Managing startup applications is crucial for optimizing the performance and boot time of your macOS system. Startup applications are programs that automatically launch when your computer boots up, which can be convenient but may also slow down your system if too many are running. In this article, we will explore how to manage these applications on macOS, offering practical examples and commands to help you control which apps start automatically.

Examples:

1. Using System Preferences:

   • Open "System Preferences" from the Apple menu.
   • Navigate to "Users & Groups."
   • Select your user account from the list on the left.
   • Click on the "Login Items" tab.
   • To add an application, click the "+" button and select the app you want to add.
   • To remove an application, select it from the list and click the "-" button.

2. Using Terminal:

   • You can also manage startup items using Terminal commands. For example, to add an application to the startup list, you can use the osascript command:

     osascript -e 'tell application "System Events" to make new login item with properties {path:"/Applications/YourAppName.app", hidden:false}'

   • To remove an application from the startup list, you can use:

     osascript -e 'tell application "System Events" to delete login item "YourAppName"'

3. Using Launch Agents and Daemons:

   • For more advanced users, macOS allows you to use Launch Agents and Daemons to manage startup items. These are plist files located in /Library/LaunchAgents, /Library/LaunchDaemons, ~/Library/LaunchAgents, and ~/Library/LaunchDaemons.
   • To create a Launch Agent, you can create a plist file in ~/Library/LaunchAgents with the following content:

     <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
     <!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
     <plist version="1.0">
     <dict>
      <key>Label</key>
      <string>com.yourdomain.yourapp</string>
      <key>ProgramArguments</key>
      <array>
          <string>/Applications/YourAppName.app/Contents/MacOS/YourAppExecutable</string>
      </array>
      <key>RunAtLoad</key>
      <true/>
     </dict>
     </plist>

   • Save the file with a .plist extension and load it using:

     launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.yourdomain.yourapp.plist