Saving and Restoring Color Picker Favorites

About a month back I bit the bullet, created a new home folder and switched to using it. I demand-paged-in necessary preference files as I noticed they were missing ("Oh, OmniGraffle Pro 3 thinks I don't own it, better copy over that software license file").

One pref that was missing, which was nonobvious to restore, was my custom color favorites I defined in the Color Picker palette. Turns out the data is stored in ~/Library/Preferences/.GlobalPreferences.plist under the key NSColorSwatchData (thank you fs_usage!).

Here's a command that will save your custom colors to an external file:

defaults read -g NSColorSwatchData|sed -e 's/[<> ]//g'>myColors

The call to sed strips out formatting that defaults can't understand when read back in (Radar #3616001). Here's a command that will read that file back in:

defaults write -g NSColorSwatchData -data `cat myColors`

Wednesday, April 07, 2004
11:22 PM