Sometimes, it’s the little tech annoyances that sting the most

macOS wouldn't remember mouse settings? This means war!

Anyone who has suffered the indignity of a splinter, a blister, or a paper cut knows that small things can sometimes be hugely annoying. You aren't going to die from any of these conditions, but it's still hard to focus when, say, the back of your right foot is rubbing a new blister against the inside of your not-quite-broken-in-yet hiking boots.

I found myself in the computing version of this situation yesterday, when I was trying to work on a new Mac Mini and was brought up short by the fact that my third mouse button (that is, clicking on the scroll wheel) did nothing. This was odd, because I have for many years assigned this button to "Mission Control" on macOS—a feature that tiles every open window on your machine, making it quick and easy to switch apps. When I got the new Mini, I immediately added this to my settings. Boom!

And yet there I was, a couple hours later, clicking the middle mouse button by reflex and getting no result. This seemed quite odd—had I only imagined that I made the settings change? I made the alteration again in System Settings and went back to work.

But after a reboot later that day to install an OS update, I found that my shortcut setting for Mission Control had once again been wiped away. This wasn't happening with any other settings changes, and it was strangely vexing.

When it happened a third time, I switched into full "research and destroy the problem" mode. One of my Ars colleagues commiserated with me, writing, "This kind of powerful-annoying stuff is just so common. I swear at least once every few months, some shortcut or whatever just stops working, and sometimes, after a week or so, it starts working again. No rhyme, reason, or apparent causality except that computers are just [unprintable expletives]."

But even if computers are [unprintable expletives], their problems have often been encountered and fixed by some other poor soul. So I turned to the Internet for help... and immediately stumbled upon an Apple discussion thread called "MacOS mouse shortcuts are reset upon restart or shutdown." The poster—and most of those replying—said that the odd behavior had only appeared in macOS Sequoia. One reply claimed to have identified the source of the bug and offered a fix:

1. Set your Mission Control mouse shortcuts as usual.
2. Go to ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.Desktop-Settings.extension/Data/Library/Preferences folder.
3. Copy com.apple.symbolichotkeys.plist file.
4. Go to ~/Library/Preferences
5. Paste the com.apple.symbolichotkeys.plist file. Re-writte the previous one.

 

The bug is the macOS core seems to save the shortcut preferences directly into the step 4 folder, but it should be saved in step 2 and 4 folders at the same time.

Unfortunately, I didn't have any such .plist file in ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.Desktop-Settings.extension/Data/Library/Preferences. However, a second intrepid user found the file in a different location, writing:

This solution worked for me but NOTE that to find the plist file to copy I had to go to ~/Library/Container/Desktop & Dock/Data/Library/Preferences instead. For whatever reason the other folder (com.apple.Desktop-Settings.extension) didn't exist. Perhaps they moved it in 15.3 (but didn't fix the bug!)?

Here, at last, was the answer. I found the proper .plist filed and I copied it over to ~/Library/Preferences, then I rebooted the computer. Everything worked.

Sweet success! Jovial victoriousness! Ebullient wonderment!

...and then I went on with my day.

Who moved my cheese?

This trivial annoyance reminded me of several things.

First, despite Apple's "it just works" ethos, it doesn't always work; Macs are computers like any other, their software filled with spaghetti code and poorly defined variables. Errors creep in. This one was a bit surprising, however, in that it has already persisted across three point releases of the operating system even though the fix is in Apple's own forums and appears to be as simple as storing a file in the correct spot. I am tempted to draw grandiose lessons from the incident about whether Apple's attention to iOS is leading to sloppiness in macOS—but I won't.

Second, we really take the working of these ultra-complex systems for granted. I'm old enough to remember the Bad Old Days of trying to get Wing Commander running on a PC and having to muck about with HIMEM.SYS files just to get the game to load. Young Nate, with his modem and shared phone line that could lose an hour-long download if someone else in the house picked up the phone, would have loved to deal only with small problems like a mouse setting not sticking. So perhaps Current Nate has gotten soft.

Third, it is really irritating to have one's muscle memory routine interrupted. Every time I clicked that middle mouse button and nothing happened, I felt the sharp shock of annoyance that my devices should betray me in this way. Even though my brain knew that the clicks were no longer producing their expected results, my fingers clicked anyway out of instinct until I broke down, went back into System Settings, and made the change again. The brain/body system rebels against anything that forces its expected reactions to change. (Though over time, of course, humans are great adapters. But in the short term... not so much.)

Fourth, the corollary to this level of irritation is the feeling of triumph when the problem—however small it might be—is successfully fixed. In the slightly less technical realm, our refrigerator has two sliding plastic doors that twist closed together in order to protect (?) the cheese drawer. But years of cheese consumption had apparently led to tiny bits of cheese getting down into the mechanism and gumming it up something terrible. Last week, I spent 45 minutes taking the doors and the drawer apart, washing all the pieces in hot, soapy water, and scrubbing at them for a good 10 minutes until the last of the ground-in cheese residue was cleared away. When I reassembled the whole contraption, and the doors swung as smoothly as if they were new, I felt the same sense of elation as when I defeated the macOS mouse bug. There's something about figuring out how a system works, identifying the current problem, and then addressing that problem that just tickles the brain in a certain way.

Fifth and finally, I was reminded that for all of the Internet's many (many!) problems, it is still full of people taking time to share their knowledge just to help others. So thanks, random Internet commenters who showed me how to fix my problem! I owe you a debt of gratitude.

Since I enjoyed fixing my little problem so much, I thought I'd share it with you, gentle Ars readers. What minor tech irritations have you overcome recently?

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