Home Forums Mac Software Mac Operating Systems Reordering Login Items

(This is relevant to Tiger, Leopard, and Snow Leopard, so I'm not certain in which forum it belongs.)

We apparently lost the ability to reorder the items in /Apps/SysPrefs>Accounts>Login Items with drag and drop with the release of Tiger, my recollection being that the only suggested fix has been to trash the applicable plist and re-import its contents in the desired order.

I discovered a while back, though (and apologize for not having had the presence to post sooner), that items can be reordered, but only by dragging them to the very bottom of the list...cumbersome, but significantly easier than the potentially nightmarish trash and re-import approach:

1. Place your cursor to the left of an item's check-box and, while clicking, drag to the left until your cursor is out of the GUI pane.
   
   
2. Drag your item down and back into the GUI pane, and when it reaches the bottom you'll (barely) see a dark blue line just above the bottom line of the pane.
   
   
3. Release your click, and your item will be the new bottom item.

I hope this helps somebody (despite the fact that the question has not come up in a considerable period of time).

Why System Preferences will only permit you to move a login item to the end of the list, seems to me a curious design decision. However, Marcel Bresink's old OS X freeware standby TinkerTool, his shareware TinkerTool System (if you have imported the TinkerTool panes), and Koingo software's MacPilot will allow you to rearrange the startup items at will.

> Why System Preferences will only permit you to move a login item to the end of the list, seems to me a curious design decision.

Curious is the precise word I used when I stumbled on the option... Why change it from freely-relocatable to this, and why on earth make it so difficult to find?

Thanks for filling out this thread with the links.

maybe just a lazy programmer, or a programmer on a tight schedule.

We already coded adding items and removing items, now you want us to add MOVING them at the last minute? Oh wait, we can already remove and add to the end... *click *click*. There. When they drag to the end, we just call the delete followed by the add. done! *compile*

You may think that's funny, but sometimes that's why things happen the way they do...

Hmm, looks like I got some work to do. First off and assuming I do it correctly, the dragging trick doesn't work for me (running 10.4.11 on a 20" iMac G5 iSight). Following your guideline after I select an item and drag downward, regardless of how far left I dragged first, I simply extend the selection to include all intervening items listed. No dark blue line, however faint, shows up in this scenario.

Strangely, when trying MacPilot* (v. 3.4.5), no Login Items were listed at all under the 'Login Items' tab, but Tinkertool (v. 3.96) did, and allowed rearrangement.

*) I have some issues with MacPilot, as I can crash it reliably when asking it to do certain things, plus the fact that Koingo isn't all that clear about which versions of the utility should (not) be used with the various OS versions around. But that's a different story.

The thing is: reordering login items in that particular window (even when possible) is of little practical value. It doesn't significantly affect actual launch order. And even if it did... those items fire off so closely together in time that we aren't afforded any real authority over the final outcome [not to mention the intermediate stages].

If "fine-tuned" control of such events is truly needed, then use a single AppleScript with appropriate 'delay' statements to activate various applications. [such tactics may be useful for external apps... whereas executable login items internal to prefPanes themselves (like GeekTool or Growl, etc.) will of necessity need to remain in the Login Items list.]

Alter, it seems to be a matter of timing. If I click to the left of the checkbox and immediately drag to the left, the item isn't highlighted/selected and is very clearly on the move. If I've accidentally selected the item before beginning the drag it's more hit and miss...sometimes it moves, other times the selection is extended.

The dark blue line is very evident in my case, but sometimes there's a bit of a delay before it appears.

(I quit paying attention to the order of my login items years ago, for the reasons Hal noted, but tried out Artie's tip to see how it works.)

Just to be certain, cyn, does your response to alternaut apply to Tiger? (I confess to having jumped to the conclusion that the tip is applicable to Tiger when I should have solicited opinions.)

Note: I've experienced the same erratic behavior as you have when an item has been highlighted before I've begun dragging.

Addendum: You can "gang" select items to move, and they will all be displayed as being dragged, but only the bottom one will have been relocated after you've dropped.

You're 100% on the mark! (I posted the tip not because it's of critical importance but because it's the answer to a question that has remained unanswered for something like four years.)

My personal preference, strictly for aesthetic reasons, is to see my Login Items in alpha order, but with AirPort Base Station Agent as my first one (not that I'm the least bit certain that it's helpful), so I'm pleased to have stumbled on this tidbit.

(Several years ago I d/l'ed a 3rd party app, an AppleScript, I believe, that purported to do precisely what your suggested AppleScript would do, but it didn't work as advertised.)

Code:

-- begin applescript
delay 7
tell app "terminal" to launch
delay 7
tell app "textedit" to launch
delay 7
tell app "preview" to launch
delay 7
tell app "safari" to launch
-- end applescript

Not exactly rocket science... but it should provide a functional starting point. [tweak the delay values and app names as needed, according to your specifications and how *your* system responds during login.]



I might look at mine 6 times a year maybe... so it doesn't matter much. There may be some software solution for "alphabetizing the login item list" — but i haven't run across it. If you wanted them *launched* in alphabetical order , then the applescript above might be handy after all.

I'm running Leopard.

I found the click doesn't have to be to the left of the box; anywhere on an item's line works, for me anyway.

Same here (after testing).

We still need a second report on Tiger functionality to either complement or contradict alternaut's.

Edit: Apple, knowing that it was pretty much useless, may, in fact, have taken the "move" option out of Tiger and then half-assed restored it in Leopard.

That scenario would pretty much pull-together the entire content of this thread.

Thanks for that, Hal, but I'm happy with my setup as it stands.

(Launching Login Items in alpha order... What a concept!)

I tried a few more things and here are the results:

1. I can easily rearrange Login Items by dragging under Leopard (MBP early 2008, 10.5.8) dark blue line and all, but not under Tiger (iMac). Any click, however brief, on a login item under Tiger selects that item; any subsequent vertical drag extends the selection. It doesn't seem a timing issue, and it looks like Artie's suspicion that this may not work on Tiger could be right. Perhaps somebody can confirm this behavior under Tiger.

2. The login items I rearranged alphabetically with Tinkertool yesterday had reverted* to their original sequence after rebooting today on the iMac running Tiger. It doesn't look like I forgot something to save the changes in Tinkertool, but I might have regardless. Comments anyone?


*) After further experimentation I have not been able to replicate this reversal. However, I did note something odd. After alphabetizing the list again with Tinkertool, the new sequence showed up immediately in System Prefs/Accounts/Login Items. After a Logout-Login cycle one item (Logitech Control Center) had moved out of sequence to the bottom of the list. I could replicate this behavior reliably with both Logout-Logins and restarts.

Just to exclude a difference between a Restart and a Shut Down-Startup I tried the latter too with a 10 minute wait between ShutDown and Startup. Again, the result was the same as with a logout-login or a restart: the list remained alphabetized but for the LCC item at the bottom. The sequence reversal I noticed this morning must have been a fluke, I cannot explain it.

Login Item rearrangement persists through restarts on the Leopard MBP. The MBP doesn't have LCC installed, and there were no exceptions to the alphabetizing here.


Btw, like Artie, my main reason to alphabetize the Login Items is cosmetic.

Well, i presented something of much higher value: the ability to actually control launch order... however one may prefer. [my little joke was merely to illustrate that alphabetizing the login items list (which wasn't mentioned as the goal in post #1) doesn't seem all that useful either... unless maybe there are over a dozen items there, and the user is going there to inspect them on a daily basis or something {???}. For me it's pretty much set and forget.]

as an alternative to applescript, I use bash

one command file:

#!/bin/bash
open /Applications/iTunes.app
sleep 5
open /users/mrbill/Documents/todolist.rtf # works for documents too
sleep 5
killall terminal # better than exit, quits terminal

> Well, i presented something of much higher value: the ability to actually control launch order... however one may prefer.

I wasn't making light of your script; I'm certain that the ability to order the launching of one's Login Items is useful to at least some, perhaps many, people, just not to me.

(I opened the app I mentioned in Script Editor, and it was similar, if not identical, to yours. Edit: On thinking, that app has disappeared... Hmmm.)

> [i][my little joke was merely to illustrate that alphabetizing the login items list (which wasn't mentioned as the goal in post #1) doesn't seem all that useful either... unless maybe there are over a dozen items there, and the user is going there to inspect them on a daily basis or something {???}.

This thread's only goal is to let people know that a long-unanswered question has been answered.

(I've got a dozen Login Items at the moment; I keep them in alpha order simply because it makes the list easier to digest when I look at it periodically.

I did not suffer any traumas before discovering the trick. )

I agree a shell script is slicker (and probably quicker) than an applescript... but we can take Terminal (and killall terminal) out of the picture. To run a script at user login, a launch agent will do the job nicely.

Just put a plist such as this inside the /Users/*you*/Library/LaunchAgents/ folder (create the folder if necessary):

login.launcher.plist

Replace /full/path/to/the/bash/script with the proper pathname (no quoting necessary), and it fires at login (so use exit $?). [the Label text and the file's name don't matter, so long as the filename ends with .plist]

Now it's a bona-fide "login item" that runs automatically (without the user's or Terminal's involvement).

I think the quintessential example is having a RAM disk mount before the web browser comes to life... but there are others i've forgotten about (or don't yet know).


Guess it's been so long that... i've forgotten why the question *needed* to be asked.

> Guess it's been so long that... i've forgotten why the question *needed* to be asked.

I think the bottom line is that the question never needed to be asked, and that's probably why Apple (apparently) removed the functionality in the first place.

On this we can agree strongly. (i suspect many users interpreted the changeable order as being meaningful somehow... most likely in terms of launch times. So if/when observations would conflict with those expectations on occasion, perhaps the complaints started to roll in... idunno, just speculating).