Thursday, February 25, 2016

Useful settings for Mac OS X (Mavericks onward) / Adding GPX files directly to a Garmin Fenix 3

Here's a few settings that I came across [1] that helped make my daily workflow easier while working on a Mac, listed below:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles YES
defaults write com.apple.finder QLEnableTextSelection -bool TRUE
killall Finder

Let's cover what they do:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles YES

This command above enables the ability to show all hidden files in the Finder, which can be useful for power users (or for those who have a Fenix 3 and need to access the NEWFILES folder in /Volumes/Garmin/Garmin to upload .GPX files [2]).


Do you use the Quick look feature much in OS X?  If not, it's certainly a very useful feature to quickly peek into files on the Finder.  If you do use it and would like to copy and paste frequently from these files (i.e. source files, or general text files), the command below will enable this:

defaults write com.apple.finder QLEnableTextSelection -bool TRUE


Of course, we will need to either logout of the current session or restart the finder.  You can restart the finder by running the following:

killall Finder


In case you want to revert the above settings to default, you can run the following commands respectively:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles NO
defaults write com.apple.finder QLEnableTextSelection -bool FALSE
killall Finder


References / Sourced from:

[1] Macworld UK:
How to show hidden files and folders in Mac OS X Finder:

How to select and copy text from Quick Look previews in OS X:

[2] Itamar Latnik's Youtube post: Garmin Fenix 3 - Import a GPX Course

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