finder

Prevent automatic scrolling in the OS X Finder

The OS X Finder offers a number of different views for organizing folder contents; however, in some of these views you may notice periodically that contents will shift around. This usually is not an issue, but sometimes it may result in the window view switching to a different position, resulting in you losing your place. This can be especially frustrating when you are managing a long list of items in a folder and the view keeps returning to a specific locaiton in the list.

This generally happens because you have the Finder view listed by date modified or a similar … Read more

Use OS X Finder shortcuts in Open and Save dialog boxes

The OS X Finder has a number of shortcuts and features for previewing items, navigating through folders, and selecting items to open. These can be quite convenient when browsing through your documents. If that's the case, you might be interested in knowing several of these are available when browsing through documents in the system's Open and Save dialog boxes as well.

Even though you may be in a program like Pages, TextEdit, or Microsoft Word, the Open and Save dialog boxes in these programs essentially open up a window to the OS X Finder so you can browse … Read more

How to use optional list-sorting methods in the OS X Finder

When you view a Finder folder in both standard lists and the Cover Flow view in OS X, you have the option to sort the list by any of the view's columns.

By default, these are the item's Name, Date Modified, Size, and Kind (for example folder, picture, PDF) which you can click to sort in either an ascending or descending list. However, there are some additional ways to locate the files you need.

Add more columns In addition to the default column categories, OS X includes a number of others that can be enabled on a per-folder … Read more

Find practically any file in OS X

The Spotlight feature in OS X is a convenient tool for locating your files, contacts, e-mails, and other information by searching through an index of file content and metadata in addition to file names. While this feature's primary use is for locating user data and resources you may use, such as Applications and system preferences, it can also be used to find practically any file on the system.

Spotlight's index of your hard drive includes information on practically every file on the drive, but since it is geared toward relevant search results, by default Spotlight does not include … Read more

How to copy a file path in OS X

Sometimes you may wish to get the full path of an item in the Finder, and while there are several ways to access file paths, not all will allow you to extract them as text to paste into documents you may be composing.

For example, if you select a file in the Finder and press Command-C to copy it, the behavior when pasting it will be different, depending on the program being used. In some cases the program will only paste the file name, but in others it may try to embed the file's contents or its icon where … Read more

List an OS X folder hierarchy with TextWrangler

The OS X Finder is a great tool to use for organizing your documents and projects into folder hierarchies; however, it is a bit limited. If you would like to save this hierarchy as a list in a file then the Finder and OS X does not provide these options. While the Finder does support printing a folder's listings by dragging a folder to a print queue, this is about the limit of the options for listing folder items.

One alternative to this is to use screenshots; however, these are static images in which items cannot be selected and … Read more

Find your car quickly and easily with this intuitive iPhone app

The age-old problem of "Where the heck did I leave my car?" may finally be over as a number of app developers use the built-in GPS feature in the iPhone to track and remind users where they left their vehicle. Car Finder Locator is just such an app and offers one of the more intuitive, attractive interfaces for GPS car locators currently on the market. The app is very easy to use, instantly activating the GPS locator on your phone and ascertaining your current location. Simply click the "Set new position" button to mark the location … Read more

Fine-tune your Mac and access hidden settings with Cocktail for Mac

Everything on a Mac looks so polished on the outside that it may become unclear how to fine-tune settings under the hood of its graphical interface. Cocktail for Mac allows you to access an impressive number of useful tweaks and enhancements without entering a single line of code.

Cocktail for Mac can manually trigger maintenance scripts, optimize inactive RAM manually or periodically, toggle Spotlight indexing for chosen drives, force special startup modes, and access a lot of the hidden Finder and core app settings, to name just a few options. By "hidden," we mean those settings that are … Read more

Exact Duplicate Finder finds and removes duplicates on the go

Duplicate file finders were critical back in the pre-gigabyte era, but in some ways, today's terabyte-capacity drives make the problem just as bad. Not for space reasons, obviously, but because duplicates clog up your file system with redundant data that your computer still has to process. Duplicate files can make your searches take longer and return confusing or contradictory results. Enough duplicates together can even cause your system to run more slowly. And if you boot from a solid-state drive (SSD), particularly a smaller one, you're probably just as concerned about duplicates as users were back when hard … Read more