Deeper for Mac: What It Does and What Else to Use

Deeper comes from Titanium Software, the same developer as Onyx, and it splits the work sensibly: Onyx handles maintenance, Deeper handles hidden functions. It is free, it has been maintained for years, and it does what it says. It is also worth knowing where it stops, because that is usually why people go looking for an alternative.

What Deeper actually gives you

Deeper groups hidden options by the part of macOS they affect: Finder, Dock, Login, Applications, Safari, and so on. Inside each tab you get checkboxes for settings Apple stores but does not show, such as showing hidden files in Finder, disabling the Dock's launch animation, or changing how the login window behaves. Tick, apply, and the relevant service restarts.

Two things about Deeper are important before you download:

• There is a separate build for every macOS version. Ventura, Sonoma, Sequoia and each release since have their own download. Grabbing the wrong one is the single most common problem people hit.
• It targets the operating system, not your apps. If you want to change how a third-party app behaves, this is not the tool.

Where people run into its limits

Deeper is a faithful front end for preference values, which is exactly its strength and exactly its ceiling. In practice, three things send people looking elsewhere.

The labels assume you already know. A checkbox reading "Disable the resume feature" is accurate, and it tells you nothing about what changes on screen tomorrow morning. If you are exploring rather than executing a known list, that is slow going.

Changes are one at a time. Setting up a new Mac means clicking through several tabs and remembering which boxes you ticked on the old one. There is no notion of a set of changes you apply together.

Undo depends on you. Unticking a box writes the opposite value, which is not always the same as restoring the state macOS shipped with. For most settings this is harmless. For a few it leaves a key set that was never meant to exist.

The alternatives, by what you need

• TinkerTool — free, same category, a slightly different set of options and a single build that covers several macOS versions. If Deeper is missing the one setting you want, check here next.
• Onyx — free, from the same developer, and the right choice if what you actually want is maintenance: periodic scripts, cache rebuilds, disk verification.
• Terminal — free and already installed. Every setting these apps change is a defaults command underneath. If you only need two or three changes, this is the most honest route:

  # show hidden files in Finder
  defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -bool true && killall Finder
  
  # undo
  defaults delete com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles && killall Finder

  Note the undo uses delete, not -bool false. That is the difference between removing your change and adding a second one.
• Mainspring — $29 once, settings only. Each toggle is described in plain English, related toggles can be applied as a group, and every change reverts from the same switch it came from.

Two settings worth doing by hand instead

Some of the most useful changes in Deeper's list are two-line commands, and doing them yourself teaches you the undo, which the checkbox does not.

# stop the Dock bouncing when an app wants attention
defaults write com.apple.dock no-bouncing -bool true && killall Dock

# make window resizing near-instant
defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSWindowResizeTime -float 0.001

# undo either one by deleting the key
defaults delete com.apple.dock no-bouncing && killall Dock
defaults delete NSGlobalDomain NSWindowResizeTime

Changes to NSGlobalDomain apply to apps as they launch, so quit and reopen an app to see the difference rather than assuming the command failed.

An honest recommendation

1. If you change a handful of settings once per Mac and you know which ones, Deeper is free and sufficient. Download the build matching your macOS version and move on.
2. If you want maintenance rather than customisation, take Onyx instead.
3. If you set up Macs regularly, or you want to understand each change before making it, a tool built around explanation and reversibility will save you more time than it costs.