Plist
More info
- Type
- File format
- Owner
- Apple
- Origin
- NeXTSTEP
- Extension
.plist
Apple's configuration format: a nested dictionary of strings, numbers, dates and binary blobs, in three mutually incompatible encodings.
The format was inherited from NeXTSTEP, where it used a brace-delimited ASCII syntax. Mac OS X switched to XML with an Apple-defined DTD — readable but verbose — and in 2002 added a binary encoding (bplist) that is compact and fast to parse but meaningless in a text editor. All three still exist; plutil -convert moves between them.
Almost all state on macOS and iOS lives in plists: Info.plist describes every app bundle, NSUserDefaults settings land in ~/Library/Preferences/, and launchd services are defined as plists. Editing one by hand while the owning process is running is a classic source of confusion — cfprefsd caches values and will happily write yours back over.