This isn’t new, but my son stumbled on something today. His Mac App Store app displays a Debug menu. When I looked this up, I find traces of it as far back as this 2011 post on the Red Sweater blog. Daniel Jalkut’s article ends with this statement:
“Enjoy it while you can. I’m sure it will be gone in the next update, especially if anybody at Apple sees this post.”
Well, three and a half years later, it’s still there.
To display this menu, open Terminal and enter the following command and relaunch the Mac App Store app:
defaults write com.apple.appstore ShowDebugMenu -bool true
(My son never entered the Terminal command, so I suspect there’s also a secret keyboard shortcut that turns on this menu.)
To remove the debug menu, choose Debug > Enable Debug Menu, which unchecks that menu item. Relaunch the Mac App Store app and it will no longer display.
So what can you do with this menu? Well, you might want to clear cookies, if you’re having trouble downloading items, or you might want to view the download folder, to delete it, again, if downloads are not working. And the Reset Application menu item might be a last resort if you can’t download apps, get updates, or purchase apps.
Much of the rest of the menu is about debugging and logging, and these might be useful for Apple’s tech support team.
So this menu doesn’t offer many useful commands, but some might help if you’re stuck trying to purchase or download apps from the Mac App Store.