Section 2.7. File and Folder Icons | Switching to the Mac[c] The Missing Manual

2.7. File and Folder Icons

Just as in Windows, every document, program, folder, and disk on your Mac is represented by an icon. In Mac OS X, icons look more like photos than cartoons, and you can scale them to just about any size (Section 2.3.1). Otherwise, icons work just as they do in Windows. They're your ticket to moving, copying, and deleting your files and folders.

2.7.1. File Names

A Mac OS X icon's name can have up to 255 letters and spaces. Better yet, you're about to discover the first of many degrees of freedom that come with a move to the Mac: Punctuation is permitted. For the first time in your life, you can name a file, say, "Update 11/15/06," without getting yelled at by your operating system. In fact, you can use any symbol you want except for the colon (:), which the Mac uses behind the scenes for its own folder-hierarchy designation purposes.

To rename an icon, begin by highlighting it (with a single click, for example). Then do one of these two things:

Click once on its name.
Press Return or Enter.

Either way, a rectangle now appears around the name (see Figure 2-12). At this point, the existing name is highlighted; simply begin typing to replace it, as you do in Windows.

Tip: If you just want to add letters to the beginning or end of the file's existing name, press the left or right arrow key immediately after pressing Return or Enter. The insertion point jumps to the corresponding end of the file name.

A space is considered alphabetically before the letter A. To force a particular folder to appear at the top of a list view window, therefore, type a space before its name.

2.7.2. Selecting Icons

To highlight a single icon in preparation for printing, opening, duplicating, or deleting, click the icon once with the mouse. (In a list or column view, you can also click any visible piece of information about that fileits name, size, kind, date modified, and so on.) The icon darkens , and its name changes color .

Figure 2-12. Click a selected icon's name (top left) to produce the renaming rectangle (top right), in which you can edit the file's name. Once the existing name is highlighted, begin typing to replace it (bottom left). When you're finished, press Return, Enter, or Tab to seal the deal, or just click somewhere else.

You can highlight multiple files in preparation for moving or copying them en masse, using the same techniques you're used to in Windows. You can select all the ones in a window (press -A or choose Edit Select All), drag diagonally to select a few (see Figure 2-13), or select individual icons by -clicking them one at a time. (If you include a particular icon by mistake, -click it to remove it from the selected cluster.)

The key trick is especially handy if you want to select almost all the icons in a window. Press -A to select everything in the folder, then -click any unwanted icons to deselect them.

POWER USERS' CLINIC
Selecting Icons from the Keyboard

For the speed fanatic, using the mouse to click an icon is a hopeless waste of time. Fortunately, you can also select an icon by typing the first couple letters of its name.

When looking at your home window, for example, you can type M to highlight the Movies folder. If you actually intended to highlight the Music folder instead, press the Tab key to highlight the next icon in the window alphabetically. You can use the arrow keys, too, to highlight a neighboring icon. (Pressing Tab has no effect in column view, however.)

After highlighting an icon in this way, you can manipulate it using the commands in the File menu or their keyboard equivalents: open ( -O), put in the Trash ( -Delete), Get Info ( -I), duplicate ( -D), or make an alias ( -L), as described later in this chapter.

Tip: In a list view, you can also select a group of consecutive files by clicking the first one you want, and then Shift-clicking the last file. All the files in between are automatically selectedalong with the two icons you clicked.

Figure 2-13. You can highlight several icons simultaneously by dragging a box around them. To do so, drag diagonally across the target icons, creating a transparent gray rectangle as you go. Any icons touched by this rectangle are selected when you release the mouse. If you press the Shift or key as you do this, any previously highlighted icons remain selected.