Bookmarks

Well, the "766" number is the number of new RSS items. That News bookmark contains RSS feeds from several sites, and the number in parentheses after the bookmark name in the bar or menu tells you how many new things have appeared.

I'm not actually sure I understand your question, otherwise; in Safari, you edit the bookmarks by clicking the little book icon on the far left of the bookmark bar, or by selecting "Show all bookmarks" from the Bookmark menu. From there you can edit or delete items in the bar, menu, or even folders that appear in neither, if you're a bookmark fiend. For items in the bar, you can also just drag them off and they will disappear in a puff.

If I'm reading right and you're poking around in your Library folder, you're doing it wrong--the end user was never intended to manually touch ANYTHING in that folder, and they've hidden it by default in Lion to discourage doing so. Use the app itself to edit things, in this case Safari.

In Safari, File -> Export Bookmarks. You end up with an HTML document containing all your bookmarks that Safari knows how to import, most other browsers will also import, and can be viewed as-is in any browser on top of it. You can manually back up the .plist and attendant files in your Library, but if you're not using Time Machine and want to do a manual backup the export option has you covered.

I've done it, but I'm a bit hazy. I think the bookmark list record is stored in: User>Library>Application Assistants>Safari>data

One of the files in the Data folder contains a record of Bookmarks.

Peter Franks said:

Why are the plist files on here if you can't view them?

Click to expand...

I'm not sure I understand your quesiton. If you're asking why the files are on the system in the first place if they're not intended for the end-user to edit, it's simple: The system has to store them somewhere.

That's the purpose of the Library folder(s)--to store the hundreds or thousands of settings files that the computer needs to do its job, but the end-user was never intended to even be aware of under normal circumstances. Again, that's why Apple now hides it entirely by default in Lion, something that power users complained about but they probably should have done a long time ago for exactly this reason.

Every OS has such folders and files, and varying OSes hide them to varying degrees. The Windows folder, for example, wasn't intended for end-users to muck around in, and when you try to you get a warning, but it's not hidden, either. Other Windows preference folders are hidden by default. Several low-level Unix directories are hidden in the Finder and always have been. Other Unixes and Linux generally expose everything but don't allow modifications, which is probably why OSX started out that way.