MOTUnation.com

MacPilot is supposedly a way of accessing some OS settings without using the terminal. Supposedly it is a messy interface but allows you to tweak 100s of settings.

I'm not even sure how I'd use it. I'd like the default Finder search to be "File name includes..." I'd like to change the way drag & drop works in finder so the visual feedback is better. Maybe a few other things.

I was just curious if others were using it and if there were some great "hacks" that made OS life easier.

I avoid most such utilities. Although they function as a front end to the Terminal, developers often go around the OS Toolkit to get the desired results which causes problems later. In addition, people can really mess up their systems by not knowing exactly what they are doing.

Read some of the reviews and proceed with caution. The biggest complaint is inadequate documentation and I agree.

http://download.cnet.com/MacPilot/3000- ... 71031.html

An internet search will generally find the correct Terminal command for anything you need to do. Since Terminal supports copy and paste, I keep a document with all the ones that I am likely to use.

Terminal is clean in that you ask it to do one thing; it does only that. Yes, you have to know exactly what that is but the knowledge keeps mistakes to practically zero.

My favorite review:

Pros
Options to change almost everything

Cons
Options to change almost everything. can be dangerous if you do not know what you are doing

My second favorite:

Use with much caution, I earn my living cleaning after people who instal these kind of applications... that and Onyx...

My conclusion: If you know enough to use Terminal well, you should be fine with MacPilot. OTOH, if you have that knowledge, MacPilot is unnecessary (as is Onyx which I consider worse than useless).

Thanks. That's exactly what I needed to know.

You raised the subject of Onyx. I've not used it in a while, but used to do it as routine maintenance. My rig has been relatively trouble-free, so I haven't reflexively reached for it to
make me feel like I was fixing something.

Sounds like I should avoid it. I hadn't seen any bad press about it-- until this.

Onyx performs maintenance routines on things that do not need maintaining. It does waste a lot of time ... If that's a plus. In the hands of the less experienced, a recent Time Machine backup is very handy.

After enough catastrophies (or near-ones) I do keep a time-machine drive running on my rig at all times.

Next time before I run Onyx (if I ever do), I'll do a little more learning about which processes to avoid.