Finder Tips

As you start working your way around the Finder, you'll learn various shortcuts and tips for how to do things more easily and more quickly. To accelerate that process and make you a superuser right away, we've compiled some of the best Mac OS Finder tips for your perusal.

Common Finder Commands

You should get familiar with a few Finder commands if you want to convince others of your Macintosh guru status—or if you just want to work more efficiently.

Power key.

Pressing the power key on your Mac's keyboard (if your keyboard doesn't have one, press the power key on the Mac itself) brings up a dialog box with four choices: Restart, Sleep, Cancel, and Shut Down. Shut Down is the default choice, so if you press Return or Enter, your Mac shuts down—it's the same thing as choosing Shut Down from the Special menu, and it only takes two quick presses on your keyboard.

Select All.

To select every item in the currently active Finder window, choose Select All from the Edit menu (or press ). This trick is especially handy when you have a couple hundred files you'd like to move from one place to another and you don't relish the thought of dragging your mouse that far.

New Folder.

Odds are you'll outgrow the basic folder structure on your hard drive pretty quickly, and you'll want to create new folders. To do so, open the window where you want the new folder to appear and select New Folder from the File menu ( in Mac OS 9 and earlier, in Mac OS X). When you issue this command, a freshly minted folder appears with its name selected and ready to edit. Just type the name you want to give the folder, followed by to make it stick.

Move to the Trash.

To move something to the Trash without dragging it there, select the item in question and select Move To Trash from the File menu (or press ).

Make Alias.

When you select an item or items in the Finder and select Make Alias from the File menu ( in Mac OS 9 and earlier; in Mac OS X), your Mac makes an alias of the selected icon in the same window and tacks the word alias onto the end. The icon's name is also in italic text.

Reveal Original.

This command is only available when you've selected an alias in the Finder. Select Reveal Original from the File menu (or press ), and your Mac opens the folder that contains the original item and selects that item so there's no mistaking the alias's origin.

Cancel.

Pressing . will cancel most actions already in progress.

Put Away.

When you've just moved an item to a new folder, you can send it back to its original location by choosing Put Away from the File menu (or pressing ). This makes the Finder move the item back to the folder where it came from, and that includes moving items out of the Trash. The Put Away command only shows up in Mac OS 9 and earlier. Mac OS X does, however, have an equivalent in its Undo command, which can undo moving an item to a different location.

Get Help.

In Mac OS 9 and earlier, you can call up Macintosh Help while you're in the Finder by pressing , which is the same as , because the forward slash (/) and the question mark (?) are located on the same key. will also invoke help, thanks to some quick thinking on the part of Apple's interface designers. That way, if you forget the key, you'll still get help.

Force quit.

At times in every Mac user's life, programs may crash or freeze, and it may happen more often than you like. Sometimes a program just stops responding, even though you can still move the mouse, and sometimes everything (pointer included) freezes. If this happens, you can try force-quitting the program by pressing . This brings up the Force Quit dialog box. In Mac OS 9 and earlier, this dialog box offers two choices: Cancel and Force Quit. Clicking Cancel returns your Mac to its previous state (great if you pressed this key combination by accident), and clicking Force Quit forces the troublesome program to go away. When you force-quit a program in Mac OS 9 and earlier, you should restart your Mac as soon as possible because it may now be unstable. In Mac OS X, the Force Quit dialog box shows all running programs on your Mac, including a few background programs you might not even know about, and it has one button at the bottom labeled Force Quit (unless you select the Finder; you then see a Relaunch button). Select the troublesome program and click this button. Your Mac will give you a chance to back out, noting that you might lose any unsaved changes in the program you're force-quitting. Click Force Quit again and the rebel program will go down (or Cancel if you want to back out). In Mac OS X, though, there's no need to restart your Mac, thanks to its advanced crash protection. We'll cover crashes and troubleshooting techniques in much more detail in Chapter 8.

Soft restart.

Then there are the times when your Mac crashes so hard that you can't do anything. It's time for a soft restart. To execute this, press -Power. Your Mac immediately restarts, and anything you may have been working on is gone.

Do not use this command unless you have no other choice. You won't get a chance to change your mind, and your Mac will take much longer to restart, because it has to check its disk structure for any errors that might have occurred because of the quick restart. Again, there'll be more on dealing with crashes in Chapter 8.

Modified Drags

When you're using the Finder, you may notice that the pointer sometimes takes on a little extra icon, depending on what keys you're holding down while you click or drag. These modified pointers tell you that instead of a plain-vanilla click or drag, you're actually going to issue one of four commands—copy an item, make an alias, open a contextual menu, or grab the contents of an open window to move them (this last one's a bit tricky.) These are modified drags, and they serve as shortcuts for Finder menu commands. Here's a bit about each (Figure 1.44):

Copy.

If you hold down while dragging a file, the pointer arrow acquires a little plus sign (+) in the lower-right corner. When you release the mouse button, the Finder will make a copy of the dragged item in the location where you release the mouse button.

Make an alias.

Hold down while dragging an item, and a small, right-curving arrow appears in the pointer's lower-right corner. When you release the mouse button, the Finder creates an alias—or pointer—to the original file in the location where you let go.

Open a contextual menu.

Hold down (without clicking anywhere), and a small rectangle appears in the pointer's lower-right corner. This means if you click an item (or even the Desktop itself), you'll invoke a contextual menu with choices specific to that item. We'll cover contextual menus later in this chapter.

Grab a window's contents.

This fourth modified click creates an all-new kind of pointer—the gloved hand, reminiscent of a certain famous animated mouse's hand. By dragging in a window while holding down in Mac OS 9 and in Mac OS X you can drag the window's contents around, saving you a trip to the scroll bar. At least one of the window's scroll bars has to be active for this to work. It's like scrolling without using the scroll bars.

Navigating by Keyboard

Believe it or not, you can navigate through your Mac, opening folders and launching programs, without ever leaving the comfort of your keyboard. Here are a couple of tricks you'll need:

Typing names.

If you start typing an item's name, the Finder will do its best to match an icon in the currently active window (or on the Desktop) to the name you're typing. The Finder makes a selection after you enter the first few characters, picking the first item in alphabetical order that matches the characters you've typed. Once an item is selected, you can use other Finder commands on it (such as Open or Move To Trash).

Arrow keys.

These let you select an icon to the left, right, above, or below the currently selected icon, depending on which arrow key you press.

Modified arrow keys.

If you hold down and press , the Finder opens the selected item, whether it's a folder, file, or icon. It's the equivalent of selecting Open from the File menu or pressing . Hold down and press , and the Finder will open the folder that holds the folder you're viewing the contents of. (Unfortunately, the latter trick doesn't work in Mac OS X.) Finally, holding down while using these shortcuts closes the window that contained the item you're moving from. For example, when you open the hard drive and then hold down while opening the Documents folder, the hard-drive window will close and the Documents folder will open.

Get Info

The Get Info command in Mac OS 9 and earlier is your key to understanding an item on your hard drive. It tells you how big an item is, where it's located, and when it was modified, among other things. The Get Info window (Figure 1.45) changes depending on whether you've selected a file, a folder, an application, or a volume. To find out more about an item on your Mac, select it and press (under the File menu, select Get Info and then General Information) to bring up the Get Info window. (In Mac OS 9 and earlier, each item on your Mac can have its own Get Info window.) Here's what you can expect to see in a Get Info window for each basic item type:

Documents.

The document's name, which application created it, how big it is, where it's located, when it was created, and when it was last modified.

Folders.

The folder's name, its size (and how many items are inside it), where the folder is located, when it was created, and when it was last modified.

Applications.

The application's name, its size, where it's located, when it was created and last modified, and its version. This last piece of information can be useful if you don't know exactly which version of a program you have on your hard drive.

Volumes.

The volume's format, how much information it's capable of holding, how much space is available, how much is already in use, the number of items on the volume, the volume's location (including some details about its physical interface to your Mac), when the volume was created, and when it was last modified.

Most Get Info windows have a couple of common elements, including a pop-up menu that lets you select a label for the item, a field for comments (if you want to jot down a few notes about what's in an item), and a Show pop-up menu. This last feature lets you set who can see the item over a network via file sharing, as well as the amount of memory a program gets when you launch it. We'll cover these details in future chapters.

Mac OS X has a similar Info window that does the same basic thing (Figure 1.46). You call up the Info window by selecting Show Info from the File menu (or pressing ). You can only have one Info window open at a time in Mac OS X, and it changes its contents to reflect what you have selected in the Finder. It also has the pop-up menu at the top that lets you change how items are shared over a network—this menu has different items in it depending on the kind of icon selected. For example, if you select a document, you can choose a program to open it; if you select an application, you can turn on different languages the program is capable of using.

Tips for Working with Files

When you spend some time working with the files on your hard drive, you'll develop your own techniques for doing things quickly. Here are a few tools to help you on your way:

Locking and unlocking files.

If you want to protect an important file or program from changes, you can lock that document so no one can rename or change it when it's open and it's harder to delete from your hard drive. To lock a file or application, select it, and then from the File menu select Get Info, General Information (in Mac OS 9 and earlier); select File, Show Info (in Mac OS X); or press . In the window that pops up, check the Locked check box at the bottom and close the window. The item's icon will now sport a little lock in the lower-left corner, and users won't be able to change the item's name or alter the item (although they can still open it), nor can they delete the file without first unlocking it. The aim of this is to keep you from accidentally deleting an important document, not to provide solid security. That's because it's easy to unlock an item. To do so, open its Get Info or Show Info window, and uncheck the Locked check box in the lower-left corner.

Trashing locked icons.

Occasionally you'll throw away a locked item you really do want to get rid of, or worse yet, you'll throw away a passel of locked files, and when you try to empty the Trash, your Mac will tell you it can't delete the locked files. (Mac OS X will not let you put locked items in the Trash at all, so you can only try this trick with Mac OS 9 and earlier.) To get around this, hold down and select Empty Trash from the Special menu. Your Mac will obediently erase everything in the Trash without asking any questions. Be careful, though, because with held down, choosing this option empties the Trash. Your Mac won't ask if you're really sure you want to throw everything away, and that's true of both Mac OS 9 and earlier and Mac OS X.

Turning off the Trash warning.

In Mac OS 9 and earlier, if you don't want your Mac to ask if you're sure you want to delete items in the Trash when you choose Empty Trash, you can turn off this warning by selecting the Trash icon and, from the File menu, choosing General Information, Get Info (or pressing ). In the Trash's Get Info window, uncheck the check box next to the words “Warn before emptying.” In Mac OS X choose Preferences from the Finder menu to bring up the Finder Preferences window. Uncheck the box “Show warning before emptying the Trash” near the bottom of the window. Now, when you empty the Trash, its contents just go away. This also means you don't get a warning, so be sure you want to get rid of the Trash's contents before you select the Empty Trash command. You can't undo it.

Encrypting an item.

In Mac OS 9, if you want to protect an item from prying eyes, you can do so by selecting the item (this doesn't encrypt a folder full of items, by the way) and then choosing Encrypt from the File menu. Your Mac asks for a password and encrypts the item. If you want to open an encrypted item, you'll first have to type in the password. It's important not to forget your password—if you do, there's no way to unencrypt your file. Encrypting an item also makes it smaller, so if you're dying for a little hard-drive space, you can encrypt a few items you don't use on a regular basis. Mac OS X doesn't have this kind of built-in encryption.

Creating stationery.

The Mac provides special documents called stationery, which act conceptually like pads of paper with preprinted designs, and when you open stationery, it's like ripping the top sheet off. You still have the pad for later use, but you can work with the sheet you just ripped off, and you don't have to go through the trouble of adding items that are used every time, such as a logo or address. Opening a stationery document opens a copy of the document, complete with all of that document's contents—text, pictures, and the like. For example, stationery is useful for items such as letterhead, which has your name, address, and company logo on it but is otherwise blank. Opening your letterhead stationery opens a copy of the letterhead document, leaving the original untouched, ready for the next time you need to write a letter. You can make stationery out of any document by selecting its icon and, from the File menu, selecting Get Info and then General Information (in Mac OS 9 and earlier); selecting File, Show Info (in Mac OS X); or pressing . Check the Stationery Pad check box and close the window. The document's icon should now look like a pad of paper instead of a single sheet. When you open that document, you'll get an untitled document with the same content as the stationery document. To turn stationery into a regular document, open its Get Info or Inspector window and uncheck the Stationery Pad check box.

Tips for Working with Windows

We've shown you the basics of working with your Mac's windows, but now it's time to pick up a few advanced techniques.

Cleaning up a window's contents.

After a short time, you might find that a window in icon or button view might start looking a little, well, disheveled. After all, it's hard for humans to move items around with machinelike accuracy. You can fix your messy windows with a quick menu command: Clean Up from the View menu. This makes your Mac square up all the icons in the currently active window according to a grid, making order out of chaos. The problem with this command is that it sometimes doesn't arrange icons sensibly. To make up for that, use View's Arrange submenu in Mac OS 9 and earlier, which offers you the choice of arranging by name, date, label, size, or kind. In Mac OS X, go to View; Show View Options to pick how to arrange the icons.

Customizing window views.

If you want to really keep your windows looking their best, open the View Options window, which lets you set how the window looks—the size of icons, how they're arranged (and whether they snap to an invisible grid), and what columns appear in a list view. To open the View Options window, choose View Options from the View menu (in Mac OS 9 and earlier) or Show View Options from the View menu (in Mac OS X). The keyboard equivalent in either case is . This pops open a window with controls that let you change how the contents of the currently active window behave.

Finding the path to a window.

In Mac OS 9 and earlier and Mac OS X, you can take a look at the folder path (the list of folders in which the currently open window is nested) by -clicking the window's title bar. This creates a pop-up menu showing each folder that lies between the current window and the Desktop, and you can open any of these intermediate folders by selecting it from the menu. Some programs, such as Microsoft Word and Internet Explorer, also support this trick.

Closing a window when you open something in it.

If you hold down while double-clicking an item, that window closes when the item opens. It's a handy way to keep your Desktop tidy when drilling down through a series of folders.

Hiding an application.

If you want to hide the currently active application without going to the Application menu, you can do so by holding down and clicking another program's windows (or clicking the Desktop). The currently active application disappears, and the program for the item you clicked becomes active.

Dragging an inactive window.

To drag a window that's behind another window without bringing it to the front, hold down and drag the window by its title bar. When you release the mouse button, the window stays behind the other windows.

Using characters to sort files in list view.

Although your Mac does a fair job at sorting items alphabetically in list view, sometimes you want just one file or folder to show up in a different place—say, at the top or bottom of the list. You can achieve this by adding a character to the beginning of a file's name. To get a file to bubble up to the top of an alphabetically sorted list, put a space at the beginning of its name. While the name looks almost the same, a file named this way pops to the top of an alphabetically sorted list. To keep a file at the bottom of a list, put a bullet in front of its name (press to get a bullet). A file named this way sinks to the bottom of an alphabetical list. You can also use numbers in front of filenames to arrange files in the desired order (Figure 1.47).