Macintosh Lesson #2c
The Finder—Customize the Finder
Finder preferences
There are also a few preferences that you can set for Finder use.
These are set by accessing Finder Preferences from the Finder menu (you will generally find the preferences for each program in its self named folder). Here you can set which items show automatically on the Desktop. I recommend you turn all of these off, these items will still show in the sidebar of each window. The second tab allows you to change the name associated with each label color. The third tab is where you set which items appear in the sidebar. By default most of these are on, and I recommend they stay that way. If you accidentally remove one from the sidebar by dragging it off, you can come here to add it back. In the forth tab are just five choices. Show filename extensions is generally not needed and can make your files harder to find. The warning before changing an extension is best left on. The third item, “Show warning before emptying the Trash” is left unchecked by me. It is after very hard to accidentally select the empty trash command, and I don’t want an extra step. Empty trash securely is a good choice if you work with sensitive documents. This makes emptying the trash take longer, but prying eyes won’t be able to recover your deleted files, but neither will you! When you use the search field in a Finder window it defaults to searching your entire computer. The last setting in this window allows you to change this behavior. If you generally know the folder you want to search in, select “Search the Current Folder” in this section. Before beginning your search, select the folder you want to search and it is limited to that folder. This speeds up the search and returns less data to sort through. If you select “Use the Previous Search Scope” the search engine will remember the setting from your last search.
Customize the Toolbar
There are many ways to customize the Finder. We’ll start with the Toolbar. As we saw in a previous article, the Toolbar is at the top of every window. While the Toolbar has many useful commands easily accessible, can also be customized. To customize the Toolbar, go to the view menu and choose Customize Toolbar… You we be presented with something similar to this.
From this sheet (Apple’s name for a dialog box that is attached to a window), you can drag any of the icons to the toolbar. Some common choices are the Eject and Get Info icons. These allow for quick access to those functions. If you burn a lot of CDs you might want the Burn icon as well. While you have this sheet open, you can also rearrange the existing icons and spaces. The Space icon, adds a blank spot the width of one icon, the Flexible Space pushes the icons to the right side of the toolbar.
On the lower left there is a pop-up menu where you can choose how you wish to view the icons (Icon and Text, Icon Only, or Text Only). When you have the arrangement that you want, click Done. You can also add folders and files to the toolbar. This makes the toolbar similar to the sidebar. If there are folders that you wish to have quick access to, just drag their icon to the toolbar. Folders placed in the toolbar are not visible in Open and Save dialog boxes, while folders in the sidebar are.
Here is an example of a toolbar with options and folders added to it. The icons have also been rearranged.
This is also true of windows in most applications. Here is an example of how this technique can be applied to other applications, in this case Mail.
Customize window views
In a previous article I mentioned that while in List View you can modify the information that is visible about files in the list. This is accomplished by choosing Show Finder Options from the View menu (or command-J). There are other options here as well. The option available will vary depending on the view mode you are in.
The first option is to set the default view for the folder then there are various option pertaining the the particular view. I will highlight the most notable items.
Calculate all sizes—available in list and cover flow modes—this calculates the size of folders as well as files.
Show icon preview—available in all modes—this shows a preview of the document. With it unchecked, you see a application specific icon. Unchecked it makes it easier to find all Excel files for example.
Arrange by pop-up—available in icon and column mode—this allows you to change the sort order (column mode in Snow Leopard only).
Icon mode has some specific options as well. You can change the icon size, a grid to arrange the icons and decide where to put the text labels. You can also change the background color or use a picture as the background for the selected window.
Other view options
There are a few other basic options in Finder windows. Take a look in the view menu. Here you can choose to hide the Sidebar, Hide the Toolbar (this also hides the Sidebar), Show the Path Bar (this shows the complete path to the current folder near the bottom of the window, each parent folder is also double-clickable) and Show the Status Bar (this shows at the bottom of the window, it tells you how many files are in the current folder, how many are selected and the amount of available space on the selected hard drive).
