Apple's Hidden Commands

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How to find the commands

Based on the stackexchange answer the following commands can be used to discover hidden functionality.

Simulator Functionality: strings /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Applications/Simulator.app/Contents/MacOS/Simulator | grep -E '^[A-Z][[:alpha:]]+$'

To filter and sort apply to the end | grep -E '(Enable|Disable|Show|Number)' | sort

Full: strings /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer/Applications/Simulator.app/Contents/MacOS/Simulator | grep -E '^[A-Z][[:alpha:]]+$' | grep -E '(Enable|Disable|Show|Number)' | sort

Xcode Functionality:

strings /Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Frameworks/IDEKit.framework/Versions/A/IDEKit | grep -E '^IDE[[:alpha:]]+$'

How to find prefixes

How to use the commands

In terminal run the command

defaults write <PREFIX> <STRINGS_KEY> <VALUE_TO_WRITE>

where

PREFIX is the prefix used by Apple; like com.apple.dt.xcode or com.apple.iphonesimulator

STRINGS_KEY is the key out put from the strings command above

VALUE_TO_WRITE is the value to be used; example 1, false, etc.

Example: defaults write com.apple.iphonesimulator ShowSingleTouches 1

NOTE: These are private apis so do not rely on them to always be there

Known Commmands

MacOS 10.14.5