MacMost: Finder

You have a lot of ways to customize your Mac's Desktop. You can use a grid or even have items automatically sorted. You can change the icon and text size, show more information, set a background color, and even show images or information over the background.

If you suspect that you have some large duplicate files on your Mac, you can find them without any special software. You can use the Finder to search for files and sort them so duplicates are together. You can also use the Terminal to find duplicates with a multi-part command.

Accidents happen and things get deleted. Here are several ways you can get back deleted text, files and other items on your Mac.

When you drag and drop a file from one folder to another on a Mac, sometimes this will move the file, and sometimes this will copy the file. Learn when a drag is a move vs a copy and how to choose the other option.

When you transfer a file between Mac and Windows, or upload to a cloud service, you may notice that the file size looks different. Windows and most cloud services use a different way to measure sizes like megabytes than Macs do. The file is actually the same size, just the math used to get those file size numbers is different.

If you have a messy Mac Desktop and want to clean it up, there are several techniques you can use. You can do something quick and simple to tidy up, or get to work and go through those files to organize them better.

The Desktop & Documents Folders feature of iCloud Drive lets you decide whether those two folders are stored only on your local Mac's hard drive, or as part of iCloud Drive and available across all of your Apple devices.

The Finder is easily controlled with a mouse or trackpad, but if you prefer to use your keyboard you can access most functions if you know the right keys to press.

In most apps you can choose to Duplicate the current document, or use a hidden Save As command to do something very similar. What are the differences between the two commands and what other alternatives are there?

Most apps you use to create documents on your Mac have the same core commands in the File menu. Learn how to use New, Open, Close, Save, Duplicate, Save As, Rename and Move To. Plus, lots and lots of useful tips and tricks!

While it may not seem like you can use wildcards in a Spotlight search on a Mac, you can use a variety of options to get the same result with a normal search, and then regular wildcard searches when using Raw Query as your search type.

Drag-and-drop is a basic Mac skill, but there are many advanced techniques that most users don't know about. Learn how to use drag-and-drop with multiple desktops, the App Switcher, text selections, URLs, and even between Macs with Universal Control.

When you save a file, the dialog that appears allows you to choose the name and location of the new file. There's a lot of hidden functionality in the File Save dialog that youc an use to improve your productivity.

If you have a file you need to open often it could be worth it to set up a special quick way to access that file. Here are 10 suggestions for super fast access to one or more important files.

You can use the Terminal to list files and folders, restrict the lists to only large files and folders, and also just show the ones that use the most space.

Merging two folders can seem difficult or impossible until you learn this trick. While it is easy to drag and drop new files into an existing folder, you'll need to decide which ones to keep and which to replace on a file-by-file basis. However, a hidden feature of the macOS Finder lets you merge the files in folders, keeping the newest versions.

If your hard disk is full and you need to clear out some space fast, here are 20 places to look. In macOS Monterey you can use the Storage Manager to clear out a lot of unneeded files, plus I'll show you some places to look in your Library folder, Applications, Photos, Documents, iCloud and more.

The search feature in macOS is very deep, including the ability to search metadata in media files, dimensions of images, fonts used, file origins, and much more.

The Go To Folder function in the Mac Finder got a face lift in macOS Monterey. Go To Folder makes it easy to navigate in Finder windows using only your keyboard with some knowledge of your folder structure.

Starting with macOS Monterey, you can now bring up the path bar temporarily using the Option key. You can also click it to view sibling folders and use the context menu to access other functions.