The Mac OS X Finder allows you to ignore the way the filesystem is structured at the command-line level and look at it in a variety of ways that are more relevant to everyday tasks. By selecting one of the items in the Sidebar (shown in Figure 3-4), the view to the right of the Sidebar changes to reveal that folder’s contents, or specific details about a selected file.
The most useful feature about this tool in the Finder is that it gives you quick access to your Home folder (which is usually the center of activity on your computer), or to any other folder that you place in the Sidebar. You can even place a Desktop Printer (discussed in Chapter 10) in the Sidebar, for quick access to its drag-and-drop functionality.
All the files, applications, preferences, and resources that are yours and yours alone are located within your Home folder. This is where you should make all your modifications and additions. If you are an old-school Mac OS 9 user, this is where you should feel like customizing your system. And, even better, if you play by the rules, you’ll be able to move to a new machine simply by copying your Home folder.
The folders you’ll find inside your Home folder are:
Contains all the files and folders that appear on the Mac OS X desktop for the user.
Intended to contain your documents. Of course, you can save your documents anywhere in your Home folder, but this is the recommended location. It is also the default location that will be proposed for you when you save a document from an application.
Contains application- and user-specific resources that belong to a single user only. This allows you to have fonts on the system that nobody else can use. It also allows your applications to save your preferences separate from those of other users.
Intended to contain your movies. This is where iMovie creates its project files.
Intended to contain your music. This folder is where iTunes keeps its datafiles as well as your MP3 and AAC files. It is also the default save location for GarageBand audio projects.
Intended to contain your digital photographs. iPhoto keeps its data here—including photos you upload from a camera.
Intended to contain the files that you are willing to share with other users, either on the same machine or across the network.
Intended to hold your personal web site, which can be served by Mac OS X’s built-in web server. When personal web sharing is turned on, these documents can be accessed by passing a path of the pattern ~username
. For example, a user with the username norman
could access these documents from his machine with the URL http://localhost/~norman/. Even if you don’t run a web server on the public Internet, this is a handy way to publish files to other people on the network.
Unlike the base of the filesystem, the command-line view of the Home folder looks pretty much the same as what you see in the Finder. The only difference is, using the command line, you can see the hidden “dot” files that you can’t (by default) see in the Finder, as shown in Example 3-3.
Example 3-3. The command-line view of the Home folder
$ ls -a
. Documents Pictures
.. Library Public
.CFUserTextEncoding Movies Recycled
Desktop Music Sites
These dot files are either self-explanatory or are files that you usually don’t need to worry about. The one thing you should notice is the ~
symbol when you first open a Terminal window. This symbol is shorthand for your Home directory. From anywhere on the system, you can construct a path using the ~
symbol, and the operating system will automatically use the full path to your Home directory.