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This truly is an amazing little piece of software. Especially useful for people who don't want to download Xcode (which is more than a gigabyte in compressed form), this product is far more useful than Apple's Property List Editor, as it show items in Binary (Standard Plist), ASCII, and XML formats. It only has competition from the freeware program Pref Setter, an application which seemingly lost support in 2008. While Pref Setter has a more 'user-intuitive' interface, it is lacking in real features, such as changing the format.In a nutshell, if you like your tools to be weak, obsolete, but nice-looking, sure, keep your money and use Pref Setter. However, if you're looking for something more powerful that is getting updates more regularly, pitch in the towel and buy PlistEditPro. For $30 USD, it's a really good buy.I am aware that the last update for PlistEditPro was Halloween of 2009, but the developer, Brian Webster, delivered an update for another one of his applications this past November. Another feature that I failed to mention earlier is that PlistEditPro has AppleScript support. This is very useful for parsing a .plist file, except it is possible to use System Events to accomplish the same task.
Active1 year, 10 months ago
In Mac OSX, there are property list files (.plist). You can modify them with Xcode.
Given a .plist file, is there a reasonable way to modify them like Xcode does in Windows 7?
I have found http://www.icopybot.com/plist-editor.htm, but it doesn't seem to parse the file correctly (for starters, each entry in an array doesn't appear with the index number - it is blank, when it should be 0, 1, 2, ...). Plus it is difficult to edit entries anyway.
Of course I can just use Notepad++ and modify the code, but I'd rather have a visual editor like Xcode.
OmegaOmega19922 gold badges66 silver badges1717 bronze badges
3 Answers
I use plist editor pro when messing around with iOS apps. It has a nice visual key editor as well as a pure XML view and is free, unlike many others. It's very simple and I think that's why it's so underrated, even though it completely fulfills its purpose as what is basically a jazzed up text editor.
JonahJonah
Other way is using the PUTIL.EXE from your itunes directory installation. The file is here: C:Program FilesCommon FilesAppleApple Application Support
plutil -convert xml1 com.apple.springboard.plist
Plistedit Pro
NaykilyxNaykilyx
If you are going to be doing a bit of plist editing on Windows you can buy Plistinator, which handles both binary and XML versions of plist files. There's a video and screenshots on the site explaining its features and how it compares to 'Plist Editor Pro'. The array elements are numbered and the order is preserved as per the original file.
Disclaimer: I'm the developer of Plistinator.
Update: (ref @Journeyman-Geek comment) Plistinator as far as I know should parse the file correctly. The file back end is a clean-room implementation based on Apple's Open Source C code, and its extensively unit tested.
I've found from users that sometimes third party non-apple programs (like Unity, Qt Creator, dozens of others) generate plist files which are non-standard. Also plist files can become corrupted by crashing or misbehaving programs. So 'given a plist file' doesn't mean that its standards compliant.
Certainly if the file is OK, and has an array in it Plistinator will number the rows and preserve the order. I have some things to say about iCopyBot's product in the How-To video on the plistinator site, which I won't repeat here. As far as I can tell Plistinator is the only Plist editor for Windows that provides a complete working solution.
Plistinator is designed to work like Xcode, but has some improvements over it. For example string fields can be edited in a large text box - so in that regard at least its easy to edit entries.
sezsez