How can I make the "find" Command on OS X default to the current directory?

If you must call it 'find', then you want:

alias find=/usr/bin/find\ .

in your .profile or .bash_profile or …. Substitute the real path (if not /usr/bin/find) on your Mac OSX. Enter the full path to avoid cycles (bash normally would interpret alias find=find without issues, but better be sure).

But you better not name the alias find (findl, myfind etc), because it will become a habit and trouble for you if you try it on another system.

Install GNU find instead.

$ brew install findutils
$ alias find=gfind

Yay, it works!

find ./ -name "*.plist"

edit: hmm, i may have misunderstood the question! if you were crazy, how about emulating it via a shell script? i routinely keep random utility scripts in ~/.bin, and that's the first thing in my PATH. if you had a similar setup perhaps you could do something like: (untested!)

#!/bin/sh
# remapping find!
CMD=`echo $1 | cut -c 1`
if [ $CMD = '-' ]
then
# pwd search
  /usr/bin/find ./ $*
else
# regular find
  /usr/bin/find $*
fi

If you can't discipline yourself to use find 'correctly', then why not install GNU find (from findutils) in a directory on your PATH ahead of the system find command.

I used to have my own private variant of cp that would copy files to the current directory if the last item in the list was not a directory. I kept that in my personal bin directory for many years - but eventually removed it because I no longer used the functionality. (My 'cp.sh' was written in 1987 and edited twice, in 1990 and 1997, as part of changes to version control system notations. I think I removed it around 1998. The primary problem with the script is that cp file1 file2 is ambiguous between copying a file over another and copying two files to the current directory.)

Consider writing your own wrapper to find:

#!/bin/sh
[ ! -d "$1" ] && set -- . "$@"
exec /usr/bin/find "$@"

The second line says "if argument 1 is not a directory, then adjust the command line arguments to include dot ahead of the rest of the command. That will be confusing if you ever type:

~/bin/find /non-existent/directory -name '*.plist' -print

because the non-existent directory isn't a directory and the script will add dot to the command line -- the sort of reason that I stopped using my private cp command.