Intro
I have to say it has been a very long time since I’ve taken the time to share anything about Mac OS or iOS. This is a fix to remove the overlay animation that occurs, for example, when you change the volume up or down. I have read a few people online saying the older 3rd party fixes, and even command line solutions, are not working or not persisting on High Sierra. This fix does temporarily disable SIP! Take the time to look this up and fully understand the risks, there are already much better explanations than I can offer but suffice to say this will disable System Integrity Protection. I am not responsible for you screwing up your computer. However, if you follow the procedure I did I would expect you’ll be alright. So let’s begin.
The Fix
First you’ll need to get into Recovery mode. Shut Down/ Restart your machine and be ready to press [⌘] + [R]. Once in Recovery Mode select Utilities from the menu bar and choose Terminal. From the command prompt you will need to type in: csrutil disable; reboot and press [Enter]. This will disable SIP and allow changes to be made to sensitive system files while also rebooting the computer into a fresh session. After you log in you will want to go to Go in the menu bar and choose Go to Folder… Type in or copy/paste /System/Library/LaunchAgents/ and press [Enter]. Open the file named com.apple.OSDUIHelper.plist in Text Editor. Remove all of the text between <plist version=”1.0″> and </plist> and save the file. The file format is no longer valid but also doesn’t catch the attention of SIP once the system reboots. On that note, TURN IT BACK ON! Go back into Recovery Mode and enter csrutil enable; reboot
Now enjoy the use of your keyboard control system without tacky animations… that still don’t have a factory setting to be turned off. Seriously Apple?
Afterward
Also I thought I might address the reason I even went down this rabbit hole that may be unnecessary for other versions of Mac OS. Simply deleting the file or utilizing; launchctl unload -wF /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.OSDUIHelper.plist restored to default animations after a reboot. I have no idea why but after I observed the file being restored I thought I’d give a chance to removing the instructions all together. That didn’t work either I ended up working my way to the solution I listed above by removing progressively bigger pieces of instruction until ?SIP? restored the file to factory. After that it was ‘back a 1/4 turn’ and I was happy!
It blows my mind that Apple pulls this presumptuous crap to this day.
Alan Vitullo 