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 can 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 is cluttered with files and folders well then obviously you can clean it up by moving those files and folders, say, 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. 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 & Dock. Look for Desktop and Stage Manager. There are two checkboxes next to Show Items. If you turn off On Desktop here then 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 will 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 can set it to Recents. You can set it to any of the most common folders, like your Home Folder or iCloud Drive. You can choose Other and choose any folder you want. So I can set it, for instance, to My Daily Reports Folder in my Documents Folder here. 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 can 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 can have it start with the current folder. But you can 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. There are a bunch of check boxes. You can uncheck somethings to get rid of them. So if you don't need something there in the Sidebar you can remove it like that. You can also simply Drag & Drop from here. That doesn't delete the actual item. It is just removing it from the Sidebar. So if I want to get rid of, say, this item I just move it until I see the little x there and then I release. You can see it is gone. You can easily add items into the Sidebar like that. So feel free to remove them when you don't need them for awhile 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 extensions. In List View we can always look at the Kind column to see what kind of file it is. But in Icon View you usually don't see that. A lot of people like to have the file extension visible at all times. You can do that by going to Finder, Settings and then under Advanced turn on Show All File Name Extensions. Now you'll see them all whichever view you're in. 

Now there are a number of warnings that 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 Advanced there are a few of them here with checkboxes. 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. 

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Now if you ever look in a folder and instead of just seeing the folders and files you expect, you see this, then you may have accidentally triggered Show Hidden Files. All of these grayed out 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 is 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. You can 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 that 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 can always adjust these. You can 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. 

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. 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 right-most 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 a 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, Hide 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. It brings this up. But one problem that people note is that if you go to select another file, like this one, the Info Window still shows you information for the previous 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 simple Option Command i. This shows the Inspector. It looks just like the Info Window. But the difference is that it will now reflect whatever file it is you have selected. 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 of ways to do this. One is use the Command Key and click here on the title of the folder. Then you can see the full path up to the top. Better yet you can actually select one of these and go to it. But you could also use View and then Show Path Bar, right here. This will show the path at the bottom for the folder that you're currently in. If you select a file it includes that file as well. 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 Statue Bar. Bring that up and it will 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 the Toolbar. You may have accidentally hidden that and you can go and bring it back and the sidebar comes with it. 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 is not showing me the size of all the files in the folders. Go to View and then Show View Options again. 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 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. Then in here there's Text Size. You can 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 can help you pick out the right file or identify what a file is. This works in other views as well. Here I am in Icon View, for instance. If I go to View, Show View Options you can see I can change the Icon size to make the icon 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 is no keyboard shortcut indicated here. It is simply the Return Key. With a file selected just press Return and now you are 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 a 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 PDF's instead of Adobe Reader, you can use this technique to do that. 

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 that 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.