How to open every section of macOS Ventura System Settings

Awhile back I wrote about identifying panes in System Preferences in order to figure out how to deep link directly to specific parts of System Preferences. That resulted in a near complete dictionary on how to open nearly every single section of System Preferences via script in macOS Monterey.

macOS settings have changed drastically in macOS Ventura, bringing with it a new name (System Settings) as well as a unified visual interface that has been a bit divisive among the apple community. A recent post from Rich Trouton reminded me to take a look at System Settings now that macOS Ventura has been released, and create a revised list that reflects the changes that were made in the latest operating system.

You can find the complete compiled list of macOS Ventura’s System Settings here.

A few observations regarding the new System Settings:

1. Apple seems to be using a new “extension” schema for items in System Settings as referenced by the new .extension naming you see in the screenshot below. However, some of the bulkier sections of the app have maintained their previous .preference schema, particularly Privacy (open "x-apple.systempreferences:com.apple.preference.security?Privacy) and Accessibility
2. Even though the new app is called System Settings, the URL scheme still retains it’s systempreferences designation of x-apple.systempreferences
3. Apple is still mixing .preference and .preferences in their URL schemes, although most of that comes from legacy stuff that is still compatible.
4. All sections of System Settings support URLScheme now! In Monterey, it was a mixed bag and depended on if an individual pane supported URLSchemes or not.

How do I identify the sections of Ventura’s new System Settings?

Apple has made identifying the different sections of System Settings significantly easier in macOS Ventura. In fact, the majority of them are stored in a plist right inside of the app itself! Check it out at
/System/Applications/System Settings.app/Contents/Resources/Sidebar.plist

There are still a handful of items in System Settings that you can link to that are not sidebar items, and thus not in that plist. One method for digging those out of the app itself is by using the strings command to pull out any potential strings out of System Settings that may belong to those deeper submenus beyond the sidebar.

for pref in $(strings "/System/Applications/System Settings.app/Contents/MacOS/System Settings" | awk '/^com.apple./ {print $1 }'); do echo "$pref"; done

I hope you find these useful in your scripting and automation adventures!