How To Fix These 10 Mac Finder Annoyances

There are many small ways to customize the Mac Finder that may get rid of small annoyances for some users. Check out these settings and techniques.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you ten Mac Finder annoyances and how to fix them. 
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So first let's start with the Desktop. A lot of people complain that a lot of desktop space is taken up by showing icons like the hard drive, external drives, and other connected network drives and things like that. You don't have to show any of these on there. As a matter of fact I don't have any hard drives showing on my desktop at all. To get rid of these in the Finder, go to Finder, Preferences, and then under General look for Show These Items in the Desktop. You can turn all of these off. That's how I have it set. So anything on my Desktop is a file or folder that I specifically put there. Otherwise the Desktop is empty. 
Now when you create a new Finder window it will go to a default location. So I'll close this Finder window here and do File, New Finder Window and you could see here it goes to my Recents folder. If this isn't exactly where you want it to go it could be annoying and if it's some place you never want to go, like perhaps your Recents folder, then it's always annoying. So let's go to Finder Preferences to fix this. Under General here you'll have New Finder Window Show and you can set it to anything that you want. So instead of Recents you could pick say the top computer level or your hard drive or your User folder, Desktop, Documents, or use Other and select any folder location that you want. So, for instance, in iCloud Drive I could select My Documents folder and then maybe a specific folder that I want. Choose this and now when I open a New Finder Window it will start there. 
Another annoyance could be your Sidebar here. It would have lots of things in it that you don't necessarily need. So go to Finder, Preferences and go to Sidebar. There are a lot of default item that you could turn On or Off. So, for instance, you could get rid of Recents. You could get rid of AirDrop. You could get rid of Downloads, Movies, Music, Pictures, your Home folder. You can get rid of all of these things. They're easy to get to anyway. In the Finder you could just use the Go menu. Most of these items are right here. They even have keyboard shortcuts. So you can still get to them pretty easily without having them clutter up the Sidebar. Also near the bottom of this list here under Locations there are a lot of things that you might not want to see. For instance you may not want to see external drives, inserted optical media, Cloud storage, other computers on your network. You can get rid of all of these things. As a matter of fact if you get rid of everything under Locations that whole category just goes away. Then anything else that you've got in here, maybe something you've added on your own, you can get rid of by dragging away. As soon as you see the X there you can release it and it will disappear from the Sidebar. You can easily add something back by just dragging it into the Sidebar. 
Now notice here some of these file names have extensions and others don't. You'd rather always see extensions. You can turn that on in Finder Preferences under Advanced. The first checkbox here is Show All File Name Extensions. By turning it On you could see now it's there for all files. On the other hand if you'd rather have it Off, turn it Off, note that when you create a file name, if you add the extensions when you're typing the file name, it will appear there. You can use Command i to bring up the Info window and here is where you could Hide the extension for one where you've set it to be On. So you can switch it On or Off individually for File but any file that you haven't set that for, that's going to obey that universal setting in Finder Preferences. 
Now under Finder Preferences in Advanced, there's also a set of warnings that you can turn Off. There's Show Warning Before Changing an Extension, Show Warning Before Removing something from iCloud Drive, and Show Warning Before Emptying the Trash. If one or more of these is an annoyance to you, you can switch them Off. 
When you start a Search in the Finder either using the iCloud here or Command F it's going to search in a specific location. It may start in this Mac All your Files or it may start in a certain folder. The default for where it starts can be annoying if it's not where you want. You can set this in File Preferences. In Advanced there's when performing a search you could have it set to the current folder which is probably your best option. But you could also have it go to the previous search scope or Always Start on This Mac. Anyone of those three, though, when you set it you have to get used to looking here to make sure it's where you want it to be before you start performing your search. There's no good answer. Your Mac can't really read your mind and figure out where you want to search. The only real solution is to always learn to go where you want to start the search first and then do the search and have it set to use the current location.
Now you don't always see all the files that are in a folder. There are hidden files. Usually they're hidden for a reason. They are not something you would normally want to access. This could be annoying though when you do want to access that file or folder or conversely it could be annoying when you see these invisible files and you're not sure how you ended up being able to see them and you want to get rid of them. Well, the keyboard shortcut to Show or Hide hidden files is Command Shift and Period. So you can see here it is showing me the hidden files in my Home folder. This could be useful if I want to see my Library folder, for instance. But if you accidentally turn this On it could be really annoying if you don't know how to turn it Off. Just Command Shift Period turns it Off. 
When you're in List View you've got columns here at the top and I hear a lot of people complain it's annoying that the columns either aren't the right size for them or they're not showing the right information they want to see. Or maybe they're not in the right order. After all if you shrink this window you could easily cutoff some of these columns. Well, this is all customizable. You can grab the line between anyone of these columns and change the size for the column. You could click on a column and drag it left or right to reposition it. So you can take the column that's more important to you and move that further to the left. You can also change which columns are there. You can do this a few different ways but the quickest way is to Control click, two finger click on the trackpad or right click on the mouse, on anyone of these columns here and then you can select which column to Show or Hide. So if I want to have Date Last Opened instead of Date Modified I can add Date Last Opened. I can Hide Date Modified and I can move this here to the left since it's the most important one for me. Then, of course, you can sort by any of these by clicking on the column to sort. Pay attention to the arrow here for the direction. Click again and it changes the direction. 
So this is actually one of the annoyances I hear about the most. You get a Preview area here to the right side of the Finder. This can appear here in List View. It can appear in Icon View. It's very common to appear in Column View where it's on by default. While I find this to be a very handy feature but a lot of people end up seeing it and don't realize how they turned it on and now they want to turn it off. It's just here under View and then it's Show or Hide Preview or Shift Command P. It will show or hide that in any Finder view. 
A common annoyance that even I deal with sometimes is that when you select a file and then use Command i for File, Get Info it brings up the info window here. So let's move that over here to the right. Now let's say I want to select this file. Notice that the Info window is still showing the info for the first file. But I want it to follow me around. When I select some other file I want to see info for that file. So to do that instead of the Info Window, when you go to File, Get Info hold the Option key down and you'll see that Command Option i is Show Inspector. The Inspector looks a lot like the Info Window except it will change to show the info for whatever is selected. It's a bonus if you select multiple files. It will actually combine those and show combined information. Like the total size for all of those files. 
Now here's a bonus one. I always like it to keep a clean desktop and not have files like this cluttering the desktop. So to that end I rarely have files on the desktop. But I know that other people work in different ways. Sometimes you have a lot of files on the desktop. If you need to clean this off really quickly, like maybe to do a presentation, you would have to take the time or organize your files, move them off to the proper folders in your Documents folder or wherever you want to have them which can be time consuming. If you're crunched for time there is a way to get rid of the files here on the desktop. Remember the Desktop is just a regular folder. If in the Finder here I go to Desktop I can see my Desktop folder is the same files that are here. So it's just two ways of looking at the same location. But if I'd rather only have these files in the Desktop folder in a Finder window and not have it actually rendered here on the Desktop, I could do that using a hidden setting. You've got to go to Terminal and then use a special command. This will change the default for the Finder for a property called Create Desktop. It's going to set it to the bullion value of False. Then in order to enact it you've got to restart the Finder. So Kill All Finder will do that. 
Now notice what happens is the Desktop is no longer rendered using the icons. I still set that those files are actually on the Desktop. So the files are still there. They haven't moved. Just the Desktop is no longer showing those files. So this could be handy in an emergency situation although you certainly don't want to use this normally as it can get confusing. You can think you have an empty Desktop and you actually have all these files in your Desktop folder. To turn this Off just use the same Command but True instead of False. Restart the Finder again and now it's rendered with those files on the Desktop again. 
Once you get in the habit to move it's just you've changed the behavior of the Desktop to no longer show files even though they're still there. So I hope you found these tips useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 9 Responses to “How To Fix These 10 Mac Finder Annoyances”

Tim A.

2 years ago

And Option-Cmd-I will get to the "Show Inspector" view from the keyboard.

Victoria Hill

Thank you so much for this handy video Gary. I do so appreciate you. Whenever a friend has a mac issue, my response is always "Go ask Gary, at Macmost.com". All the best. Vx

ronald davidson

How would I FIND terminal commands hide desktop and return it ?

Gary Rosenzweig

Ronald: Not sure what you are asking. Can you restate the question, maybe with an example. If it is something new, not related to this video, use https://macmost.com/ask

Ellen

Too much to remember. If I hide anything I'll forget I have them! Great ideas if young and remember everything. Not so great when older.

Gail

Always amazed when I learn what a Mac can do, thanks to you. : )

Mick

Brilliantly useful tutorial. Thank you

Mike

11 months ago

In the finder window, I used to have drop down arrows to the left of folders for quick access. Something changed all of them to not be visible now - how do I get these back?

Mike: Do you mean the sidebar is missing? Or the sections in the sidebar? Or the arrows next to the settings? Or what, exactly?

Comments Closed.

How To Fix These 10 Mac Finder Annoyances

Comments: 9 Responses to “How To Fix These 10 Mac Finder Annoyances”

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