Not too long ago, I was toying around with one of the many third-party tools that allow you to modify how your Mac works. During my testing, I enabled a setting that made those little yellow tooltips pop-up every time I hovered over a URL in Safari. Ugh. Within a week or two, I couldn't take it anymore, and wanted to turn them off again. However, I could not locate the program that I had used to enable them -- I probably had trashed it shortly after trying it out.
So, a little Unix juju to the rescue. First, I had to find where that option was set; it's not a regular preference, as far as I could find. After quitting Safari, I typed this at a Terminal prompt:
So, a little Unix juju to the rescue. First, I had to find where that option was set; it's not a regular preference, as far as I could find. After quitting Safari, I typed this at a Terminal prompt:
defaults read com.apple.Safari | grep -i tooltip | grep -v grep
This search would show me if anything containing the word "tooltip" was present in Safari's settings file. Bingo; the search found a line that read:
WebKitShowsURLsInToolTips = 1;
This result naturally suggested one more command in Terminal.app to turn that "feature" off:
defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitShowsURLsInToolTips 0
And voila; no more tooltips. Whew! Of course, for those who like those things, replacing the 0 with a 1 in the second command above will enable the tooltips.
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