Using the Mac Finder Go Menu

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's take a look at the Go Menu in the Finder.

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So it's possible to use the Finder to get to your files without ever having to look at the Go menu. But there is a lot of useful functionality in there. So here I have a Finder window open. I can use the Go menu to change the location of that Finder window to point somewhere else. There are all of these different shortcuts here that allow you to go to different places. 

For instance, if I wanted to go to my Downloads folder I can simply select Downloads and it changes the location of the current Finder window. There's a lot of different locations in here. You've got Documents and Desktop and this is sensitive to whether or not you are using iCloud Drive with Documents and Desktop turned on. If they're not  they are going to take you to the Documents and Desktop folders in your Home folder. If you are using iCloud Drive with this feature then it will take you to those locations in iCloud Drive.

For instance, if I select Desktop here you can see it now has selected the Desktop folder under iCloud Drive. I could also go Home which takes me to the Home folder and in this case, since Documents and Desktop aren't there, they are in iCloud Drive, you don't see them there. But you do see other common folders like Music, Movies, Pictures, etc. You can also go to the main computer level. This takes you to the top which shows you your main hard drive and also any other external hard drives.

You could also go to Network which will show you any Network drives. You can go to AirDrop which will open up the AirDrop window so you're ready to receive something from someone. You can go to your main iCloud Drive level there. So I can see my Desktop folder, my Documents folder but also other specific iCloud Drive folders if you have them. You can jump to your System Applications folder. This is really a variety here of locations because some of these are in your Home folder are related to your user account. Other things, like Applications, will actually take you to the system level applications folder as well as Utilities which takes you to the Utilities folder inside of the Application's folder.

Notice these all have shortcuts. So if there is something here that you need to get to often you can simply memorize the shortcut to get there. You also have access to the Recent's folder. The Recent folder isn't really a location on your drive. It's basically a search that's returning results showing the most recent files that you've accessed. Notice I have it under Favorites here as well. Sometimes you can turn that Off. You can go to Finder, Preferences, and under Sidebar,  you can Turn Off Recent. But that doesn't mean that you can't access it using the Go menu of that keyboard shortcut.

Now there's something that's missing from here that you can actually add by using the Option key. Hold down the Option key and your User Library Folder appears. So this isn't the system library folder but your User Library Folder and you can go there. So if you're ever told that you need to access something in your User Library Folder, Go with the Option key is a quick way to get there.

At the top of this menu we've got Back and Forward which have keyboard shortcuts for Command and then the square brackets. You can use this like a browser window.  You can keep going back or you can go forward through the locations that you were looking at in the Finder. You can also go to Enclosing Folder. So, for instance, here if I were to go to my Documents folder I could go to enclosing folder to go up a level, in this case iCloud Drive. So you can do that at any level. I can go to Documents and then into Projects and then I could do Go and Enclosing Folder, or Command Up Arrow to just keep going up the hierarchy.

Now note if you don't have a Finder window open what happens when you choose one of these is that it opens the Finder window. So, Go Documents will open up a Finder window. That only happens if you don't have an existing window open. Otherwise if you've got a bunch of Finder windows open using Go will take you to that location in the current Finder window.

Now you also have a Recent Folder submenu here so you can jump to the last ten places that you were at. Then you have something that's a favorite of a lot of pro users. They love this shortcut. Go to Folder, or Shift Command G. This brings up a little field that you could type in and select any location on your drive to go to. So in this case it shows the last thing that was there. I can hit Go and it jumps there. You can use Shift Command G and quickly access this and then start typing right away. Most of the time you're going to want to access something that's in your Home folder. In that case you don't have to type User/ and then your Home folder name. You could do tilde, which on US keyboards is the Shift key and the key right above the tab. Then slash and then put the name of the folder. ~/ then put the name of the folder. So if I wanted to go to pictures, for instance, I could also go that way.

You also have a list here of recent folders that you've gone to so it's really easy. If you wanted to dive into a folder that's in the current folder that you are at, so for instance if I'm in Documents and I want to go into the Samples folder here I can do Shift Command G and I can type samples and it will go down into the Samples folder. You also have the ability to Connect to Server, Command K, which allows you to type a server address and using a prefix, like vnc for screen sharing, then you could also just hit Browse right there to jump to browsing the network.

One final trick if you use the Go menu and you hold the Shift key down you'll notice Enclosing Folder changes to Select Startup Disk. Shift Command and then Up Arrow is the shortcut for that. So this will take me, in this case, to the Mackintosh hard drive. So it's basically the same thing as going to Computer and then choosing your startup disk, but in this case it chooses the startup disk right away.