Finder tips & tricks
MAKE MORE USE OF FINDER’S HANDY HELPERS.
CREATE YOUR OWN tags in Finder’s Preferences to make it easy to classify and find related files.
01 CHANGE HOW YOUR FOLDERS ARE DISPLAYED
To change how Finder displays a folder, open any folder in Finder and then click on View > Show View Options. Choose how the contents should be grouped and sorted, and also specify if you want the folder to always open in List View. Also, Cmd-1, 2, 3 or 4 displays icon view, list view, column view and gallery view.
02 DECLUTTER YOUR DESKTOP
Show View Options also works on the desktop to set Stack and sorting options, icon sizes and spacing, and the size and positioning of text labels.
03 CHANGE GLOBAL SETTINGS AND SIDEBAR
You can adjust global settings for the
Finder in its Preferences panel. This lets you specify whether external disks and devices should appear on the desktop, which folder new Finder windows should open in, and whether new folders should be opened in new tabs rather than new windows. This section also enables you to specify which tags and links should appear in the sidebar.
04 TRANSFORM THE TOOLBAR
Ctrl-click over the toolbar to switch between icon, text, and icon+text views, or pick which buttons appear.
05 PICK A PATH
If you’d like to see the location of the currently selected file or folder, make the Path Bar visible from View > Show Path Bar. You can open a folder from the Path Bar by Ctrl-clicking on it and selecting Open In New Tab.
06 SHOW YOUR STATUS
You can also show and hide the Status Bar from the same menu.
07 UNHIDE THE LIBRARY
You can access commonly used folders such as Pictures and Applications from the Go menu, but Library isn’t there. Hold down Opt and it magically appears.
08 GET TAGGING
Finder’s Tags enable you to quickly apply one or more tags to something. For example, you might tag a document as a work file and tag it with a particular project name too. You can edit tags and create new ones in Finder’s Preferences.
09 EDIT EXTENSIONS
The Extensions preference pane lets you adjust the options that appear when you click on the Share button. Third-party apps tend to add themselves in here, and you can disable them again by unchecking them. If you have apps that integrate with the Finder, such as Dropbox or OneDrive, you can disable unwanted ones in Finder Extensions.
10 TAKE A LOOK AT TODAY
The Today section specifies which apps get to appear in the Today view of the Notifications panel. You can disable the ones you don’t want – so, for example, we’d rather see the Fantastical widget than the macOS Calendar one, so we’ve changed that. Whether you’re changing the Finder actions, the Today view or the Share sheet, you can re-order items by dragging and dropping them.