Is there a way to manage and sort lots of wireless networks on OS X?

Question

On OS X you can manage your wireless networks; that is drag them to set preferred order, delete ones you don't want any more, etc.

The only problem is that there is a tiny window which only shows ~4 networks at a time.

Is there some way to be able to see more of the networks at once, and perhaps sort by name?

Answer 1

There is absolutely no way to change the layout of that dialog. As it doesn't support custom sorting and resizing, you can't change that.

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But the source for this list is accessible from the following file:

/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.airport.preferences.plist

You can open/read the file in any text editor, Property List Editor/Xcode 4, PlistBuddy or defaults.

To get the full list of networks:

defaults read /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.airport.preferences RememberedNetworks | grep SSIDString | cut -d= -f2 | cut -d';' -f1

To also sort the list of network names case-insensitively:

defaults read /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.airport.preferences RememberedNetworks | grep SSIDString | cut -d= -f2 | cut -d';' -f1 | sort -f

To print both the network name and the security type (like in the list), use:

defaults read /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.airport.preferences RememberedNetworks | grep -E "(SSIDString|SecurityType)" | cut -d= -f2 | sed -e 'N;s/\n/ /' -e 's|;||g'