TL;DR This is only the begin­ning. I pre­pared a whole bunch of useful macOS thin­gies and will pub­lish them in the near future. Follow me to stay updated.

A week ago or two I helped a friend set­ting up his new Mac and get a web-devel­op­ment envi­ron­ment up and run­ning. During this tedious process he noticed how fast I was able to manage some simple every­day sce­nar­ios within macOS. Of course I wanted to share every­thing with him which became quite over­whelm­ing very quickly. You simply can’t remem­ber more than three short­cuts at once with­out repeat­edly using them by your own. At least I can’t. That’s why I decided to start this little series to col­lect some useful little bits, share them with the world, and maybe learn some new ones in the com­ments below. To keep things simple my first post will only cover the Finder which is the default file man­ager of macOS since its begin­ning. But there is a lot more in the making so follow me on Twit­ter if you think you could get more work done in less time. ⚡️

0.1

Spe­cial Keys

Apple has been incred­i­bly incon­sis­tent with its key­board layout in the last decade espe­cially when it comes to naming and iconog­ra­phy of some spe­cial keys. So to clear things up:

1

Resize columns auto­mat­i­cally

Have you ever switched to columns-view in Finder ⌘+3 and your columns were either totally huge or way to small? There is a simple fix: Just double-click the sep­a­ra­tor line to the right and the column will set its size to the largest item in the list.

2

Fullscreen Quick­Look & Index Sheet

One thing I miss hardly when play­ing around with Win­dows is get­ting a quick overview of a files con­tent with­out having to open it. In my opin­ion that’s one of Find­ers core strengths. Simply invoke Quick­Look for the cur­rently selected item by press­ing Space and even nav­i­gate around with your Arrow Keys. A nice addi­tion is its dis­trac­tion-free fullscreen mode which only requires you to hold ⌥ while press­ing Space.
In either mode you can:

• Press and hold ⌥ to tem­porar­ily zoom to around 150%. 
• Click the little grid-icon to open a so called Index Sheet where you see all your items at once. I often use this to quickly com­pare two ver­sions of an image.

3

Quick­Look Exten­sions

Quick­Look is nice but it has some lim­i­ta­tions when it comes to some more advanced file-types like Mark­down, WebP, JSON or even CSV. By exe­cut­ing the fol­low­ing com­mand in your Ter­mi­nal all of this becomes a part of the past.

brew cask install qlcolorcode qlstephen qlmarkdown quicklook-json qlprettypatch quicklook-csv betterzipql qlimagesize webpquicklook suspicious-package quicklookase qlvideo

For more infor­ma­tion see this GitHub page.

4

Quickly show Dock items in the Finder

This is a short one. You can’t decide between stack-, grid-, or list-mode of the fold­ers (most likely Down­loads) in your Dock or like none of these like I do? Simply ⌘+Click on them to instantly show them in the Finder. This works with appli­ca­tions too.

5

Keep fold­ers on top when sort­ing by name

Since macOS Sierra 10.12 you can go to Find­ers set­tings and tick the very last check­box in the very last tab named Keep fold­ers on top when sort­ing by name. Simple but a mas­sive time-saver which should be enabled by default.

6

Go to Folder

This little text-field you invoke by press­ing ⌘+⇧+G (or man­u­ally in the menu bar) seems rather boring but it fea­tures the same ⇥ auto-com­ple­tion as your Ter­mi­nal which comes in handy. By the way: In macOS you can simply abbre­vi­ate your home direc­tory (e.g. /Users/wottpal/) with a tilde ~.

7

Tabs

Finder has tabs for a long time which is nice if you don’t want your desk­top to be clut­tered with dozens of win­dows. But there are some things to keep in mind if you want to effec­tively work with them. Since macOS Sierra you can enable Open fold­ers in tabs instead of new win­dows in your Find­ers set­tings which I highly rec­om­mend. And if you spread your apps between mul­ti­ple Desk­tops but only want one instance of Finder run­ning on all of them make sure to right click on Find­ers icon and check Assign to all Desk­tops. This can be done with every appli­ca­tion in your Dock.

If you actu­ally work in Finder and want to open a direc­tory in a new tab there are mul­ti­ple ways to do that:

• Just open a new tab with ⌘+T at your default Finder loca­tion which can be set up in the set­tings as well.
• ⌘+Double-click on any folder or ⌘+Click on a side­bar item.
• Right click and chose Open in New Tab
• Drag the folder onto the plus-icon in the tab bar in the upper right. If you can’t see the tab bar per­ma­nently enable it with ⌘+⇧+T.

Other useful short­cuts to handle tabs are (almost) iden­ti­cal with Safari: Close the cur­rent tab with ⌘+W. Nav­i­gate between them with ⌃+⇥ and ⇧+⌃+⇥. But one of my most favorite actions in Safari Close Other Tabs doesn’t work and is mapped to Close All Tabs: ⌘+⌥+W. What a sad incon­sis­tency. I already con­tacted Apple about that a year ago but they didn’t respond. 😢

8

Batch Rename

A rather less-known but very pow­er­ful fea­ture is renam­ing a bunch of files at once. While renam­ing a single file can be ini­ti­ated simply by press­ing the return key ↩︎ for mul­ti­ple files it’s nec­es­sary to use a right click. Here you can find a more detailed guide.

9

Get the absolute path

Some­times it can be useful to know the exact path where a file is located. By press­ing ⌥+⌘+P you can toggle Find­ers handy path bar where all parent direc­to­ries are listed like bread­crumbs. You can even inter­act with them via drag and drop or ⌘+Double-click to open a new tab.
But what if you only want the path copied as plain text? Just do a right click on the ele­ment and hold ⌥. Now you can select Copy “…” as Path­name. Et voilà.

10

Create a new folder with all selected files

This is one of my favorite time-savers: Select a bunch of files which you want to move to a new direc­tory and press ⌘+⌃+N. A new folder is cre­ated for you with all of the files already inside.

11

Always open file with… 

You all prob­a­bly know if you want to open a file with any other app than its default you can do this with a right click and Open with ▸. But by hold­ing ⌥ this option in the menu becomes Always open with ▸.

That’s it for now. I’ve already col­lected at least this amount of Finder tips one more time. Follow me if you don’t want to miss them. 💌