The New Quick Look Finder Path Bar

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at a new minor feature of the Finder that's actually pretty useful. 

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Now when you're using the Finder, no matter which view you're in, you could have the path of whatever you're looking at or whatever is selected here at the bottom. So, for instance, in List View here I could select a file and I could see the complete path here. Now you probably don't see this path unless you change the default setting. That's in View and then here I've got Hide Path Bar. Normally that would be View, Show Path Bar and you could see without it turned on I don't have the Path Bar there at the bottom. But I could easily turn if On and Off with the keyboard shortcut. It will be around in Icon View, in Column View, even Gallery View has it. 

What's new in macOS Monterey is if you have it turned Off you can actually get it there temporarily by holding the Option key down. So I've selected a File here and let's say I wanted to see the path for that file. I don't want to switch on the Path Bar and then forget to switch it off again. So I'm just going to hold down Option just for a second and then it appears there at the bottom. It will stay there just for a second after I stop holding Option. If I keep Option held down it will stay there so I can take my time to read it. 

Now whether you're using the actual Path Bar or just this temporary view of it there are actually some useful things you can do with it besides just viewing the path. So I will just bring up the temporary one by holding the Option key down. I'll move my cursor down while still holding the Option key. So if will stay there. Now I can add the Shift key and click on any one of these and it will show me sibling folders. So, for instance, inside of Documents I've got Projects. You could see there are sibling folders to that like Personal, Miscellaneous, MacMost. If I click, and remember I've got the Shift key down, I'll see all of the folders that are at that same level. I can select one to jump to it. In fact if I hold the Option key down but then move my cursor over this I can release the Option key and as long as the pointer is over this temporary view here it's not going to go away. So I can now hold Shift and click but you have to release the click for anything to show up. When I click and hold down nothing happens. But release and now I can see all the things at this level here. But it's a little finicky. No matter what I do when I click on the top level here of iCloud Drive it's just going to go to iCloud Drive. That actually works in any of these. If you just click on them it will jump to that level. 

Now if you control click on any of these you get even more options. You get a lot of things you would expect to find in the Context Menu like Open a New Tab, Show in Closing Folder, Get Info. But there are two things that you'll find here that you don't find in other places. Copy as Path Name and Open in Terminal. Opening in Terminal will open a new Terminal window and it will take you right to that folder. In this case the Documents folder. Of course that only works for folders. If I do it here I'm not going to get Open in Terminal because it's not a folder. It's not a location. But I will be able to get to Copy as Path Name. If I paste that somewhere you'll see the path to that folder or file. Note that you don't see Copy as Path Name or Open in Terminal if you Control click on a file. It's not there. Or a folder, it's not there either. That makes the Path Bar for this Option key temporary Path Bar more useful. 

This feature is also available in Open and Save dialogue. So here I am in Pages. Let's go to File, Open here and I can select something. Let's say I want to see the Path to that. I can hold the Option key down and you can see the temporary path will appear here at the bottom. I can Shift click to go to sibling folders. But I can't Control click on these in an Open or Save dialogue. You can do the regular click to jump to that location though. You can see here it will work in the Save dialogue as well. I hold down Option and there these appear with Shift click but no Control click although you can click to just jump to that level.

Those are just new tools to add to your Toolbox for doing things in the Finder and in Open and Save dialogues. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.