Tour De Finder: A Quick Guide to the Mac OS X Finder

In Windows you have Explorer, which allows you to navigate through your files. In Mac OS X, you have the Finder. The Finder is one of the hidden jewels of OS X, especially in Leopard - now it's not perfect and definitely has its shortcomings, but it takes file browsing to a whole new level and puts lots of information right at your fingertips.

First, let's take a look at your basic Finder window:

Let's start at the top of the window. On the top left you'll find the "stoplight" buttons. Red to close the window, yellow to minimize the window to the Dock and green to expand the window (not exactly the same as maximize in Windows - try it and see). Just below those are the forward/back buttons for navigation (just like a web browser). To the right at the very top you'll either have the name of the location you're currently in or you'll have the full path to the location you're currently in.

Just below that is the toolbar; you can customize this area by control-clicking (or right-clicking) on the toolbar and select "Customize Toolbar..." Buttons that you can add to the Toolbar include icon view changers, adding/deleting folders, burning items to disc, moving up in the folder hierarchy, activating Quick Look and others. On the far right, there is a small oblong button that hides all the elements of the window except the title bar and the actual contents of the window. Below that is a search box for performing Spotlight searches on your current folder.

Working our way clockwise, we come to the bottom of the window where we find the Status Bar. This bar gives you instant access to information on the number of items in the current location and your overall free disk space.

On the left side, you'll find the aptly named "Sidebar."

The Sidebar is broken into four sections (three if you're not connected to a network): Devices, Shared (appears automatically with the names of the computers on your local network), Places and Search For.

Devices is where you'll find all the disks, both hardware and disk images, mounted on your computer. USB, Firewire, optical media and disk images show up in this area and (usually) appear with a small eject icon next to them so you can unmount/eject them easily. The exception is your startup disk, which you can't eject, obviously.

Shared will appear when you are on a network with other computers and will show each computer attached to the network. With the proper credentials and configuration, you can mount these computers and browse them like any other disk. One note, occasionally, I've had the Shared section not appear when I'm on a network. At that point I have to relaunch the Finder (Command-Option-Esc, select Finder and hit Relaunch) in order to make it appear. This hasn't happened often, but it has happened.

Places is a customizable section where you can drag folders, files and applications for quick access. It rather functions as a "mini Dock," allowing you to "pin" items to it; simply click and drag something off the Sidebar and it disappears into a poof of smoke, just like the Dock.

Lastly, the Sidebar contains the "Search For" menu, where you can do a quick search for pictures, movies and documents as well as everything you accessed today, yesterday and the past week. While I don't use it real often, it has proven very handy when I'm looking for something I opened a few days ago but can't remember what it was.

In Windows you can right-click a file and hit "Properties" to pull up detailed information on the file. The Finder has a similar function called "Get Info" that can be pulled up from the context menu (control-click or right-click) or by selecting a file and hitting Command-I. This brings up an info panel that is far more extensive than Properties in Windows. The info panel for a file contains the following sections:

Icon & Name - At the very top is the name of the file and its icon. This section is worth mentioning because it is one of the free ways to change the icon of a file or folder. All you do is Command-C (to copy) an image from another info window or from an image file on your computer, then select the icon in this section (a blue highlight appears around it) and Command-V to paste that image and replace the default icon for that file. Pretty sneaky, huh? For more sweeping changes, you should get a program like CandyBar.

Spotlight Comments - You can add your own notes to the file to make it easier for Spotlight to find.

General - You can find info on file location, size, date created, date modified; you can change the label color and lock the file from this section as well.

More Info - Gives you information on title, author, number of pages (for a document), encoding software (for PDFs), color profile (for pictures) and date last opened.

Name & Extension - Here you have the name of the file, which you can change.

Open With - The default program the file opens with, which you can also change just for this file or for all files of this type.

Preview - Gives you a thumbnail image a picture or first page of a document

Sharing & Permissions - Here you can see who all has access to the file and, by authenticating through the padlock in the lower right, can change users and permission for the file.

The Finder is more than just Finder windows, though. It's the key piece in a well laid out file management system where multiple programs (like Spotlight and Quicklook) function in concert to provide you with a maximum amount of information both quickly and conveniently.