If you want to change your Auto-start Applications on MAC OS X and you've typed 'Autostart' in your search bar you'll find nothing. Great Apple. But of course you can type it into google and hopefully you've found my little blog post. ;)

There are different ways to change your Autostart behavior for Applications. The first way is the easiest, and most accessable. But it only works if your application is in your application dock.

The second way of changing your autostart is by changing "Login Items" - I don't know why Apple called them "Login Items" but it is what it is. First I thought maybe it lets me add different things, but I can only add Applications. Maybe I have overseen something.

Changing Autostart behavior in the Dock

Rightclick and then 'Open at Login'

If you want to change the behavior just change the 'Open at Login' option. Rightclick on your Appicon --> then 'Options' --> enable or disable 'Open at Login'

If your App is not in the Dock

Go to: Settings --> "Users & Groups" --> Click on your User --> On the right go to "Login Items": Change your Startup Apps here. With the little +/- Box you can Add a new Application and remove an Application.

Users & Groups - Login Items

You can even add some "Items" to the list. For example open your ToDo list every morning you turn your PC on. There was a bug for me, that Items did not show up immediately, but after a restart everything seemed to work. Maybe this is also fixed in future MAC OS X releases.

Change Login items over Commandline

There was a possibility to list the items, but with newer OSX Versions this possibility is gone. There is a nice little Project on Github which lets you change the Login Items over Commandline: https://github.com/OJFord/loginitems

You can install it via Brew: 

brew tap OJFord/formulae
brew install loginitems

More on the usage on the Github repository.

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Big thanks for the title picture go to: Photo by Danielle MacInnes on Unsplash