macOS can open a System Settings pane from a URL, using the x-apple.systempreferences: scheme. It works from the Terminal, from a script, from an AppleScript, from another app — anywhere you can open a URL.

Most of the lists of these online are years out of date. They were written for System Preferences before Ventura reorganised everything, and a good half of the identifiers in them no longer resolve to anything. You paste one, nothing happens, and there is no error to tell you why.

This list was read off a running macOS install. The pane identifiers are the bundle identifiers of the settings extensions in /System/Library/ExtensionKit/Extensions. The privacy anchors are tokens vended by the privacy pane itself. There are 242 settings extensions installed on a current Mac; these are the ones with names anyone would recognise.

How to open one

From the Terminal:

open "x-apple.systempreferences:com.apple.Displays-Settings.extension"

The quotes matter — without them the shell will object to the colon in some configurations.

From a web page, including this one, a link using this scheme will usually ask you to confirm before it opens, and some browsers refuse custom schemes outright. That is the browser being careful about an app-opening link, not the URL being wrong. Copy the text into the Terminal if a click does nothing.

In AppleScript or a shortcut, open location and the Open URLs action both take these directly.

The settings panes

A URL with a ? in it opens the pane and scrolls to that section. One without opens the pane at the top.

The utilities

These are not settings panes at all — they are applications, in /System/Applications/Utilities, and they open by bundle identifier instead. Included because they are the other half of what people are usually hunting for.

Bluetooth Explorer is the exception: it ships with Apple's Additional Tools for Xcode rather than with macOS, so most Macs do not have it and the command will simply fail.

The two that have no URL

These are the useful part of this page, because no other list mentions them.

Gatekeeper — "Allow applications from". The Privacy & Security pane publishes anchors for its privacy sections but none for the Security section at the bottom of it, where this setting lives. You can address the pane. You cannot address the setting. The only way any app can put you in front of it is to open the pane and then scroll the window, which requires the Accessibility permission — which is why every set of instructions for it, Apple's included, ends with the words "scroll down". There is more on this, and on the faster route when an app has just been blocked, on the Allow applications from page.

Full Disk Access. The privacy pane implements it — TCCServiceSystemPolicyAllFiles — but publishes no Privacy_AllFiles token on macOS 26. That older anchor appears in a lot of the stale lists and it does nothing now. Open the pane and scroll to it — there is more on that one on the Full Disk Access page.

A warning about copying this

These identifiers change between macOS releases. Panes get split, merged and renamed, and an identifier that worked in Sonoma may not in the next one. This list says which version it was checked against, at the top, and it gets rechecked when a major version ships.

If you are putting these in something you ship, verify them at runtime rather than trusting them — check that the pane exists before you offer to open it, and fail quietly when it does not. Otherwise your app will start sending people to nothing, on someone else's schedule.