finder

Often when saving and managing files you may need to quickly access certain folders. In OS X, in general, user folders are located within your home directory, and the standard way of accessing them is to open a new Finder window and navigate to the desired location. However, there are some perhaps quicker alternatives. Not only does the Finder offer some shortcuts for getting to favorite folders, but there are some additional ways in OS X such as accessing recent items and using hot keys coupled with custom services to quickly open directories.

Finder default location In prior versions of … Read more

Emoticons have become some of the most commonly used symbols when communicating using computers and cell phones. Starting with combinations of text characters, smilies evolved into emoticons with the development of Unicode fonts that include complementary images for common smilies. For instance, applications like iMessage and iChat in OS X will make use of emoticons, automatically substituting an image of a smiling face from an emoticon font if you enter the ":)" text for a standard smile.

If there are other emoticons you often use, then you can use the system preferences to set up your own global text … Read more

MacFixIt Answers is a feature in which I answer questions e-mailed in by our readers.

This week, readers wrote in with questions on hiding specific file types in the Finder, managing a program opening numerous documents when launched, dealing with "file in use" warnings in the Finder, resetting a Mac to factory default settings, and concerns about memory leaks in Apple's Dashboard feature. I welcome views from readers, so if you have any suggestions or alternative approaches to these problems, please post them in the comments!

Question: Hiding files of a specific type in the Finder MacFixIt … Read more

Apple's Quick Look feature in OS X is a convenient way to preview the contents of a document before opening it fully in an application. To invoke Quick Look, simply select a file in the Finder and press the spacebar, and you will see a window appear that shows a view of the contents of the file, or for unsupported file types will show the file's icon along with some information about it.

Quick Look uses small plug-ins that provide it with a lightweight interpretation of a specific file format, so it can display some detail about the … Read more

To make sending multiple files by e-mail or other means easier, Apple includes a quick Finder contextual menu option to zip a selection of files and folders into an archive, which not only will ensure that the files stay together, but can also greatly reduce their size for the file transfer. While convenient, Apple does not provide a means to encrypt or secure the contents of the ZIP archive with a password; however, there is a way to do this if needed.

To place a file or folder into a ZIP file that is encrypted, you will need to use … Read more

The sidebar in the OS X Finder is a convenient way to store links to your commonly used folders, and to access available network servers and hard drives. By default the sidebar shows some folders from your home directory along with the Applications folder, and clicking through these should reveal their contents in the current Finder window; however, some people who have upgraded to Mountain Lion are noticing an apparent bug where clicking between these links does not show the appropriate change in contents.

For those with this problem, clicking on a specific link in the sidebar will show that … Read more

Apple's iCloud is built to be application-centric, which means that unlike other cloud-based file management services for OS X that are essentially add-ons to the Finder, iCloud only allows you to interact with documents through the programs that created them. If a program is built for iCloud, then its Open dialog box will show an iCloud document list that you can select from, but you by default cannot access these documents in the Finder.

While this approach is convenient in some respects, it is limiting if you wish to open an iCloud document in another program, access the files … Read more

Aliases in OS X are analogous to the Windows shortcuts, in which you create a small pointer file that references another location or file on disk, so you can quickly access that resource without continuously having to reveal it first. In a sense aliases allow a similar function as the OS X Dock or the Finder sidebar, except they can be placed anywhere on the file system. A benefit to this is that you can create a folder that contains aliases of all the common documents, remote folders, and other items you access, and then add this to your Dock … Read more

The OS X Terminal is a very useful and powerful tool for troubleshooting Mac systems, and in doing so, one of the more common steps in getting a task done is to change directories to target files in it. The contemporary method of doing this is to use the "cd" (change directory) command and then specify a filesystem path; however, this can be a bit frustrating to deal with, especially if you are relatively new to the Terminal and are not too familiar with text-based filesystem browsing.

Given that Apple provides a fairly easy to use filesystem browser … Read more