Last night, I had my first serious Mac problem in my three and a quarter years with the Powerbook. It was entirely my fault for clicking on DNSTrans when they said it was supposed to be a command-line application. The Mac asked me what program I wanted to open the program with, and I chose the Terminal app. That coaxed the command-line help information out of DNSTrans, giving me enough clues that I could run it from the command line myself.
For a while, everything seemed ok. Then I closed some apps and came home, and when I tried to open iTunes and listen to Filk Radio, the Terminal app opened instead. I tried some other programs, and all the icons opened Terminal. I could still open apps by roundabout methods, such as clicking on an html file to open the browser, and then clicking on a mailto link in the browser to open Mail. A few programs still ran from their icons, possibly because they didn’t have the .app extension.
So I searched Google for the solution to my application woes. I found one guy on Google Groups who’d had the same problem (with TextEdit instead of Terminal), but no one had answered his post. I found out about the three files you can delete on OS X to do what rebuilding your desktop database will do for pre-X macs. The files were LSApplications, LSClaimedTypes, and LSSchemes, which are all in the ~/Library/Preferences directory. (The ~ means under your Home directory.) I deleted them, but my problem didn’t go away. It did mutate slightly - instead of everything opening Terminal, my icons all opened Sherlock.
That’s when I started worrying, but it was late so I went to bed. At work today I searched some more - finding the proper search term for my apps are all trying to open themselves with Terminal.app was hard. I’m not sure how I finally found these troubleshooting tips, which mentioned the three files above and also the real culprit, com.apple.LaunchServices.plist. I deleted that one, and my Mac is all better now.
While I was puttering around Mac sites looking for help, I found an application I used to run under OS 8.6: DragThing. Many’s the hour I wasted configuring DragThing with snazzy colors and exhaustive app icons back then. Now, the OS X Dock does some of the same things. I downloaded DragThing, but there were too many buttons I couldn’t click without registering first, and I have no patience for picking the perfect Bondi colors and backgrounds anymore. I decided the Dock was good enough for me, but not before I read up on how to disable the Dock in order to use DragThing’s process dock instead.
So here it is, Death to the Dock (from Google Groups):
- Open a terminal window (that’s Terminal.app, in Utilities).
- Type: sudo mv /system/library/CoreServices/Dock.app
/system/library/CoreServices/oldDock.app
The password it wants is probably your own password for the Mac.
- Logout and log back in.
