Change the System Prefs area names

Jan 05, '02 09:47:32AM

Contributed by: robg

I noticed last night that my desktop machine had "Customize", "Gear", "Connectivity', "Nuts and Bolts" and "Misc" in place of the normal names within the System Preferences window. The normal names are "Personal", "Hardware", "Internet & Network", "System", and "Other". I'm not sure how these were changed on my machine; I honestly do not recall doing it myself (and I searched the site for a hint about renaming system prefs and came up blank). Perhaps some third-party preference panel that I installed and removed changed them at some point. If you have some idea of what might have changed this, let me know (out of curiousity more than anything else).

In any event, noticing that they differed from the official names as seen on my iBook, I set out in search of what was controlling the names and discovered that they are relatively easy to change.

Read the rest of the article for the how-to...

NSPrefPaneGroups.strings is the file that controls the names of the areas in the System Preferences, and it can be found buried in the System Preferences application. In the Finder, control-click on the System Preferences application, then open Contents then Resources then English.lproj. You should now see a listing of four files, including the NSPrefPaneGroups.strings file.

If you open the file with TextEdit, you'll see how it works - the category definition is on the left, followed by an equals sign, and then the displayed name is on the right. By default, the file will look like this:

"personal" = "Personal";
"hardware" = "Hardware";
"net" = "Internet & Network";
"system" = "System";
"addons" = "Other";
To change the names, just replace the words on the right with the words you'd like to use ... except this file is owned by root, so you won't be able to save the changes.

A terminal solution seems obvious, but the file is in Unicode (I believe) format, and I can't figure out how to use vi or emacs on a Unicode-format file. So you'll have to use alternative methods to save your changes. Here are two possible solutions.

The Slower Way: Logout and login as root, edit the file, save the changes, then logout and login as your normal user. The changes will show up in the System Prefs app the next time you launch it.

The Faster Way: Get the freeware app Skeleton Key. Launch it, then drag-and-drop TextEdit onto the Skeleton Key icon in the dock. Enter your admin password. Now drag and drop the NSPrefPaneGroups.strings file onto TextEdit. You are now editing the file as root, and you can save the changes you make. When done, quit and restart the System Preferences applications and your new names will appear!

As an aside, if there's a way to easily edit Unicode formatted files in the Terminal, I would be interested in the solution...

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