tell application "System Preferences"
    activate
    reveal pane id "com.toastycode.Cuckoo"
end tell

That is, you can use reveal pane localizedName or reveal pane id bundleId to tell SysPrefs to switch to a given prefPane. This is an improvement on reveal in earlier versions of the OS, which only supported the reveal anchor someTabName in pane name phrasing, which doesn’t fly if your preference pane doesn’t have tabs. (As noted here, you can use the pseudo-anchor main on Apple’s tabless prefPanes, but I couldn’t find any kind of documentation on how to add “main” to my own prefPane.)

If you try the 10.5-style reveal pane syntax on Tiger and earlier, you’ll be rewarded with a less-than-elucidating NSReceiversCantHandleCommandScriptError. (Try saying that three times fast. Or, uh, once.)

The following AppleScript will work on all releases of Mac OS X, however:

tell application "System Preferences"
    activate
    -- works in 10.4 and 10.5
    set current pane to pane id "com.toastycode.Cuckoo"
end tell

Just thought I’d share in case there’s some other poor soul out there trying to launch a specific preference panel from AppleScript or Cocoa.

My only gripe: Why does the new Finder take Cuckoo’s pretty birdhouse icon and cram it into a tiny little badge stamped on a generic “PREF” document? You can barely see it, even at 128×128 pixels (see below). For shame.

I was wondering if this script could be modified to remove all login items from all users and not just the currently logged in one? We have about 30 computers with at least 6 users each that we need to remove all the login items from. Think it would be possible?

It turns out that because loginitem uses AppleScript to ask System Events.app to do the work, it’s fundamentally limited to operating on the current user’s login items. We’ll need some other way of manipulating those settings. Fortunately, this particular problem (deleting all login items) has a convenient solution.

Referring back to Apple’s documentation, we see that a user’s login items are stored in ~/Library/Preferences/loginitem.plist. For a single user, it’s sufficient to delete the AutoLaunchedApplicationDictionary key and log out and in again, but we’re trying to automate this process across a number of users.

Here, finally, is the recipe:

1. Create a “pristine” version of loginitem.plist, with no login items in it. You might do this by opening ~/Library/Preferences/loginitem.plist in Property List Editor and deleting the AutoLaunchedApplicationDictionary key, or by running the command:

   defaults delete loginwindow \
        AutoLaunchedApplicationDictionary

2. Stash that file somewhere:

   cp ~/Library/Preferences/loginitem.plist /tmp/

3. Run:

   for aHome in /Users/*; do
     sudo cp /tmp/loginitem.plist \
       $aHome/Library/Preferences/
   done

[Theoretically it should suffice to simply delete the loginitem.plist file, since the remaining values in that file (BuildVersionStampAsNumber, etc.) seem like the sort of things that the system could re-create for you. I don't know if it does, though, so the safest bet is to preserve them.]

Exercise: Convert your pristine loginitem.plist to text (either with defaults read or plutil); embed in a script; ssh in parallel to all the Macs in your lab, downloading and running the script on each.

While testing the new release I cooked up loginitem, a command-line tool that can be used to quickly add, remove, query, and list all the login items for the currently logged-in user. It’s a Python script that uses the Objective-C bridge and AppleScript to bark orders at System Events to get the job done. I found it to be safer than screwing around with defaults and more convenient than fishing through System Preferences. You could conceivably employ this script as part of a software installer, or use it while isolating a login item that’s giving you trouble (a technique suggested here). It does quite a bit, so there are probably other uses I haven’t thought of as well.

Here’s an example session with loginitem:

Set Terminal to launch on login:

$ loginitem --add /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app

Did it work?:

$ loginitem --exists Terminal \
    && echo "yup, it worked"
yup, it worked

Let’s see it another way:

$ loginitem --list
[...]
Terminal
[...]
$ loginitem --list-paths
[...]
/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app
[...]


On second thought, no, don’t bother:

$ loginitem --remove Terminal

Hey, what happens if we try that again?

$ loginitem --remove Terminal
error: login item "Terminal" does not exist

Note that the results returned from --list are UTF-8 encoded localized names, so if you’ve got an app whose name in the Finder has non-ASCII characters (Quicksilver is egregious in this respect), just be careful.

The loginitem script is freely available under a BSD license. Please get in touch if you find bugs or have suggestions.