My MacOS X

When tabs finally found their way into Web browsers some years ago, people immediately fell in love with them. In fact, most people wonder how someone could live without them. With Apple’s love for a minimalist interface, you have to wonder why we still don’t have them on the desktop. Whatever the reason, we’ve been left to wait for a third-party solution.

Thankfully, a creative and persistent developer has finally figured out a way to add them into Mac OS X’s Finder without completely replacing the look, feel and functionality of the Finder in the process.

TotalFinder, a SIMBL application by BinaryAge adds elegant tabs, borrowed from Google Chrome, to Mac OS X’s Finder windows. The tabs look, feel and act like tabs in your Web browser for the most part. Along with the tabbed windows (seen above in the screenshot), TotalFinder also adds a few other really cool features.

Though you can drag and drop items between tabs, you can also hit Command + U or double-click a tab while holding the Option key down to merge two adjacent tabs into a sort of dual-pane window. As you can see in the screenshot below, the dual-pane window shows both tabs in the same window, including the sidebar on each side.

Another really handy feature is the ability to invoke, via a keyboard shortcut, a window that glides up from the bottom of your screen, called the Visor. The Finder window fills the entire width of your monitor and about one-third the height. You can quickly hide the window with the same shortcut (double tapping the option key, by default). BinaryAge borrowed this idea from Visor, their app which pops open a Terminal window with a keyboard shortcut.

I found the Visor window feature to be somewhat annoying for me, but other users may love it.

TotalFinder doesn’t stop there with the features. You can also set TotalFinder to place folders at the top in list view, stop creation of .DS_Store files, and show invisible files in the Finder. All of TotalFinder’s preferences can be accessed in the Finder Preferences window by hitting Command + , while in the Finder.

TotalFinder is still in Alpha stage, but I’ve found it perfectly usable – experiencing no adverse behavior at all. The developer plans on charging for the app eventually, but until it’s 1.0 release, TotalFinder is free of charge. Considering how long it took Apple to add virtual desktops (called Spaces in OS X), this may be the only way to add tabs to Finder windows for a very long time.

Added from: the graphic mac

If Finder is misbehaving you probably think you need to restart your computer. Usually you can fix the problem by relaunching Finder itself. This saves a lot of time since the relaunch only takes seconds to do.

Here 4 ways for relaunching Finder in Snow Leopard

Relaunching with Dock

This is probably the fastest way to relaunch Finder.

1. Hold down control-option and click on the Finder icon stuck onto Dock
2. Choose Relaunch option from appearing contextual menu
3. Finder should be relaunched by then

Relaunching with Terminal

As usual, Terminal lends us a great help in relaunching Finder.

1. Open Terminal
2. Execute command line

   killall Finder
   

3. Finder will be quitted and relaunched after a while

Relaunching with Force Quit Pane

We can use force quit pane to quit any running applications, including relaunching Finder (we can quit Finder).

1. Hit command-option-escape to open Force Quit Pane
2. Select Finder
3. Click on Relaunch button

Relaunching with Quicksilver

Besides using Quicksilver as applications launcher, we can also use it to relaunch applications. This relaunch feature is also applicable to Finder.

1. Download Quicksilver and launch it
2. On the application box type Finder and type Relaunch on action box
3. Hit return key to execute
4. Your Finder should be relaunched by now

The fastest way to browse your directories in OS X is clearly the column view that you access by pressing “Command + 3“.

You probably know that if you double-click the icon at the bottom of a column, it will “right size” that column, so you can see the entire file name.

If you “Option-double-click” that icon, then all columns will be “right sized” to the maximum width necessary to display the longest item in the column.

If you want to change all of them press “Alt” while resizing. This will not only resize all columns at once, but also makes the new width the default setting for all windows.

In 10.5, Apple apparently felt these shortcuts were too hidden; there’s now a contextual menu hiding under the column resize widget, too. Just “control-click” on it, and three choices will appear:

Hopefully someday Apple will figure out how to get the “right size all columns” feature into the Finder, where it would be truly useful. Until then, though, at least it works in the Open and Save dialogs

You can reveal the location of a recently-used item by holding down the Command key while looking at the Apple menu’s Recent Items menu. With the Command key held down, the wording of the menu items (for Applications and Documents) changes from some item to Show “some item” in Finder.

source: osxdaily