You’re now ready to take a closer look at Mac OS X and its operation as we focus on the Finder. The Finder is the application that Mac OS X uses to launch and manipulate files and applications. Unlike other tools and utilities that you activate, the Finder starts immediately after you log in to the system and is always active. In addition to helping you locate your files, the Finder handles all common tasks, such as creating, deleting, moving, and copying files and folders, which we’ll talk about in Chapter 4, “Working with Windows Folders, Files, and Applications.”)
You can interact with the Finder in several different ways. There’s a menu bar for the Finder, but there’s also the Finder window, which has several different modes and view options. The Finder window is perhaps the easiest way to understand and move through the Mac OS X file system, so let’s look at it first.
To help people manage their files, the Finder includes a specialized window, which is accessed by double-clicking the icon for the Mac OS X hard drive on the desktop.
Mac OS X introduces two modes of operation in the Finder window. In the first of the two window modes, shown in Figure 2.1, a sidebar appears along the left, and a toolbar appears at the top. Content area takes up the rest of the window. In this mode, which we’ll call the toolbar mode, double-clicking a folder displays its contents in the content area of the current window, replacing what was there before.
The second mode, a toolbar-less version of the Finder window, can be entered by clicking the Hide/Show toolbar button in the upper-right corner of the Finder window. In this mode, shown in Figure 2.2, double-clicking folders opens additional windows to display their contents while leaving the original window as it was.
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At the top of the toolbar-less version of the Finder window is the status bar, which shows the number of items in a folder and the amount of space available on the drive. The status bar can be toggled on and off by using the Show/Hide Status Bar command in the Finder’s View menu.
The toolbar version of the Finder window provides several useful controls for viewing and navigating your files.
In the upper-left corner of the toolbar is the Back arrow—click it to return to the previous folder. Using this technique, you can dig many levels deep into the file system and then quickly back out by using this button. The Forward arrow enables you to follow the same path back to inner levels.
By default, there are several other elements in the toolbar, as shown previously in Figure 2.1. From left to right, you see the View selector, the Action pop-up menu, and the Search text entry field. We talk more about using the Finder to find files in the section “Performing File and Content Searches” later in this chapter.
You can customize your Finder toolbar by adding other predefined Mac OS X shortcuts or by removing the default items in this way:
Choose View, Customize Toolbar from the menu.
From the sheet window containing all the available shortcuts (shown in Figure 2.3), locate the items you want to add.
Add a shortcut by dragging it from the window to wherever you want it to appear on the toolbar.
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When you modify your toolbar, it’s modified for all Finder windows in your workspace, not just the currently open folder. However, the changes that you make to your toolbar don’t affect other user accounts on the same computer.
While the Customize Toolbar sheet window is visible, you can also rearrange or remove any toolbar shortcuts. To rearrange, simply drag a shortcut to a new location—the others will move aside. To remove, drag the shortcut icon outside the toolbar area. It disappears with a whoosh and a puff of smoke.
Now that you’ve seen the Finder window, let’s explore the Finder’s file system.
After you double-click the icon for your Mac OS X drive, you see a collection of permanent folders, as shown previously in Figure 2.1. These folders contain preinstalled applications, utilities, and configuration files for your system, known collectively as system folders. You cannot modify these system-level directories or move them from their default locations. However, you can create folders and files within these locations.
The following list describes the folders at this level, which are the starting point for accessing most of your system’s functions:
Applications—. Contains all the preinstalled Mac OS X applications, such as iTunes, Mail, Safari, and many others. Within the Applications folder is the Utilities folder, which contains the tools necessary to set up your printers, calibrate your display, and other important (if sometimes unglamorous) tasks.
Library—. Although it doesn’t have a strict definition, Library mostly stores systemwide application preferences, application libraries, and information that should be available to anyone using the computer. Some of the folders in Library are used by applications to store data such as preferences, whereas others hold printer drivers or other system additions made by the user.
System—. Next on the list is the Mac OS X System folder. By default, the System folder contains only a folder called Library—a more specific version of the other Library folder. Within the System’s Library folder are the components that make up the core of the Mac OS X experience. These files and folders shouldn’t be changed unless you’re aware that any modifications you make could cause your computer not to start up or otherwise operate as expected.
Users—. As mentioned in Chapter 1, “Introducing Mac OS X,” Mac OS X is a true multiuser operating system in which each user has a private account and password to access the operating system. The Users folder contains the home directories of all the users on the machine. (We’ll talk about “home” directories next.)
Let’s take a closer look at the Users directory, where folders are created for use by each individual user on your system. Figure 2.4 shows the Users folder in List view for a system with three users: robyn, jray, and coco.
Your home folder can be considered your workplace. It’s yours alone because most of the files and folders stored there are protected from other users. Even though you can see the folders for every user, you can access only the Public and Sites folders in another user’s home folder. (Chapter 33, “Sharing Your Computer with Multiple Users,” further discusses setting up additional user accounts.)
Your home directory, as shown in Figure 2.5, is the start of your personal area on Mac OS X. There, you can save your own files, and no one can alter or read them.
Your home directory is named with the short name you chose when you created your Mac OS X user account. Several default folders are created inside your home directory. Those folders and their purposes are as follows:
Desktop—. Contains all the files, folders, and applications that you’ve saved to your desktop.
Documents, Movies, Music, and Pictures—. These four folders are generic store-all locations for files of these kinds. You don’t have to use these folders; they’re merely recommended storage locations to help you organize your files. (Applications such as iPhoto, iTunes, and iMovie store their files in the appropriate folders by default.)
Library—. Serves the same purpose as the top-level Library folder and the Library folder in the System folder, except what is stored there is available for your use only. Within the subfolders in this folder, you can store fonts, screensavers, and many other extensions to the operating system—especially those you don’t want to share with other users of the computer.
Public—. Provides a way for you to share files with other users on your computer without granting total access. Also, if you plan to share your files over a network, you can do so by placing them in the Public folder and activating file sharing in the Sharing System Preferences panel. This is discussed further in Chapter 33.
Sites—. If you want to run a personal Web site, it must be stored in the Sites folder. To share your site with the outside world, you also have to enable Personal Web Sharing, which we discuss in Chapter 33 and Chapter 34, “Sharing Files and Running Network Services.”
Although folders for different file types exist by default, you can do nearly anything you want with your home folder. The only folders that should treated with caution are the Desktop and Library folders. They are critical to system operation and must not be renamed or removed. (Also, you shouldn’t remove any of the items in the Library folder unless you put them there to start with.)
Now that you’ve seen the file structure, let’s take a look at the default items in the sidebar along the left side of the toolbar version of the Finder window, as shown previously in Figure 2.5.
Although you can choose to display your computer’s hard drive on the desktop, it is also visible in the top portion of the sidebar. Any additional FireWire or USB drives (and other types of removable media, including CDs) currently recognized by the system will also appear.
In the bottom portion of the sidebar are icons for the home directory of the current user, the applications folder, and several folders within the current user’s home directory.
Clicking any drive or folder in the sidebar fills the content space of the Finder window with a view of the files it contains.
Just as you can customize the toolbar, you also can add your own shortcuts to favorite folders, files, and applications by adding them to the sidebar.
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If you want to change the width of the content area or the sidebar, you can click and drag the narrow strip separating the two areas. Double-clicking the strip toggles the sidebar open and closed.
When folders and applications are added to the sidebar, a single click on the icon opens or launches the selected item. You can also drag documents onto an application icon or folder icon in the toolbar to open the file by using the application or to move the file into a folder.
To add something to the sidebar, locate the item’s icon and drag it to the list. A blue insert bar appears, as shown in Figure 2.6, to show you where the file will be added. If you drag an item onto an existing folder or storage device (including your hard drive) in the sidebar, that folder will be outlined in blue, as shown in Figure 2.7, to let you know the item you are dragging will be placed inside it.
In addition to the options to switch between the toolbar and toolbar-less versions of the Finder window, there are other display options from the Finder window. Three View buttons in the toolbar enable you control the way information is displayed in the Finder window.
The first time you log in, the Finder is in toolbar mode and using Icon view. If you’ve already been using the Finder and are no longer in Icon view, you can quickly switch to Icon view by choosing As Icons from the menu or by clicking the first of the View buttons in the toolbar. (Refer to Figure 2.5 to see the Finder window in Icon view.) In Icon view mode, you navigate through the folders on your drive by double-clicking them.
The next view to explore is the Finder’s List view. You can switch to List view by clicking the middle button in the Finder’s View selector or, if the toolbar isn’t present, by choosing View, As List from the Finder’s menu. Demonstrated in Figure 2.8, the List view is a straightforward means of displaying all available information about a file or folder in tabular form.
The columns in the List view represent the attributes for each file. Clicking a column highlights it and sorts the file listing based on that column’s values. For example, if you want to locate the most recent files in a folder, you can view the folder contents in List view and click the Date Modified header. By default, the column values are listed in descending order. Clicking a column header again reverses the sorting order. An arrow pointing up or down at the right of each column indicates the current sort order.
You can change the width of the columns by placing the mouse cursor at the edge of the column and click-dragging to the left or right. You can reposition the columns by clicking and dragging them into the order you want. However, the first column, Name, cannot be repositioned.
When a folder appears in the file listing, a small disclosure triangle precedes its name. Clicking the triangle reveals the file hierarchy within that folder. As with Icon view, double-clicking a folder in this view either opens a new window (if you’re in toolbar-less mode) or refreshes the contents of the existing window with the contents of the selected folder. (Double-clicking applications or files opens them in any view.)
Unlike other views, which can either overwhelm you with information or require multiple windows to move easily from point to point, the Column view is designed with one thing in mind: ease of navigation.
The concept is simple: Click an item in the first column of the content area, and its contents are shown in the next column. Click a folder in this new column, and its contents are shown in the next column, and so on. Figure 2.9 shows a multicolumn display that reaches down two levels.
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If you use the horizontal scrollbar to move back along a path, the folders you’ve chosen remain highlighted in the columns. You can, at any time, choose a different folder from any of the columns. This refreshes the column to the right of your choice. There’s no need to start from the beginning every time you want to change your location.
One big bonus of using Column view is the ability to instantly see the contents of a file without opening it. If you choose a file or application, a preview or description of the selected item appears in the column to the right. For an example, take a look at the far right column in Figure 2.9, where a representation of an image file is displayed. When you choose an application or a file that cannot be previewed, only information about the file is displayed, such as the creation/modification dates, size, and version.
For each of the three Finder window views, there are additional settings that you can customize by choosing View, Show View Options from the menu. For Icon and List views, you can also choose whether your changes apply to the current window only or to all Finder windows.
For Icon view, you can scale icons from the smallest to largest size by dragging the Icon Size slider from the left to the right. You can choose how the icon is labeled, including the font size and label placement. You can set how the icons are arranged and what color the window background is.
List view enables you to choose small or larger icons, text size, and which columns of information to display with the filenames. You can also choose to show relative dates, such as “Today” and “Yesterday,” or to calculate the sizes of all files. (Be warned, however, that calculating files sizes does consume some system resources.)
Column view gives you options for text size and whether to show icons or the preview column. There are no global settings for this view.
Now that you understand how to navigate within the Finder window and alter your view options, let’s move on to exploring the desktop. (We’ll save discussion of the Action pop-up menu that appears in the Finder window toolbar until Chapter 4.)
The desktop is, for all intents and purposes, a global Finder window that sits behind all the other windows on the system. The primary difference between the desktop and the other window modes we’ve discussed is that the desktop is always in Icon view mode.
As with other Finder windows, the desktop layout is controlled by the View Options in the View menu. Use the Icon Size slider, text, and arrangement settings exactly as you would adjust any other window in Icon view mode.
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You can change the background image of your desktop in the Desktop & Screen Saver pane of System Preferences. There you’ll find many background images from which to choose, and you can even add images of your own!
Besides being a window-like object that displays icons, the desktop is also your workspace. As you open Finder and application windows, they cover the desktop; as you open more and more windows, they cover each other. To help you find buried windows, or even just focus your attention, Apple has introduced a feature called Exposé, which rearranges and resizes the windows currently open so that you can see them all at one time, as demonstrated in Figure 2.10. From this view of open windows and applications, you can then choose what you want to work on.
You set up Exposé from the System Preferences pane shown in Figure 2.11. There you can choose what activates the various states of Exposé. Those states are
All Windows—. Displays all open windows, as shown previously in Figure 2.10. You can then move your mouse cursor over the window you want to bring to the front and select it. The other windows on the desktop will reappear in their original locations behind it.
Application Windows—. Displays all open windows for the application that’s currently active and dims the rest of the desktop. When you select a window, it appears in front of all the other windows for that application.
Desktop—. Moves all open windows aside to reveal the desktop. You can open Finder windows to locate files or applications you want to launch, and Exposé maintains its state. If you double-click a file or application to open it, the file or application window opens, and the other windows on the desktop reappear in their original locations behind it.
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You can also temporarily de-clutter a busy workspace by choosing either Hide [current application] or Hide Others from most application menus, but availability of this feature is at the discretion of each application’s developer.
If you would prefer using keyboard commands to activate Exposé, you can set those options instead. (Or even set both screen corners and keyboard options.)
The Finder Preferences can be used to adjust settings that control how you interact with your desktop and icons. Open these settings by choosing Preferences from the Finder application menu. Figure 2.12 shows the options available in the General pane of the Finder preferences.
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You can change the appearance of Finder windows, and systemwide elements, from the Appearance pane of the System Preferences. There, you can choose the color of highlighted items and the interface elements (as discussed in Chapter 1).
Among the General preference settings are whether to display icons for the hard drive, removable media, or connected servers on the desktop and the default content displayed by new Finder windows. Spring-loading is the desktop behavior that occurs when you drag a file or folder on top of another folder and it springs open to let the dragged item move inside and then closes again to return the desktop to its previous state.
The Label settings relate to a feature discussed in Chapter 4, so we’ll discuss this pane further in the section “Adding Color Labels” in Chapter 4.
The Sidebar section allows you to choose which items appear in the sidebar of the Finder window while it is in toolbar mode. Check and uncheck the boxes in front of the options, which include computer, hard disks, network, removable media, desktop, and applications.
The Advanced section pertains to a variety of Finder features and functions. You can set whether to show file extensions. Traditionally, Mac users have paid little attention to whether a filename ends in .doc or .txt, but Windows users are used to seeing these extensions. (That’s because the Windows operating system uses these extensions when determining which application can open a given file; Macs, on the other hand, rely on hidden information stored in the file itself to make that determination.) Checking this option reveals file extensions.
The option to show hidden files will make visible files used by your system that normally users don’t know are there. There’s also an option to display a warning that appears when you empty the Trash to give you a second chance to reconsider.
The final option in the Finder’s Advanced preferences allows you to choose the languages of which files to index for file searching. (Indexing is a process of cataloging all the content in a location so that searches can be performed faster.) If you don’t plan to read many documents in other languages, it’s best to limit the checked options to your native language because indexing additional options requires additional time and storage space.
Close the Finder Preferences pane when you’re satisfied with your settings.
In addition to organizing your files, the Finder enables you to search for applications and folders by name, and documents by filename or by content. But the best part is that the search results are interactive. You can launch located programs and applications by double-clicking their icons in the results window. Also, dragging a file or folder to the desktop or a Finder window moves that object to a new location. This is a quick way to clean up when you accidentally save a file to the wrong folder.
An easy way to search for a file by name only is through the Finder window. To do this, open a Finder window by double-clicking the folder or drive containing the file you want to find. Then type your search term in the Search box in the toolbar. Remember, if the toolbar isn’t visible, you can show it by clicking the oblong button at the upper right of the window’s title bar. If the search box isn’t visible, you might have to enlarge your window by dragging from the diagonal lines in the bottom-right corner.
If you want to do a search of file contents or search more than a defined folder, choose File, Find (Command-F) from the menu. Figure 2.13 shows the Find dialog box.
When the screen in Figure 2.13 appears, follow these steps:
Choose where to search. Your options are
Everywhere—. Examines all local and network drives, including user accounts.
Local Disks—. Examines all local drives and all user accounts on them.
Home—. Examines only the home directory of the person currently logged in.
Specific Places—. Displays a list of available drives for you to choose from. You can also click the Add/Remove button to insert or remove specific folders.
Pick whether to search by filename, content, dates created or modified, kind, label, size, file extension, visibility, type, or creator. (Use the + button to add more types of search criteria.) Enter your search term into the appropriate field(s).
Although filename, content, size, and date created or modified are obvious, some of these search criteria require a bit of explanation.
Kind refers to whether the item sought is an application, folder, document, audio file, image, movie, or an alias (or shortcut) to a real file.
Label refers to a color-coding system you can apply to your files to help you organize and prioritize them. (We’ll discuss labels further in Chapter 4.
Extension, as you’ll recall from earlier in the chapter, refers to an ending added to filenames to identify their file type (such as .JPG or .PDF) or the program that created the file (such as .PSD for PhotoShop Document, as created by Adobe PhotoShop).
Visibility may seem like a strange option—you probably don’t know of any invisible files on your system. However, as you learned in Chapter 1, Mac OS X is a Unix-based system, and under Unix (and many other operating systems) files meant to be used by the system alone may not be visible under normal circumstances.
Creator is a somewhat more advanced option. Previously, you learned that file extensions are used by some operating systems, such as Windows, to identify which files go to which applications. However, Macintosh systems have always stored that information as hidden data in a document. The Creator criterion lets users search the data about the application that made a document. Note that special codes are used, so this field only holds four characters. (You can find Microsoft Word documents by typing MSWD.)
Type, like Creator, is an advanced option that searches a file’s hidden data about the kind of file, such as text or image.
If you want to refine your search further, add further search criteria by clicking the + button. (To remove an unwanted search criterion, click the − button.)
Click the Search button to start the search.
In a few moments, the search results are displayed, as shown in Figure 2.14. For each result, Find lists the filename, the parent folder that contains it, the date it was modified, its size, and the kind of file it is. After an item is highlighted, the path required to reach it on your hard drive is shown at the bottom of the window. (You can drag the divider line up or down to show a large or an abbreviated path map.) Double-clicking any portion of the path opens the file, folder, or application.
We’ve talked about the Finder window, but there’s also a Finder menu bar, which provides access to a range of features. Some of those features are standard and shouldn’t require much description. The standard features include options in the Edit menu to Undo/Redo, Copy, Paste, and Select All and an option in the Window menu to access all open Finder windows.
Some menu bar options offer other ways to perform actions that we’ve already discussed. For example, several of the View options duplicate settings in the Finder window toolbar. We’ll cover some of the unique options in the following sections.
The options in the File menu mostly have to do with creating, opening, duplicating, and getting information about an item. We’ll talk about these in Chapter 4.
The Find function, discussed earlier, is also accessed from the File menu.
However, there is an unexpected, and useful, feature in the Finder File menu—Burn Disc.
Mac OS X makes writing a CD similar to moving files to any other storage device. To make the process as simple as possible, Mac OS X stores applications, files, and folders that you want to write to CD in a special folder until you tell the system to burn the CD. Files are transferred to the CD only after the burn starts.
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To choose File, Burn Disc from the menu, the active Finder window must be the CD’s window. If the CD is not the active window, the menu item will be disabled.
These are the steps to write your own data CD using the Finder:
Insert a blank CD into the CD writer. The Mac OS X Finder prompts you to prepare the CD, as shown in Figure 2.15. (This doesn’t actually write anything to the CD yet, but it tells the computer what your intentions are for the disc.)
Choose the Open Finder option from the Action pop-up menu. (We talk about burning from iTunes in Chapter 22, “Using iTunes.”)
Enter a name for the CD you’re writing. The disc appears with this name on the desktop.
Click OK to start using the CD on your system. An icon representing the CD appears on your desktop. At this point, you can interact with it as you would any other folder or storage device under Mac OS X. You can copy files to it, delete files, and so on.
When you create the CD layout you like, you can start the burn process by choosing File, Burn Disc from the menu (or by clicking the Burn toolbar shortcut if you’ve added it). In addition, dragging the CD to the Trash also prompts burning to begin. This process takes a few minutes and is tracked by the Finder much like a normal Copy operation.
If you decide against writing the CD, you can choose File, Eject from the menu and then click the Eject button in the CD burning dialog box to remove the media and erase the CD layout you created.
If you want to navigate quickly to several commonly used folders or drives, you can use the folder shortcuts in the Go menu. This menu enables you to jump to one of several predefined locations. These options are the same ones that can be set in the Finder window’s sidebar.
The Go menu also enables you to manually enter the name of a directory to browse. This quick-navigation option is the Go to Folder dialog box (Shift-Command-G). Here, you can tell the Finder where you want to be, based on the pathname you enter. Figure 2.16 shows the Go To Folder dialog box.
You can type any folder pathname in the Go to the Folder field. Folder names are separated by the / character (think of a pathname as being similar to a Web URL). For example, if you want to open the Documents folder in your home directory, you would type the following:
/Users/[your Home directory name]/Documents
Also in the Go menu is the option Connect to Server for connecting to remote computers, which we discuss in Chapter 34.
The Mac OS X Finder is a powerful tool for managing your files and folders. It offers a high degree of customization to help you work efficiently. In addition to the expected file search capabilities, the Finder also provides some special functions, including CD burning, that make it more than just a filing system.