How To Fix These 20 Mac Finder Annoyances

Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here's how to fix some common Finder annoyances. Let's start with the desktop. Let's say you've got a really cluttered desktop and you want to clean it up starting with the hard drives. Whether they're connected to your Mac, the internal one, or network drives. So you could see three of them here and you don't really need them on your desktop. They're easy enough to get to in a Finder window. You'll find them in the left sidebar. So let's get them off the desktop by going to Finder Settings and then going to General. Use the checkboxes to determine the hard drives and other items that may appear on the desktop. Uncheck all of these to clean things up. But what about the rest of your desktop? If it's cluttered with files and folders, well then obviously you can clean it up by moving those files and folders, out of the desktop and into the Documents folder. But let's say you want to leave them there and kind of tidy them up. There are other options you've got. Like for instance, under View you can turn on Use Stacks. This only appears if you have the desktop selected, not some other Finder window. And then it combines things into these little stacks here that keeps everything nice and tidy. But you can also just temporarily turn off all of the items on your desktop. If you go to System Settings, go to Desktop and Dock and look for Desktop and Stage Manager. And there are two checkboxes next to Show Items. If you turn off On Desktop here, then your desktop appears to be empty. Now don't worry about your files. They're still there. They're still in the Desktop folder. They're just not shown on the desktop as long as you have that checkbox turned off. Now when you create a new Finder window, it'll always go to the same location. In this case, Recents. If you don't want Recents to be the default location for new Finder windows, or whatever the default location is for you, you want to change it, you can do that by going into Finder Settings and then looking under General for New Finder Windows Show. You could set it to Recents. You could set it to any of the most common folders like your Home folder or iCloud Drive. Or you could choose Other and choose any folder you want. So I could set it, for instance, to my Daily Reports folder in my Documents folder here. And now whenever I create a new Finder window, that's what it shows. There's another default location setting and that's where you start your searches. So if I use Command-F here in the Finder or use the Search button there, you see it's going to start searching this Mac. In other words, all of my files. But notice here I can also just choose the current location. This is the folder I was in before so I could select it here and that's where it will now search for things. But you've got a setting for that. Under Finder Settings, go to Advanced this time and look for When Performing a Search. You can choose to always start with this Mac. You could have it start with the current folder but you could also have it use the previous search scope, wherever you searched last time. Now a common problem people have is too many items here in the left sidebar. You can easily clean this up starting with Finder Settings again. This time go to Sidebar here and there are a bunch of check boxes. You can uncheck some things to get rid of them. So if you don't need something there in the sidebar, you can remove it like that. You could also simply drag and drop from here. That doesn't delete the actual item, it's just removing it from the sidebar. So if I want to get rid of say this item, I just move it till I see that little X there and then I release and you could see it's gone. You could easily add items into the sidebar like that. So feel free to remove them when you don't need them for a while and know you can put them back in very easily. Now when viewing files in the Finder, no matter which view you're in, sometimes you may see a file extension like this .txt here and other times you won't see any file extension. In ListView you can always look at the Kind column to see what kind of file it is. But in IconView you usually don't see that. A lot of people like to have the file extensions visible at all times. You can do that by going to Finder Settings and then under Advanced turn on Show All File Name Extensions. So now you see them all whichever view you're in. Now there are a number of warnings you may get while using the Finder. If you'd rather not see them or maybe you've dismissed them and you want to bring them back, you can go into Finder Settings and in advance there are a few of them here with check boxes. Show Warning Before Changing an Extension, Show Warning Before Removing from iCloud Drive, and Show Warning Before Emptying the Trash. So decide which ones you want to see and which ones you don't. If you find these videos valuable, consider joining the more than 3,000 others that support MacMost through Patreon. You get exclusive content, course discounts, and more. You can read about it at macmost.com slash patreon. Now if you ever look in a folder and instead of just seeing the folders of files you expect, you see this, then you may have accidentally triggered Show Hidden Files. All of these files are hidden files. A lot of them start with a period. Others are things you may or may not recognize. If you just want to get things back to normal just to see your stuff, use Shift Command and then period which toggles it off. Now there's nothing wrong with this file listing here. It's listing everything in alphabetical order, but some people would rather see their folders at the top not mixed in with the files. You can do that by going to Finder Settings, and there's an option Keep Folders on Top, and you could do it in Windows when sorting by name. So keep that in mind. It's when sorting by name. If I were to sort some other way, then these would be mixed in again. Now when looking in either List View or Column View, you can change the width of a column by grabbing the line between the headings here and dragging left or right. Sometimes you might end up with a column that doesn't have enough space to fit everything, like the name here, or maybe there's too much space, say for size, like that. So you could always adjust these, but you could also double click on them right here, and it will automatically adjust the size of a column to fit the largest item. So you can see how I was able to compact the size column, but enlarge the name one. Now the same is true for Column View here. You go into Column View, and you can grab the line between these columns and grow or shrink them. You can also double click on them to make them the perfect size for the largest item. But there's also a setting that will do this automatically. If you go to View, and then Show View Options, and you have to be in Column View for this, you can turn on Resize Columns to Fit File Names. And then no matter where you go in Column View, it's always going to resize those columns to be the perfect size. Now one of the things you usually get in Column View is a preview pane. So the rightmost column here will show you a preview of the file selected. You can also get this in other views as well. So for instance, in List View here, I normally don't see it, but if I maybe use the keyboard shortcut, I do get it here. And then a lot of people ask, well, once you get this, how do you get rid of it? It's under View, High Preview or Show Preview here. Shift Command P. So if you see it there and you want to get rid of it, or you don't see it there and you want to add it, that's how you do it. Now you can get more info on a file by selecting it and using File, Get Info, or just Command I, and it brings this up. But one problem people note is that if you go to select another file like this one, the info window still shows you information for the previously selected file. It sticks with its original file. If you want an info window that follows around your selection, then what you want to do is instead of File, Get Info, hold the Option key down, and note the keyboard shortcut is simply Option, Command I, and this shows the inspector. It looks just like the info window, but the difference is that it will now reflect whatever file is you have selected. And better still, if you select multiple files like this, it will show you a total, for instance, for size, for the entire selection. Now a lot of times you want to see more than just the name of the folder that you're currently in. You want to see the full path. There are a couple ways to do this. One is use the Command key and click here on the title of the folder, and then you could see the full path up to the top. Better yet, you could actually select one of these and go to it. But you could also use View and then Show Path Bar right here, and this will show the path at the bottom for the folder that you're currently in. And if you select a file, it includes that file as well. And you can click on any one of these to jump to it. Now maybe that you knew about the path bar, but it was missing and you didn't know how to get it back. There are other things like that as well. For instance, there's also a status bar. Bring that up and it'll give you more information like how many items are in this folder or how many items are selected. You also get to see the total amount of space available, either in iCloud or your local drive, depending upon where you're looking. Also, if you're missing the left sidebar, then note that there's a menu item here that hides it or brings it back. The same goes for Toolbar. You may have accidentally hidden that and you can go and bring it back and the sidebar comes with it. And if the toolbar buttons are what's missing, note that if you make the window narrow enough, these items go away. It may just be a matter of making the window wider again. Now note here I'm looking at a bunch of files in List View and I've got the size for each of them in the Size column, which is nice, except that I'm missing the size for this and this. These are folders and it's not showing me the size of all the files in the folders. Go to View and then Show View Options again and then look for Calculate All Sizes. Turn that on and it will calculate the sizes of all the files in each folder. If there are a ton of files in each folder, it may take a little time to generate that number. Another complaint I hear sometimes is that the file names are too small. If you just want to make the text bigger for the file names, you can do that by going to View and then Show View Options and then in here there's Text Size and you could set it to something larger. Note that this is a per folder basis. Now the same goes for the icons. There's an icon size right here. You can make it larger, which could help you pick out the right file or identify what a file is. And this works in other views as well. Here I am in Icon View, for instance, and if I go to View, Show View Options, you could see I could change the icon size to make the icons much larger. One question I often get is why is there no keyboard shortcut for renaming a file? It seems like renaming a file is something you would do all the time. Yet if you select a file like this and go to File, Rename, you'll see there's no keyboard shortcut indicated here. It's simply the Return key. With a file selected, just press Return and now you're renaming. You can type something new and then press Return again to accept the file name. Another common problem people have is when they double-click to open a file in its default app, it opens up in the wrong app, just the one you don't want. To change the default app for a specific file, just select it, use Command-I or Get Info, and you can change Open With. Once you change it, you can click Change All here, and now all files with that extension will use this app to open that type of file. It's pretty common for an app you install to hijack opening a certain file type. If you'd rather go back to what you had before, like opening Preview for PDFs instead of Adobe Reader, you can use this technique to do that. And here's one I've heard a million times before. Why can't you cut and paste files? You can select files like these three and use Command-C to copy and then go to another location and then use Command-V to paste, and it will make copies of those three files there. But what if your intention is to move the files? You think what you would do is go to Edit and then Cut, but Cut is grayed out. So the way to do this is actually to start the same way with Copy, and this leaves those files there, so if you're interrupted, nothing has changed. Now go to the Destination, and instead of using Paste, hold the Option key down, and you'll see Paste changes to Move. Option-Command-V. So instead of Cut and Paste, you're actually doing Copy and Move. So hopefully this video has solved one or two problems for you. Hope you found it useful. Thanks for watching. Want to know about every new MacMost video each week? Sign up for the absolutely free MacMost email newsletter at macmost.com newsletter.