Moving Plists Between Macs

Mac
Written By John Plummer

I use a few apps where I would like to synchronise preferences between 2 MacBooks.

Unfortunately, there seems to be no way to do this automatically, but a manual workaround is to export the plist to a folder that can sync over Dropbox/iCloud, etc., then import it on the 2nd Mac.

As an example to copy Amethyst settings from a source to a target mac:

  • Quit Amethyst on both Macs
  • On the source Mac run: defaults export com.amethyst.Amethyst ~/Library/Mobile\ Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/Config/Preferences/Amethyst/Amethyst.plist
  • On the target Mac run: defaults import com.amethyst.Amethyst ~/Library/Mobile\ Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/Config/Preferences/Amethyst/Amethyst.plist

This uses a folder Config/Preferences/Amethyest in iCloud drive that must already exist.

John Plummer
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