BBEdit can open a binary plist. On Open, it decompresses the file so you can edit the XML. On Save, it re-compresses the file (if it was compressed when you opened it). It is all done transparently, so you might not even realize the file is binary.
I fiddled with the icon spacing and it fixed the problem (through one re-awakening). Thank you.
So will changing the icon spacing (or was it icon size?) mess up icon positions, as I learned to my chagrin. But it’s worth repositioning them one time if that internal drive icon will stay where it belongs.
And the result was no different than moving the icon and then using View > Clean Up Selection.
I wonder why BBEdit didn’t find it when I searched. I copied the string from this thread and pasted it into BBEdit’s Find box. Well, too much time spent on this issue already.
Thank you for the help, especially @j.albert.
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It sounds like this might be helpful.
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What I’d like to see:
A finder option to “lock in place” file and folder icons.
That is, put them where you want, and perhaps then do a “get info” on them, with the choice in the info pane to “lock position on desktop”.
The LAST THING I want on my desktop is to have icon positions changed from where I put them, by sorting, etc. I don’t want them to move on their own. Ever.
You can achieve this, sort of, by changing the protections on the folder’s .DS_Store file so that the Finder can’t update it. But then it won’t remember positions of new icons.
It is a crime that macOS updates blow away the .DS_Store for Applications and Utilities, so I lose all my carefully curated icon positions. Now what I do is:
- SuperDuper! clone to another drive, which of course backs up the .DS_Store files
- Apply update
- Run a script that:
a. Repairs the permissions and group on /Applications/Utilities, which macOS updates also corrupt every single time
b. Restores the .DS_Store files for /Applications and /Applications/Utilities from the backup
c. Kills the Finder, so it won’t overlay the .DS_Store files with its in-memory copy. This forces it to read the files as the source of Truth - Dismounts the backup drive
While I’m sure that works fine for you, it seems unnecessarily complicated.
Applications and Utilities are not ordinary folders. They are produced by overlaying several different app-holding folders, including:
/Applications(from your Data volume)/System/Applications(from your System volume)
And some of them are symlinks to mounted cryptexes. Like Safari:
$ ls -l /Applications/Safari.app
lrwxr-xr-x@ 1 root wheel 54 Mar 10 05:37 /Applications/Safari.app@ -> ../System/Cryptexes/App/System/Applications/Safari.app
I suspect that one of the reasons icon positions get lost is because after an upgrade, many of the firmlinks needed to create that overlayed file system get blown away and recreated. So, as far as the Finder is concerned, it isn’t the same file, so it can’t reuse any saved location.
I also wonder, when you say that the permissions are corrupted after every update, if maybe they’re not corrupt but simply different from what you want, and maybe it would be easier to accommodate Apple’s design than to try to force your own system of permissions on a folder that is really managed by the OS.
Anyway, all that being said, if you want an Applications/Utilities folder with icons in the specific places you want, maybe it would be better to create a new folder in your home directory containing aliases to the contents of these folders. System updates shouldn’t break this, although you will have to periodically update it if new apps are added or old ones get deleted.
Sadly, macOS 26 got rid of the Launchpad, which is my favorite way of accessing apps, and never cared about the file/icon locations in the Finder. Once I upgrade my main Mac, I’m going to have to look for a third-party app that can give me that functionality.
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David, I use LaunchOS which not only reproduces the old Launchpad but adds more features. Not free but well worth the current sale price of $7, https://launchosapp.com/
On a related topic…whenever I have an icon, e.g., for a document, in the lower half of the desktop all my drive icons are randomly rearranged after sleep. I cannot always reproduce this but it happens more often than not. This makes no sense. Can anyone suggest a work around?
No, I can see that macOS upgrades are changing the permission on the folders, which is why I have to do extra authentication when I want to put something in Utilities. And I can see that the upgrade is wiping out the .DS_Store files. The fact that some of the apps are symlinks has nothing to do with it; it is has been doing this for long before cryptexes even existed. And the fact that the Finder is merging several folders has nothing to do with it either; it did it before that started, and all of the icon positions for both source folders (the system Applications and the user Applications) are stored in the same .DS_Store file.
The reason has to be: no one at Apple uses Icon view.
I’m not change how I organize my folders – which I’ve done since System 7 – just because of bugs in the macOS upgrade. It is my Mac, not theirs.