually just copy the old binaries from that computer or backup to your modern MacOS installation, and telnet will work just fine.

With Mac OS and Mac OS X versions that include telnet, you will find Telnet at the following location (thus serving as a reference for where to find the binary in the backups:

/usr/bin/telnet

The telnet binary is tiny weighing in at only 114 kb, so this is a quick simple task.

Copying that telnet binary into the following location in modern macOS releases, including MacOS Mojave 10.14 and MacOS High Sierra 10.13.x, will allow telnet to run on the new system software releases:

/usr/local/bin/

At that point you can run the ‘telnet’ command as usual.

Another option which requires more caution is to request the telnet binary from a trusted coworker or trusted friend who is running MacOS Sierra or prior. All they need to do is zip up and send you their /usr/bin/telnet binary file. Do not try and find a random telnet binary zip file from the internet since it could be compromised or otherwise untrustworthy. It’d be a good idea to use md5 hash or sha1 checksum on the original telnet binary if you’re going this route.

By the way, if you’re relying on binaries of telnet from Sierra or earlier, you might also be interested in grabbing ftp as well, which is also removed from modern macOS releases, but is located at the following location in prior MacOS builds:

/usr/bin/ftp

Again you’d place the ftp binary into /usr/local/bin/ on new versions of system software.

For those wondering, while Telnet (and ftp) has been removed from Mojave, High Sierra, and presumably anything moving forward, MacOS Sierra remains the last version of system software to include Telnet by default, while any MacOS / Mac OS X release prior to Sierra also includes Telnet and ftp, including El Capitan, Snow Leopard, Yosemite, Mountain Lion, Mavericks, Tiger, Cheetah, etc.

Telnet Alternatives for Mac: SSH, Netcat

Of course there are some alternatives for Telnet, depending on what you need to use telnet for in the first place.

For remote connections, ssh is the new standard as it is secured, and both the ssh server and ssh client are available by default in all modern versions of MacOS system software. Simply, connecting to a remote IP with ssh would look as follows:

ssh [email protected]

For simple testing of network connectivity, or for testing of an open / listening port, netcat can often fulfill the same needs that telnet provides. For example, you can confirm that the connection to the aforementioned ASCII Star Wars server and port 80 works with the following netcat command string:

nc -vz towel.blinkenlights.nl 80

Remember that netcat for this purpose requires specifying a valid TCP or UDP port number of whatever the host protocol is.

Restoring Telnet to MacOS Mojave & High Sierra by Compiling Telnet from Source

If you don’t want to use Homebrew for whatever reason, you can also compile Telnet yourself from inetutils source. As a prerequisite you’ll still need to install the Mac OS command line tools to be able to accomplish this, however.

First you’d download the latest inetutils package from gnu.org:

curl -o http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/inetutils/inetutils-1.9.4.tar.gz

Next you’d decompress the tarsal:
tar xvzf inetutils-1.9.4.tar.gz

Now change into the appropriate directory:
cd inetutils-1.9.4

Issue the configure command to begin:
./configure

When configure is complete, make from source:
make

And finally, use make install to complete the installation of inetutils and telnet:
sudo make install

Personally I think using Homebrew is easier, plus there are many other great and useful Homebrew packages available. If you’re familiar with compiling from source and you are this far, you’ll almost certainly appreciate having Homebrew anyway.

What about Telnet for iPad and iPhone? Telnet for iOS!

Just to cover all bases, there are also telnet clients available for iOS. How practical this is for you likely depends on your particular device and what your intention with telnet is, but a free option for iOS is iTerminal and an excellent paid option is Prompt. Using ssh and telnet from an iOS device can be a challenge without an external keyboard though, so you might want to connect one to your iPhone or iPad before going that route, and realistically this is a better option for the iPad simply due to the larger screen. Of course iOS is not MacOS however, so this is sort of off topic.

Alright so that’s a pretty comprehensive guide to getting Telnet in modern MacOS releases, but if you know of another method, or another approach to getting Telnet in MacOS High Sierra or returning Telnet to MacOS Mojave, share with us in the comments below!

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Dynamic Desktops are an interesting feature in MacOS Mojave that cause the desktop wallpaper to change throughout the day with the time, mimicking the changes in lighting that would occur in a scene as the day and night progresses. It’s a subtle but cool feature that brings some life to an otherwise static wallpaper.

But you actually don’t need macOS Mojave (whether in public beta or otherwise) to gain a Dynamic Desktop feature on the Mac, and you can accomplish a very similar effect by using existing features available to every version of Mac OS system software.

To mimic Dynamic Desktops on any version of Mac OS, you will need a collection of wallpapers that are of the same scene but have different lighting or colors. If you’re creative with Pixelmator or Photoshop you can make them yourself, you can download collections of them found on the web (as we’ll do in this tutorial with images from Mojave default wallpaper), you create these yourself with Time Lapse photography on iPhone or iPad, or you can compile your own collection of images on your own – just make sure the pictures have file names that are labeled sequentially in the order of how you want them to show up (file1, file2, file3 etc). For optimal effect you will want somewhere between 10 and 25 images that are of the same general scene or landscape. Aside from that, you’ll simply be using the existing Automatically Change Desktop Picture feature of Mac OS that has been around since the earliest days of Mac OS X.

Here’s how to set it all up.

How to Mimic Dynamic Desktops in Mac OS

1. First, gather a collection of images that feature the same scene but in different lighting conditions – for example you can download the full collection of macOS Mojave default wallpapers from here or here (zip file) – place this image collection in a folder that is easily accessible
2. Now pull down the  Apple menu and go to “System Preferences”
3. Choose “Desktop & Screen Saver” and go to the Desktop tab
4. Drag and drop the folder of images into the left side menu in the Desktop section (or you can click the + plus button and find the folder manually)



5. This will load the image collection into the Desktop preference panel, now click the checkbox for “Change Picture:” and select an amount of time between when you want the wallpaper to change automatically (“Every hour” is pretty close to how Dynamic Desktops works in Mojave)

That’s it, simple! Now your Mac wallpaper will change dynamically for the amount of time you set.

You can quickly test out how it will work by setting the Change Picture time to “Every 5 seconds” but you will probably find that’s a bit too fast and can be distracting, though it does demonstrate rather quickly how the feature works.

The video embedded below demonstrates this setup and effect, with the aggressive 5 second setting so that you can see how it works and appears:

Note this is on a Mac running macOS Sierra, not Mojave, but you can get the same effect in literally any version of Mac OS X system software as the feature has existed since the beginning.

Another way to get dynamic-style wallpapers is to use a screen saver as the desktop wallpaper in Mac OS as discussed here, but keep in mind that trick will use some system resources to maintain. Another way to get a visually active desktop is to set an animated GIF as the wallpaper though that relies on a third party tool and also uses a fair amount of system resources to maintain. But they’re options if you’re into that.

Of course you can also just use Dynamic Desktops in macOS Mojave too, and while it’s currently under active development you can install macOS Mojave public beta on any compatible Mac and check it out yourself if you’d like, just be sure to backup your Mac before doing so.

If you want some inspiration to try this out yourself, browse through our wallpaper posts or a site like Unsplash, you can make multiple copies of the pictures then modify the brightness, hue, colors, and exposure of images to keep the scene the same while the ambiance shifts.

Do you have any other interesting image collections or combinations for using a dynamic desktop on Mac OS? Maybe some particularly cool wallpapers for this purpose? Share with us in the comments below!

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Steam makes it easy to acquire and manage a great game library on a Mac, Windows PC, or Linux machine. But if you find that you’re not playing a particular game much anymore, or if you just need to free up some disk storage space to make room for something else, you might want to uninstall the game from the computer and remove it from Steam.

This tutorial will show you how to uninstall Steam games on Mac OS, and the process is also identical for deleting games from Steam on a Windows PC or Linux too.

You may have already noticed this, but deleting a game from Steam is different from the simple Move to Trash method involved in how most users uninstall Mac applications, because the games themselves are stored elsewhere on the Mac rather than in the Applications folder. But it’s still easy. To properly uninstall a Steam game, you’ll actually be using the Steam application itself. Because Steam is a cross-platform compatible app you can use this method to uninstall any Steam game from any Mac, Windows PC, or even Linux.

How to Uninstall Games from Steam on Mac, Windows Linux

We’ll show you how to uninstall games from Steam and remove them from your computer, thereby freeing up whatever disk space they were taking up. This approach will delete the game locally, but it will not delete the game from the Steam account.

1. Open the “Steam” application



2. Click the “Library” tab at the top of the Steam app and locate the game you want to uninstall from Steam



3. Right-click (or hold CONTROL and click) on the game you want to delete from the computer and uninstall



4. Choose “Delete Local Content” from the drop-down menu that appears
5. Confirm that you want to delete the game from the computer and uninstall the local game files by clicking “Delete”



6. Wait a few moments for the game to uninstall from Steam and be deleted from the hard drive

You can repeat that process with multiple games if you’re trying to free up additional disk space, or if you simply want to thin out your Steam game library, or remove a distraction from your computer.

When you delete a large Steam game you will see a little “uninstalling” message alongside the title in your Steam Library until it completes. You can see this being demonstrated in the screenshots when uninstalling Civilization.

This uninstall method works on every OS that Steam is compatible with, whether it’s MacOS / Mac OS X, Windows, or Linux.

Uninstalling Steam Games doesn’t remove them from a Steam account

Note that by uninstalling a game from Steam, the game will be deleted locally but it will not be removed from your Steam account. This means that you still own the game with that Steam account and it can still be played, but to play it again in the future it must be re-downloaded again.

Uninstalling the Steam application itself

And for Mac users, if after you have uninstalled games from Steam you want to remove Steam itself as well, you can uninstall the app the same way you would any other on the Mac by dragging it to the Trash from the Applications directory. But doing so will not delete the Steam games, or the Steam game files, or any other Steam data. Thus you’d want to uninstall the games first along with deleting the game data, then delete the Steam app itself.

If you’re deleting Steam games to free up disk space, or you discovered an enormous Steam folder that was long forgotten when using a tool like OmniDiskSweeper to recover disk space, you could also consider using a secondary hard drive to offload the games onto instead. You can learn how to move Steam games and saved game files to another computer or hard drive here. If you have a giant hard drive you may be less concerned about storage capacity, and perhaps you just want to delete or uninstall a game if you no longer use it, or if you just find it too distracting to keep around. If you’re aiming for the latter, you might want to stop Steam launching automatically on the Mac during boot, restart, or login too – it’s less distracting if it doesn’t open itself automatically!

Oh and for the less familiar, you may be wondering what the heck Steam is. Well, Steam is a gaming distribution platform for Mac, PC, and Linux, that makes it easy to buy, download, and install a wide variety of popular games from a central repository. Popular games like Civilization, Half Life, Battlegrounds, DOTA 2, Terraria, Counter Strike, Grand Theft Auto, Rust, Rocket League, and much more are available on Steam. You can think of it sort of like a dedicated gaming app store that has many cross-platform compatible games, though some of the games are limited to specific operating systems.

Do you know of any other tips, tricks, or approaches to deleting Steam games, uninstalling Steam, or managing a Steam library? Share with us in the comments below!

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The iPhone and iPad generate logs of some system activity, including app crashes and other potentially interesting or helpful data. By connecting an iOS device to a Mac, you can review those logs.

Browsing through log data is generally only useful for developers and advanced users, either for troubleshooting or diagnostic purposes, but it may have broader applications for some other environments too. And it’s possible that even more casual yet curious tinkerer-types may find it interesting to browse through, even if the data is largely irrelevant to them and their device usage.

You will need an iPhone or iPad, a Mac, and a USB cable to get started. Be sure the iOS device is powered on as well.

How to View iOS Device Logs from a Mac

1. Connect the iPhone or iPad you want to view logs for to a Mac by using a USB connection, be sure to unlock the iOS device as well
2. Open the “Console” app on Mac OS, found in the /Applications/Utilities/ directory
3. From the Console app sidebar, look under the ‘Devices’ section and select the iPhone or iPad that is connected to the Mac



4. Console Log data will begin showing up immediately for the connected iOS device

The Console Log data updates rapidly as events are occurring on the iOS device, for example if you’re connecting to or disconnecting from a wi-fi router, or disabling cellular connectivity, or opening or closing apps, or initiating a process that you know will trigger an app crash, data relevant to those events will all immediately appear on screen. To the casual user this will all likely appear as utter gibberish, but it’s useful for developers in particular.

If you connect multiple iOS devices to the Mac, say an iPhone and iPad, you would be able to browse through logs for each device independently. You can also view Apple Watch logs through the Console app on a Mac the same way, if you have an Apple Watch synced to the connected iPhone.

Note that if you select the iPhone or iPad from Console app and there is no data, and you see a little triangle “!” symbol next to its name in the Devices list, that indicates the iOS device either must be unlocked first, and/or the computer connected to must be trusted.

If you have previously untrusted a computer, or reset the trusted computers list in iOS, you would need to trust the computer again before the data becomes visible. Likewise if you ignored the “Trust This Computer?” dialog on the iOS device, you can usually trigger it again by simply connecting and disconnecting it again, if it has never been trusted before.

The Console app for Mac is frequently used for troubleshooting and diagnostic purposes by more advanced users, as well as developers and tinkerers, but why limit the fun to the Mac? Just connect an iOS device to the computer and you can browse through those device logs too.

Note this requires a somewhat modern version of iOS, a semi-modern iPhone or iPad, and a modern version of Mac OS. Much earlier versions could once use the iPhone Configuration Utility to look at the same log data, or access crash data from backups however.

Related

If you’re a Mac user that has a SuperDrive, DVD burner, or CD burner, you may be interested in knowing that modern versions of Mac OS continue to support a simple native ability to burn files directly to a DVD or CD disc.

Burning files and data to a disc allows for easy backups and file transfers, and remains common in many multimedia rich environments. Additionally, burning files or other data to a disc is particularly helpful for situations where you need to copy or share data with another computer which is not directly networked, nearby, or even a computer which is airgapped.

If this general concept or capability appeals to you but you do not currently have a SuperDrive, DVD burner, or CD burner, then you can use Remote Disc to share a SuperDrive, or you always obtain one yourself. Buying the Apple SuperDrive is a popular option (and you can often make the Superdrive work with an unsupported Mac or even a Windows PC if you happen to have one laying around going unused), but there are a variety of well-rated third party options available from Amazon too. Anyway, let’s assume you already have a SuperDrive with the capability to burn a DVD or CD.

How to Burn a Data Disc on the Mac

You can copy and burn any data or files to a disc by using this method:

1. If applicable, connect the SuperDrive to the Mac
2. Create a new folder on the desktop (or elsewhere) and place the files you want to burn to the disc inside that folder
3. Select the folder you just created containing the files you wish to burn to the DVD / CD
4. With the folder selected, pull down the “File” menu and choose “Burn ‘Folder’ to Disc…”



5. You’ll be presented with a “Burn Disc” window, when you see this, insert the blank DVD or CD disc into the drive



6. Label the disc you want to burn accordingly, and optionally choose a burn speed, then click on “Burn” to start the process

Burning a disc can take a while depending on the speed of the drive, along with the size of the data being burned and copied to the disc itself. Burning a CD is usually faster than burning a DVD, if for no other reason than a CD has less storage capacity than a DVD does.

Keep in mind that the amount of data you can burn to a particular disc will depend on the size of the files as well as the storage capacity of the target disc, and again a DVD will have more storage available (4.7 GB or so) compared to a CD (700 MB or so).

Once completed you can eject the disc from the Mac and share it as you would normally. Hand it off to a person, take it to another computer, drop it in the mail, send it via FedEx across the world, whatever you want to do.

If this idea of copying data to a physical device and sending it onward appeals to you, but you do not have a SuperDrive nor do you want to get one, you can always copy data to a USB flash drive and send that off or share that as well. Copying data to a USB flash drive does not require burning, as the flash drive maintains both read and write capabilities (unless it is specifically locked).

Mac users can also create a new burn folder from the File menu, or by inserting a blank disc directly into the Mac and choosing to open the Finder, and then dragging and dropping data onto that disc and choosing the “Burn” button in the relevant Finder window.

The approach covered here obviously pertains to files and data, but you can also use the built-in Burning functionality to burn disc images directly from the Mac Finder, Disk Utility, or even from the command line.

Physical media discs like CDs and DVDs are becoming less common as online data transfer takes over as a dominant form of data transmission and file sharing, but nonetheless discs containing files and data remains an important method of transfer and sharing for many industries, and for many users.

Was this helpful to you for learning how to copy data and files to a disc from a Mac? Do you have any other tips, suggestions, or advice on burning data to DVD or CD on a Mac? Share your experiences and advice in the comments below!

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Mac OS has long had a dark menu and dark Dock option, and macOS Mojave 10.14 has a true Dark Mode theme that shifts the entire visual appearance to a pleasing dark interface scheme. But if you’re running macOS High Sierra 10.13.x, you can use a defaults command entered into the terminal to enable a half-baked Dark Mode appearance that is system-wide, though it’s very incomplete and thus not appropriate for casual usage.

To be perfectly clear, while this technically enables a Dark Mode-like appearance in macOS High Sierra, it doesn’t work that well, and it doesn’t look particularly good either; there are mismatched colors everywhere, many user interface elements appear incomplete, many of the fonts aren’t colored correctly, and there are a variety of other very obvious visual issues with this. Basically, it’s very broken, which is probably why Apple didn’t enable this as an option in macOS High Sierra in the first place and instead waited for the complete implementation in macOS Mojave (if you’re impatient and want a fully functioning Dark Mode, try the macOS Mojave public beta). But it does work, in a broken not quite working sort of way.

It’s important to emphasize just how incomplete this implementation is, so this is more for fun and for testing than actually trying to use at any level. It’s interesting to discuss and share, but it’s probably not a good idea to even bother trying yourself unless you’re the type of Mac user who likes to tinker and doesn’t mind breaking things. It’s truly for the adventurous only.

For good measure you should backup your Mac before trying this out. While it’s just a defaults write command string that is easy to undo, if you happen to screw something up you’ll be happy you have a backup made to revert back to. You’ve been warned.

Ready to try out the broken Dark Mode appearance in macOS High Sierra 10.13.x? Open the Terminal application, and enter the following defaults write command to enable Dark Mode in macOS High Sierra:

defaults write -g NSWindowDarkChocolate -bool TRUE

Hit return, then reboot the Mac.

When it boots back up, the very broken implementation of Dark Mode in macOS High Sierra will be enabled.

You’ll likely find the macOS High Sierra implementation of Dark Mode to be completely intolerable to actually using the computer, so after you spend a minute or two with it, you’ll likely want to reverse course and return back to the normal bright white and grey appearance of macOS High Sierra (Light Mode?). To do that, return to the Terminal and enter the following defaults string, which deletes the DarkChocolate reference.

defaults delete -g NSWindowDarkChocolate

Once again, reboot the Mac, and you’ll be back to normal with the regular bright interface of MacOS High Sierra.

If you’re actually interested in Dark Mode, as many Mac users are, you can either install macOS Mojave public beta right now, or wait until the fall for the final version of macOS Mojave to be available to the general public. MacOS Mojave includes a full featured Dark Mode that looks great and is fully implemented, so if you’ve been wishing for a darker appearance to Mac OS, then MacOS Mojave will deliver for you.

Thanks to our friend Keir Thomas at MacKungFu for finding this interesting tip. If you try it out yourself, let us know how it goes! Just don’t forget to reverse back to the normal macOS appearance again.

Related

Have you ever wondered where Homebrew puts the binaries from brew packages that are installed on a Mac? If you’re a Homebrew user, you may be interested in knowing where Homebrew puts everything and where to find the installed brew packages in Mac OS.

We’ll show you the directory path where Homebrew keeps packages, and also share a few other ways to see what and where Homebrew has installed anything onto a Mac.

This is obviously aimed at more advanced Mac users who rely on the command line and Homebrew, and this won’t be applicable to anyone else. If you’re interested in installing Homebrew you can learn about that here.

Where Homebrew Packages Are Installed on Mac OS: the Homebrew Installation Path

By default, Homebrew will install all packages into the following directory in all versions of Mac OS:

/usr/local/Cellar/

Additionally, Homebrew places symlinks into the following directory path:

/usr/local/opt/

The symbolic links of binaries found in /usr/local/opt/ all point to their respective package in /usr/local/Cellar/ as can be confirmed with ls and the -l flag:

ls -l /usr/local/opt/

The screenshot example demonstrates the symbolic links pointing from /usr/local/opt/ to /usr/local/Cellar/ for each individual brew package:

Thus you can use the ls command to list all Homebrew packages installed on a Mac simply by showing the full directory listing:

ls /usr/local/Cellar

How to Find Specific Homebrew Package Installation Information

Now that you know where Homebrew generally stores packages, you can also learn more specifics about particular packages. We’ll show you a few commands to print the exact path of a specific brew package, and also show you how to get additional detailed information about particular Homebrew packages installed on the Mac.

How to Find Exactly Where a Homebrew Package is Installed

If you want the exact path to where a Homebrew package is installed reported back to you via command line, the simplest method is to use the –prefix flag and point it at a particular Homebrew package on the Mac, this will reveal the location where it is installed:

brew --prefix [package]

For example, using the package ‘wget’ we can get the following information immediately:

$ brew --prefix wget
/usr/local/opt/wget

As you can see in the command output, only the installation path for that Homebrew package is shown.

How to Get Detailed Homebrew Package Information

If you’re interested in getting more detailed information about a specific Homebrew package that has been installed, including where the Homebrew package came from, what it is, when it was installed, the path where the brew package is installed, as well as information about that packages dependencies and what other packages are required to use it. This is achieved by using the ‘info’ flag with brew to point it at a specific package, using the following syntax:

brew info [package]

For example, if you wanted to get information about the Homebrew package “wget” then you would issue the following command:

brew info wget

Hitting return will detail information about the brew package. Example output of such a command for ‘wget’ may look like the following:

$ brew info wget
wget: stable 1.19.5 (bottled), HEAD
Internet file retriever
https://www.gnu.org/software/wget/
/usr/local/Cellar/wget/1.19.4_1 (50 files, 3.8MB) *
Poured from bottle on 2018-05-07 at 10:59:31
From: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/blob/master/Formula/wget.rb
==> Dependencies
Build: pkg-config
Required: libidn2, openssl
Optional: pcre libmetalink gpgme
==> Options
--with-debug
Build with debug support

The ‘brew info’ command obviously reveals significantly more information than simply the installation path of the package, so if you simply want the exact path of an installed brew package the –prefix command may be easier for scripting or other purposes. Nonetheless the full ‘brew info’ command output is incredibly useful to get extensive information about any installed package and it has obvious value for that reason, in addition to showing where something is installed.

Try these commands yourself with any Homebrew package. If you followed our prior articles about installing Homebrew on the Mac and then checked out some of the popular Homebrew packages available, or perhaps updated to Python 3 or installed node.js and npm through Homebrew, these tips will work to show you the installation path of those packages, as well as other noteworthy package information.

Do you have interesting advice or information to share on finding where Homebrew installs packages onto a Mac, or retrieving package details? Share with us in the comments below!

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