(Mostly) disabling the Cyberduck nag on macOS | nyanpasu64's blog

(Mostly) disabling the Cyberduck nag on macOS

Written by nyanpasu64

on May 21, 2026

Cyberduck on macOS normally nags you every time you close the program to purchase a "donation" key. Removing it entirely requires modifying and recompiling the application yourself (or possibly patching the compiled Java code), but you can reduce the blocking popups to almost nothing with the following shell commands:

defaults write ch.sudo.cyberduck donate.reminder.suppress.enable YES<br>defaults write ch.sudo.cyberduck donate.reminder.interval 30 # in days, increase if desired🔗<br>Explanation

The donate.reminder.* settings are stored in the file ~/Library/Preferences/ch.sudo.cyberduck.plist.

Normally the program nags you on every single quit to pay up, seriously impeding the experience of closing or restarting the app.

The first command enables a checkbox on the nag dialog to "Don't show again for this version". When you check the box and exit the dialog, Cyberduck will save its current version to disk. Afterwards Cyberduck will skip the nag as long as you're using the same program version.

If the installed program version has changed from the last suppressed version, the program will wait for donate.reminder.interval days since the last prompt, before showing another. If this value is set to 0 (the default value), you will get a prompt every time the program closes unless your system clock is running backwards.

From searching the source code I found no GUI setting to change donate.reminder.suppress.enable or donate.reminder.interval, which would allow hiding the nag. Digging through Git history (git log -pU0), I found that in commit a332acc from October 2018, the default time between nags was changed from 20 days to 0. In the preceding commits the "don't show again" checkbox was hidden by default, unless an undocumented config flag was enabled (with no GUI to turn it on).

While researching how to disable the nag, I found older online posts referencing this checkbox, indicating people used it in the past. Even if you didn't check it, you only received a nag every 20 days. It's startling how much the user experience has degraded since then.

Are people already aware of how to turn off the donation nag? Looking up these strings in GitHub code search, I found a singular repo at kevinmcox/Configuration-Profiles which has discovered this hidden method to disable donation nags. There are almost no Google results for donate.reminder.suppress.enable, but searching for donate.reminder.interval returns a Reddit comment and rutracker forum thread describing this option.

🔗<br>Patching the Java bytecode?

Interestingly Cyberduck is written in Java. This means you can patch the bytecode of compiled builds, using a tool like Recaf.

I used rga to search for strings from the dialog, and found them in Cyberduck.app/Contents/Resources/osx-9.4.1.jar (or the latest version). In theory you could patch this binary to remove the check, without forking, rebuilding, and repackaging the entire project. I have not tested this, and don't know if placing the resulting .jar files in a .app bundle would break code signatures.

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