A Plist Apart

Or, a Story in Eight Pictures

We’ve all used Xcode’s special plist editor, which has a structured editing environment so you don’t have to maintain the XML formatting yourself, and provides a bunch of standard Info.plist keys. Very useful.

But if you do want look at the XML for a plist file in your project, it’s easy right-click on the file in the navigation pane and, under Open As, choose “Source Code”.

But what if it’s a standalone file? There’s no navigator pane, so there’s nothing to right-click on to bring up the contextual menu.

Luckily, you can press Cmd-zero, or use the View → Navigators → Show Navigator menu item. This opens the navigator pane, which, here, only shows the one file instead of the contents of an entire project.

Then, you can right-click on the file as before.

Many standalone Info.plist files are saved as binary, however, and Xcode won’t automatically translate that to text for you. But if you open the File menu, and hold down the Option key, you’ll see the Save As menu item, which will let you save over the existing binary as Property List XML.

The trick here, at least in Xcode 4.6, is that it still won’t let you look at the file as Source Code unless you close and reopen it.