Using the Finder

By Francine Schwieder

Introduction

When you double click your hard drive icon, or double click a folder sitting on your Desktop, or just click the Finder icon on the Dock, a window opens up. You are dealing with the what is really an application (although you probably have never thought of it that way), and that application is the heart of the user interface for interacting with your Mac: the Finder. All of us are familiar with the Finder, since we use it every time we use our computer, and that has been the case since the beginning of the Mac OS. We all think we know it, and we do to a certain extent. But often we have simply gotten into certain habits, that work well enough. There may actually be better ways to do things, and since the Finder has been rewritten for Snow Leopard, perhaps it is time to take a closer look at the basics. Let's start with something obvious: the Finder Preferences.

When you are gazing at your monitor, and are actually in the Finder, you see a menu bar across the top that has two sections: on the left are drop down menu items, giving access to various things you can do in the Finder. On the right are a miscellany of menu bar extras, with the Spotlight icon at one end, generally the date and time, and other things you have selected to be there. That end of the menu bar isn't really part of the Finder (it is actually handled by a different OS function, the SystemUIServer), so we'll ignore it for now. If you click on the Finder menu bar item you can access the Finder Preferences, which have some interesting choices you can make. Let's start with first section: General, select it by clicking its icon in the Preferences toolbar.

Here you select what you want to appear on your Desktop, and if you don't select hard disks, for the first time in Apple history your startup drive won't automatically appear in the upper right corner. Since most of your own files should be stored in your home folder, that is a good choice to have as the default new window. That's what you will see if you click on the Finder icon to bring up a window, or hit Command-N to create one.

The happy news in the Advanced section is that if you initiate a search with Command-F the selected default location to do the search is the folder you are in. If you choose to select secure empty trash, then every time you empty the Trash the system will first write zeroes over the file, and only then delete the entry for the file. If you are trashing quite a few files this can take much longer than a regular trash deletion. A better idea is to leave this unchecked, and if you have some files on some occasions that you want securely deleted you can select that option from the Finder menu (see the illustration of the Finder menu items above, where there are two different entries for emptying the Trash). By the way, if you uncheck the option to show extensions, you will still see more extensions than not. Often the programs you use have a check box in the save dialog that over-rides this choice, and generally the default is to show the extensions.

The Sidebar

The Sidebar section of the Finder's Preferences is where you can set just what you want to appear in the Sidebar of your Finder windows. The choices you make here are not however written in stone--you can change the contents of the Sidebar at any time, right in the Finder window.

The first item listed in the Preference section above is Noobix, which is the name of my computer (you can set this in the Sharing pane of System Preferences). If I were on a network, that is the name that would show up on other computers. Noobix will show all items that are a part of my computer, all mounted drives and partitions, plus the Network. Since I already have all the drives I want access to either on my Desktop or in the Sidebar, and since there is another way to get to this anyway, I left it unchecked to reduce clutter and keep the length of the Sidebar down.

You'll also notice that there is a - (minus) sign in front of the entry for hard disks. That is because I removed one drive and one partition from the Devices section. Since I have them on the Desktop anyway, and don't regularly access either, having them in the Sidebar is redundant. To remove something from the Sidebar just click on it, hold the click and drag off the Sidebar, then release the mouse button. The item disappears in a poof of smoke. Don't worry, everything in the Sidebar is a kind of alias. Removing it from there doesn't remove it from the computer.

I unchecked everything in the Places section, except my home folder. After all, you can get to the Desktop simply by clicking on it, and regardless of whether you have it in your Finder window or not, it will still appear in Open and Save dialog boxes. So there is no reason to have it taking up space in the Sidebar. And I can get to Applications and select what I want in the Dock (I'll discuss this later), so no reason to have that there either. I don't actually use the Documents folder as much as some do, and can get there almost immediately anyway with a click on my home folder, the Documents folder is right there as soon as home is selected, so I don't feel a pressing need to have it take up space in the Sidebar.

You'll notice that there are two items in my Places section that don't appear at all in the Preference list: to wit, Winter10 and LocalMe. I added them because I am currently using both of those folders. The first is the location of my current photos, the second is where the local copies of my web pages are stored. Indeed, that is where this page is being saved as I work on it. To add a folder to the Places section, simply navigate to where the folder is stored, then drag it to the spot in Places you want it to be. When you don't need it anymore, you can just drag it back out of the Sidebar and watch it go poof.

One rather handy use for this section is to add a folder you are moving things into to the Sidebar. Then navigate to the folder you are moving things from, drag the items you want to the folder in the Sidebar and drop them. So you can move stuff while having only one window open, instead of two. This is especially useful if you have somewhat limited screen real estate, for instance on a laptop. When you finish your re-organizing, just drag the destination folder out of the Sidebar.

I'll discuss the Search For section in more detail later, when I get to Spotlight. For now I just want to mention that despite appearances these are not folders, they are commands to the Finder to display items meeting certain specified criteria, and what gets displayed are the actual items, wherever they may be. If you remove items from the Finder window you see when you click on one of these Search For options, you are removing them from wherever they are to wherever you put them. You aren't tidying up a folder! Today is not a folder! It is a command to Finder to list all items that were opened today, other than folders, and display them. You will see any pictures you opened, any documents you worked on, any application you used. If you drag something out of that window and put it in the Trash, the item itself will go into the Trash. If you then empty the Trash, the item will be gone from your computer.

The Toolbar

At the top of a Finder window is the Toolbar. Apple has selected a default set of items to live in the Toolbar, and a default way of displaying these items, with large icons and a text description below each icon. The default items are the back and forward buttons, the four window view options (icon, list, column and coverflow), a Quick Look button, an Action dropdown list, and the Search box. You don't have to live with this default set, and, as you can see above, I'm not. You can add things you want, from other tools, to folders or files, and remove anything you don't want.

The first set of buttons, back and forward, are often useful, albeit sometimes slightly buggy. If you have navigated down the folder tree you can click the back button to step backwards to from whence you came. You can turn around and go forward too.

The view buttons may be handy, if you happen to have your mouse in hand. Just click on the View you want. Thus if you have gotten to a folder of images that is in list view (as is the case here, you can see the list view icon is selected), just click the icon view button to switch to that view. Of course, you can also memorize and use the keyboard shortcuts to accomplish the same thing--Command-1 for icon view, Command-2 for list view, and so on. I'll talk more about this in the next page.

Quick Look is a wonderful feature. However having a button for it in the toolbar seems pointless to me. All you have to do is hit the Spacebar with an item selected, and there's your Quick Look. So I removed it from my Toolbar.

With something selected (in this case a folder), you get a whole 'nother set of options, far more interesting, and potentially more useful. You get all the previous options, plus the opportunity to zip the selected item, duplicate it, create an alias, copy it, give it a label, and then any Services that apply. If the item is a file you also can select Quick Look from here.

If you have a multi-button mouse, and are in the habit of right clicking on things, you'll recognize all this stuff: it is the Contextual menu. If you are an old Mac user, and had faithfully used Steve's preferred one button mouse all these years, you may find this an easier and more natural way to access the Contextual menu options than right clicking on Finder objects.

I'll be explaining Services in more detail at a later date. For the moment I'll just say that the only Apple service on offer here is the one to set-up Folder Actions. The other three are my own creations, so you won't see them. Depending on what you have checked in the System Preferences Keyboard pane under Keyboard Shortcuts, the Services section, you may see some other services listed. I know, it is a goofy location to access Services, but no one asked me.

The most useful feature of the Action tool, and the reason I have it in my toolbar, appears when you are doing a search using one of the Saved Searches, which do not start out showing the search criteria being used. From the Action tool you can tell the search window to display the criteria, and you can then change them, removing, adding or simply altering something in the criteria to refine your search.

Finally, the last default item in the Toolbar is a Search box. Typing something in here, if you have set the Finder preference mentioned above to search the current folder, will look for whatever you type in the folder you are in. If you want to search the entire computer, just use the Spotlight search box in the menu bar instead.

There are several items in my Toolbar that aren't part of the default set, as well as one item in the default set not present in my customized version. To remove something from the Toolbar just press and hold the Command key, and click and hold the mouse button and drag the item off the toolbar, release the mouse once you've left the Toolbar. As is the case with the Sidebar, the item disappears in a poof of smoke. Also similar to the Sidebar is the ability to add folders and files to the Toolbar by doing a drag 'n drop. Just grab a folder or file, drag to the spot you want it to be, and drop it. The two icons for Visuals and francine are such folders, the first is the folder on my backup drive, where all my digital images for the last decade and half are stored. The second is my Leopard home folder. Even though it has a different icon than my current Snow Leopard home folder, it seems less confusing to have it in the Toolbar, rather than having two francines in the Sidebar.

Of course, there is a downside to the ease of adding folders and files to the Toolbar: if you do a klutzy move and accidently drop something there, and don't immediately correct your mistake, you may forget it's there. And at some later time you may delete whatever it is, and then notice a strange question mark in your Toolbar. Now you know what that question mark is. Just Command-click-hold and drag it off.

As you can see, it takes up a lot less vertical space, which is good, and is shorter as well, while still displaying all the tools. The disadvantage is you don't get the forward button option, and you have to use a drop down menu to change the View. You also have to click on the Search tool before a box opens to type in, but even with the box present in the Icon version, you still have to click in it before you can type anything, so that's not really different in terms of usability.

You can quickly check out all the different view options for the Toolbar using the little lozenge shaped button in the upper right corner of a Finder window. As you may know, clicking that lozenge will turn off both the Toolbar and the Sidebar--and in Snow Leopard you can keep the Toolbar and turn off just the Sidebar from the View menu by selecting the new Hide Sidebar option. But in addition to this function, you can quickly toggle thru all the Toolbar views by holding down the Command key and then clicking the lozenge. You get a different set of view options with each click. This makes it really easy to decide which combination of Toolbar display modes you prefer.