See the best ways to customize Mac OS X Leopard's built in file browser. Add features. Streamline it. Use the shortcut. Make your workflow work for you. With the right plug-ins and tweaks, Finder can work wonders, make you more efficient, and help you get things done faster. Ever wondered where you can find a collection of the best tweaks?
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Showing File Paths, And How To Use Them
The Path Bar. The Path Bar displays the location that you are currently viewing in a "breadcrumb" mode. This shows all the preceding parent folders of the current location. One of its most useful features is the ability to jump to any one of these parent folders by simply clicking on it.
To enable the path bar, go to the Finder menu bar at the top of the screen, then select View > Show Path Bar.
Path Button in Finder Toolbar. The Path Button in Finder's toolbar displays the path of your current location in a drop-down view, much like a simplified path tree. Similar to the Path Bar, clicking on any parent folder brings you straight there.
Step 1 | To enable the Path Button, first right-click the toolbar area, which is anywhere in the grey top part of the finder window, and select customize toolbar.
Step 2 | A drop down box should appear containing various buttons. Drag the button called path to the toolbar. At this point, you might like to add other customizations also.
Seeing More With Quicklook
Quicklooking Inside Folders. When you Quicklook a folder, instead of having a big folder icon appear, how about being able to view the contents of the folder as a list? Using a Quicklook plugin, this can easily be enabled.
Step 1 | Download the Folder Quicklook plugin
Step 2 | Place the contents of the downloaded folder into /Library/Quicklook/ (create a folder called "Quicklook" in the Library if there isn't one)
Step 3 | Hold down Option-key and right-click the Finder icon in the Dock. Select Relaunch.
Step 4 | Activate Quicklook on any folder. On certain systems, you may need to restart for the plug-in to work.
Quicklooking Inside ZIP Files. Similarly, there is also a plugin for Quicklooking inside ZIP files. The installation is exactly the same as the previous plugin, except that you need to download the ZIP Quicklook Plugin
Download | ZIP Quicklook Plugin
Show Item Info
One last thing that's extremely useful is Finder's Show Item Info feature. This displays the file size of files, the dimensions for images, and the number of items for folders below each in the thumbnail view. If you have the Macintosh HD icon on your desktop, it also tells you the amount of free space left out of the total.
To switch this feature on, right-click anywhere on the desktop and select Show View Options. The check the box which says Show Item Info.
Of course there are many more modifications that you can do to Finder, and this is just a glimpse of what is possible. Any killer hacks you know of? Feel free to leave a comment!
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