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maclaunch

Lists and controls all your macOS startup items and their startup policy.

Take back control of your macOS system!

% maclaunch list microsoft
> com.microsoft.update.agent
  Type  : user
  User  : hazcod
  Launch: disabled
  File  : /Library/LaunchAgents/com.microsoft.update.agent.plist
> com.microsoft.teams.TeamsUpdaterDaemon
  Type  : system
  User  : root
  Launch: disabled
  File  : /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.microsoft.teams.TeamsUpdaterDaemon.plist
> com.microsoft.office.licensingV2.helper
  Type  : system
  User  : root
  Launch: disabled
  File  : /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.microsoft.office.licensingV2.helper.plist
> com.microsoft.autoupdate.helper
  Type  : system
  User  : root
  Launch: disabled
  File  : /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.microsoft.autoupdate.helper.plist

How does it work?

maclaunch will list all types of entries on your macOS system that can be persistently installed:

  1. Configuration files for LaunchAgents and LaunchDaemons which are loaded by launchctl.
  2. Kernel extensions loaded in the kernel.
  3. System extensions loaded in userspace.
  4. Login or Logout Hooks
  5. emon.d scripts
  6. Cron scripts

When disabling an item, it uses launchctl, kextutil or systemextensionsctl to natively stop loading that service. It does not alter the contents in any way or moves the file, so it should work with practically any service.

The name you provide can either be specific to that service or function as a filter to work on multiple services simultaneously.

By default it hides system startup items which are most likely not interesting, but you can set the environment variable ML_SYSTEM=1 to show those.

Installation

Installation can be done straight from Homebrew via brew install maclaunch or just copy maclaunch.sh to your filesystem.

Usage

Usage: maclaunch <list|disable|enable> (filter|system)

To list all your services: maclaunch list

To list all enabled services: maclaunch list enabled

To list all enabled services, ignoring internal ones: ML_SYSTEM=no maclaunch list enabled

To list all disabled services: maclaunch list disabled

To list all your services including system services: maclaunch list system

To list all microsoft services: maclaunch list microsoft

To enable plex player-helper: maclaunch enable tv.plex.player-helper

To disable everything related to plex: maclaunch disable plex