Section 2.5. Column View | Switching to the Mac[c] The Missing Manual

2.5. Column View

Icon view and list view should certainly be familiar from your old PC. But column view is probably something newand welcome.

The goal is simple: Create a means of burrowing down through nested folders without leaving a trail of messy, overlapping windows in your wake.

The solution, a distant relative of the tree view known as Windows Explorer, is shown in Figure 2-10. It's a list view that's divided into several vertical panes. The first pane (not counting the Sidebar) shows the icons of all your disks, including your main hard drive.

Figure 2-10. If the rightmost folder contains pictures, sounds, or movies, Mac OS X even lets you look at them or play them, right there in the Finder. If it's a certain kind of text document (AppleWorks or PDF, for example), you actually see a tiny preview of the first page. If it's any other kind of document, you see a blowup of its icon and a few file statistics. You can drag this jumbo icon anywhereinto another folder, for example.

When you click a disk (once), the second pane shows a list of all the folders on it. Each time you click a folder in one pane, the pane to its right shows what's inside. The other panes slide to the left, sometimes out of view. (Use the horizontal scroll bar to bring them back.) You can keep clicking until you're looking at the file icons inside the most deeply nested folder.

If you discover that your hunt for a particular file has taken you down a blind alley, it's not a big deal to backtrack, since the trail of folders you've followed to get here is still sitting there before you on the screen. As soon as you click a different folder in one of the earlier panes, the panes to its right suddenly change, so that you can now burrow down a different rabbit hole.

Furthermore, the Sidebar (Section 3.2.3) is always at the ready to help you jump to a new track; just click any disk or folder there to select a new first-column listing for column view.

The beauty of column view is, first of all, that it keeps your screen tidy. It effectively shows you several simultaneous folder levels, but contains them within a single window. With a quick -W, you can close the entire window, panes and all. Second, column view provides an excellent sense of where you are. Because your trail is visible at all times, it's much harder to get lost, wondering what folder you're in and how you got there, than in any other window view.

Note: Column view is always alphabetical. There's no way to sort the lists by date, for example, as you can in list view.

2.5.1. Column View by Keyboard

Efficiency fans can operate this entire process by keyboard alone. For example:

You can jump from one pane to the next by pressing the right or left arrow keys. Each press highlights the first icon in the next or previous pane.
You can use any of the commands in the Go menu, or their keyboard equivalents, or the icons in the Sidebar, to fill your columns with the contents of the corresponding folderHome, Utilities, Applications, or whatever. (See Section 1.10.2 for more on these important folders.)
The Back command (clicking the Back button on the toolbar, pressing -[ (left bracket ) or choosing Go Back) works just as it would in a Web browser, by letting you retrace your steps backward. You can use this command over and over again until you return to the column setup that appeared when you first switched to column view.
Within a highlighted pane, press the up or down arrow keys to highlight successive icons in the list. Or type the first couple of letters of an icon's name to jump directly to it.
When you finally highlight the icon you've been looking for, press -O or -down arrow to open it (or double-click it, of course). You can open any icon in any column, not just the one you've pinpointed in the rightmost column.

2.5.2. Manipulating the Columns

The number of columns you can see without scrolling depends on the width of the window. In no other view are the zoom button (Section 1.11.4) and resize box (Section 1.11.8) so important.

That's not to say, however, that you're limited to four columns (or whatever fits on your monitor). You can make the columns wider or narrowereither individually or all at onceto suit the situation, according to this scheme:

To make a single column wider or narrower, drag its right-side handle (circled in Figure 2-11).
To make all the columns wider or narrower simultaneously , hold down the Option key as you drag that right-side handle.
Here's the tip of the week: Double-click one of the right-side handles to make the column precisely as wide as necessary to reveal all the names of its contents.
And here's the tip of the month: Option-double-click any column's right-side handle to make all columns just as wide as necessary.

Figure 2-11. Once again, the Option key proves its versatility. If you hold Option, you resize all columns at once, rather than one at a time.

2.5.3. View Options

Just as in icon and list view, you can choose View Show View Options to open a dialog boxa Spartan one, in this caseoffering a bit more control over your column views.

Note: Any changes you make here affect all column views; there's no "This window only" setting for column view.

Text size . Choose your preferred size for icon labels in column views.
Show icons . For maximum speed, turn off this option. Now you'll see only file names, not the tiny icons next to them, which can save your Mac a lot of work when you're loading a folder with hundreds or thousands of files.
Show preview column . The far-right Preview column (Figure 2-11) can be handy when you're browsing graphics, sounds, or movie files. The rest of the time, it can get in the way, slowing down the works and pushing other, more useful columns off to the left side of the window. If you turn off this checkbox, the Preview column doesn't appear.

Tip: No matter what view you're in, remember this trick if you ever start dragging an icon and then change your mind: Press the Esc key while the mouse button is still down. The icon flies back to its precise starting place. (Too bad real life doesn't have a similar feature for returning a spilled glass of grape juice back to the tabletop.)

POWER USERS' CLINIC
The Go to Folder Command

Sometimes a Unix tentacle pokes through the user -friendly Aqua interface. Mac OS X has a number of places where you can use Unix shortcuts instead of the mouse.

One classic example is the Go Go to Folder command (Shift- -G). It brings up a box like the one shown here.

The purpose of this box is to let you jump to a certain folder on your Mac directly by typing its Unix folder path . Depending on your point of view, this special box is either a shortcut or a detour .

For example, if you want to see what's in the Documents folder of your Home folder, you could choose Go Go to Folder, then type this:

   /Users/mjones/Documents

Then click Go or press Return. (In this example, of course, mjones is your short account name.)

In other words, you're telling the Mac to open the Users folder in your main hard drive window, then your Home folder inside that, and then the Documents folder inside that. Each slash means, "and then open." (As in this example, you can leave off the name of your hard drive.) When you press Enter, the folder you specified pops open immediately.

Of course, if you really wanted to jump to your Documents folder, you'd be wasting your time by typing all that. Unix (and therefore Mac OS X) offers a handy shortcut that means, "home folder." It's the tilde character (~) at the upper-left corner of your keyboard.

To see what's in your Home folder, then, you could type just that ~ symbol into the "Go to" box and then press Return. Or you could add some slashes to it to specify a folder inside your Home folder, like this:

 ~/Documents

You can even jump to someone else's Home folder by typing a name after the symbol, like this:

 ~chris

If you get into this sort of thing, here's another shortcut worth noting: If you type nothing but a slash (/) and then press Return, you jump immediately to the Computer window, which provides an overview of all your disks, plus a Network icon.

Note, too, that you don't have to type out the full pathonly the part that drills down from the window you're in . If your Home folder window is already open, for example, you can open the Pictures folder just by typing Pictures .

But the Go to Folder trick really turns into a high-octane timesaver if you use tab completion . After each slash, you can type only enough letters of a folder's name to give Mac OS X the idea de instead of desktop , for exampleand then press the Tab key. Mac OS X instantly and automatically fills in the rest of the folder's name.

For example, instead of typing /Applications/Microsoft Office 2004/Clipart/Standard , you could type nothing more than /ap/mi/cl/st , remembering to press Tab after each pair of letters. Now that's how to feel like a Unix power-user.