More about the Finder

When you are in the Finder, one great way of personalising your Mac is through the Finder Preferences. As is the case with all applications, go to Finder > Preferences to access them and you will see a window like the one above.

The General tab: Here you can adjust the way you would like your computer to work for your own personal comfort. You can choose to show or hide connected removable disks and servers, where you would like new finder windows to open from (i.e. Macintosh HD, Home Folder or any folder of your choice).

Choosing the Open folders in a new window option is, for me at least, a more efficient way to work, and Spring-loaded folders cause folders to open automatically when you hold a file or folder over them.

Labels: Here you can name your Labels as required.

Sidebar: Here you can choose what and what does not appear in the sidebar of each opened window.       In OS X 10.5 “Leopard” these items items are nicely grouped into Devices, Shared, Places and Searches.

Clicking the Advanced tab gives you some more advanced preferences such as showing file extensions (a little bit to “PC” for me), showing or hiding a couple of warnings and a secure trash option. Choosing the      

last option makes deleted items much harder to retrieve, but this can take some time especially if you have a large quantity or large items in the trash and is not really recommended.