macOS System Modding, Safely

Example session (illustrative; readings and settings come from your own Mac).

1. Read first, change nothing
I read the battery's power draw and health from ioreg, parsing the values correctly rather than reading the raw field that's commonly misread. I also read the current pmset settings for battery and charger separately.

2. The plan, with an undo for each step

• Finder hidden files: the setting kept reverting because the plist was edited directly while cfprefsd held a cached copy. Fix: write it through the defaults system, then restart Finder. Undo: write the old value back the same way and restart Finder.
• Battery: lower the display sleep time and turn off power nap on battery only, leaving charger settings alone. Undo: one pmset line that restores the values I backed up.

3. Your OK
I showed you exactly what would change and the undo commands, saved a backup of the current settings, and waited for your yes.

4. Applied and verified
After you agreed, I made the changes, restarted only the process each one needs, and read the settings back to confirm they stuck.

What I didn't touch
Anything protected by SIP, and anything needing a TCC permission you haven't granted. I flagged those instead of trying to work around them.

Next steps

• Re-read the battery draw tomorrow to compare.
• Ask to reorder the Dock the persistent way.