Where are preferences on Mac?

[John Ralls]

On Sep 23, 2011, at 1:14 PM, Nadine Hwa wrote:

> Hi, John.
> 
> I did find, in the Application Support/Gnucash folder, the saved-reports-2.4 and stylesheets-2.0 -- which is what I hope will transfer those Custom Reports and any Stylesheets I've created for reports. That folder also contains something called expressions-2.0 -- do you know what that refers to? There is also accelerator-map--don't know what this is, either.
> 
> I am unable to see the /.gconf that you mentioned. Can you help with this? Also, I have never used Terminal. Maybe it would be easier for me to just redo my Preferences from scratch?

As Mike explained, .gconf is hidden. Rather than messing with TinkerTool for what's a one-shot and very quick job, let's use Terminal (you'll find it in /Applications/Utilities). 

Now go to finder and connect to the other Mac. Use the "connect as" button and log in, then select your home directory there. Make sure that you see its contents in Finder.

Now switch to Terminal. I'm going to assume that your userid on the new mac is "nadine". If it isn't, just substitute the right name in the instrucios. Each command that I want you to type will start with "$ ". That's meant to represent a "prompt" that the computer will present when it's ready for you to type a command. There's probably more, including the computer's name, but I'm going to use "%" for simplicity.

$ ls /Volumes/nadine

You should get a list of all of the files and folders in your home directory on the new mac. 

$ cp -R .gconf /Volumes/nadine

That will actually copy the folder to the new mac.

$ ls /Volumes/nadine/.gconf

Should print all of the files in the .gconf folder.

If everything worked, you're done. Quit Terminal and click on the media button next to its name in Finder to disconnect.

Regards,
John Ralls